The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology [2 ed.] 1119429404, 9781119429401

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THE Wiley Blackwell Companion to

Sociology Second Edition

Edited by

George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy

This second edition first published 2020 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Edition History John Wiley & Sons Ltd (1e, 2012) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Ritzer, George, editor. | Murphy, Wendy Wiedenhoft, editor. Title: The Wiley Blackwell companion to sociology / edited by George Ritzer and Wendy   Wiedenhoft Murphy. Description: Second Edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2020] | Revised edition of The Wiley   Blackwell companion to sociology, 2012. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019010515 (print) | LCCN 2019011464 (ebook) |   ISBN 9781119429401 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119429326 (ePub) |   ISBN 9781119429319 (hardback) | Subjects: LCSH: Sociology. Classification: LCC HM585 (ebook) | LCC HM585 .W55 2019 (print) |   DDC 301–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010515 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © Liyao Xie/Getty Images Set in 10/12.5pt Sabon by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

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WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, 2nd Edition George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2nd Edition David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, Holly J. McCammon The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Families Judith Treas, Jacqueline Scott, Martin Richards The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology Edwin Amenta, Kate Nash, Alan Scott The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, 2 Vol Set George Ritzer, Jeffrey Stepnisky The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion Bryan S. Turner The New Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology William C. Cockerham The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory Bryan S. Turner The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities Mary Romero, Eric Margolis The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture Mark D. Jacobs, Nancy Weiss Hanrahan The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society Austin Sarat The Blackwell Companion to Criminology Colin Summer

Contents

Contributors Bios vii Introductionxiii George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy Part I  Introduction

1

1 Classical Sociological Theory Alan Sica

3

2 Contemporary Social Theory Jeffrey Stepnisky

21

3 Quantitative Methods Russell K. Schutt

39

4 Qualitative Methods Mitchell Duneier

57

Part II  Basic Topics

67

5 Action, Interaction, and Groups Kimberly B. Rogers and Lynn Smith‐Lovin

69

6 Social Network Analysis Nick Crossley

87

7 Culturalizing Sociology Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo

104

8 Deviance: A Sociology of Unconventionalities Nachman Ben‐Yehuda

124

9 Criminology Charles F. Wellford

141

10 Critical Sexualities Studies: Moving On Ken Plummer

156

vi Contents 11 Racial and Ethnic Issues: Critical Race Approaches in the United States Brittany C. Slatton and Joe R. Feagin

174

12 Families Medora W. Barnes

190

13 Sociology of Education Joseph J. Merry and Maria Paino

206

14 Sociology of Religion Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and  Christopher P. Scheitle

224

15 Medicine and Health William C. Cockerham

250

16 Urbanization Kevin Fox Gotham and Arianna J. King

267

17 Environmental Sociology Richard York and Riley E. Dunlap

283

18 Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change Kevin Gillan

301

19 War and Society Miguel A. Centeno and Vicki Yang

319

20 Immigration Noriko Matsumoto

340

21 The Sociology of Consumption Christopher Andrews

358

22 Digital Technology, Social Media, and Techno‐Social Life Mary Chayko

377

23 Contemporary Feminist Theory Michelle Meagher

398

Part III Cutting Edge Issues

417

24 Big Data for Sociological Research Jason Radford and David Lazer

419

25 Toward a Sociology of Debt Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy

444

26 Sociology of Sport Alan Tomlinson

460

27 From Fordism to Brexit and Trump: Is Authoritarian Capitalism on the Rise? Robert J. Antonio and Alessandro Bonanno

477

Index496

Contributors Bios

Christopher Andrews is an assistant professor of sociology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He has published book chapters and articles on software startups and the “new economy”, online job listings and informal hiring practices, and self‐service in the retail food industry. His most recent book The Overworked Consumer: Self‐Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do‐It‐Yourself Economy (2019) examines the growing trend of self‐service and its effects on American jobs and consumers. Robert J. Antonio specializes in social theory, but also teaches and works in the areas of globalization, political economy, and environment. He is currently working on multiple projects related to contemporary capitalism’s crisis tendencies, especially concerning the intersection of increased economic inequality, ecological risk, and possible democratic and authoritarian responses. Medora W. Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at John Carroll University. Her research focuses on a variety of gendered life transitions. Recent research has examined teachers’ work‐family decisions during the transition to parenthood, and how learning fetal sex changes the interactions of pregnant women. Publications include articles in the Journal of Family Issues, Qualitative Sociology Review, and Journal of Consumer Culture. Nachman Ben‐Yehuda, department of sociology and anthropology, Hebrew University’ centers his research on various manifestations of deviance from Durkheimian and constructivist perspectives. By asking the age‐old Hobbesian question “how is the social order possible?” he focuses on the Hegelian concept of antithesis. This general plot is occasioned by directing attention to how, why, where and when challenges to the status quo emerge and function as catalysts for processes of social change or stability. His last book is on fraud in research (with Amalya Oliver‐Lumerman). Alessandro Bonanno is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Sam Houston State University. His work focuses on the neoliberal globalization of the economy and society. In particular, he investigates the impact that neoliberal globalization has on democracy, labor relations and the emancipatory options of subordinate groups. Dr. Bonanno is the author

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of numerous publications that appeared in English and other major languages. His latest books are: “The legitimation Crisis of Neoliberalism” (2017) and “Resistance to the Neoliberal Agri‐food Regime: A Critical Analysis” (2018). Mary Chayko is a sociologist, social media researcher, and professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information (SC&I). Her research is on the impact of digital technology and social media on relationships, community, society, and self. She is the author of four books, including Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno‐Social Life (Sage Publications), now in its second edition. Connect with Dr. Chayko at http://marychayko.com and on Twitter @MaryChayko. Miguel A. Centeno is the Musgrave Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. William C. Cockerham is Distinguished Professor and Chair Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He was Editor‐in‐Chief of the Wiley‐ Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society (2014) and served on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, Mental Health and Society, and Social Currents among others. Recent books include Medical Sociology, 14th edition (2017) and Sociology of Mental Disorder, 10th edition (2017). Nick Crossley is a Professor of Sociology and Co‐Founder/Co‐Director of the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis at the University of Manchester (UK). His recent work has focused upon the role of social networks in collective action and culture, particularly music. His most recent book is Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post‐Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–1980 (Manchester University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book which maps out a relational approach to music sociology, to be published by Manchester University Press. Mitchell Duneier is Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton. He is the author of Sidewalk, Slim’s Table, and Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. Riley E. Dunlap is Dresser Professor and Regents Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Oklahoma State University and one of the founders of environmental sociology. He has chaired the environmental sociology groups within the American Sociological Association, the Rural Sociological Society and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and served as President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Environment and Society. He also chaired the American Sociological Association’s Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change, and is senior editor the resulting volume, Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives (Oxford, 2015). Joe R. Feagin, Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, researches systemic racism, sexism, and classism. His 73 books include The White Racial Frame (Routledge 2013); and Elite White Men Ruling (Routledge 2017). He is the recipient of the American Association for Affirmative Action’s Fletcher Lifetime Achievement Award and the American Sociological Association’s W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award and Cox‐Johnson‐Frazier Award. He was the 1999–2000 president of the American Sociological Association.



Contributors Bios

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Kevin Gillan is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester and Editor‐in‐Chief of Social Movement Studies. His work focuses primarily on the ways in which social movements generate and communicate alternative conceptions of political economy. He is currently writing a book with the working title How Capitalism Matters: Economy, Polity, Society (Palgrave). Kevin Fox Gotham is a professor of sociology and associate dean at Tulane University. He is author of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (with Miriam Greenberg) (2014, Oxford University Press), Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development (2014, SUNY Press), Authentic New Orleans (2007, NYU Press), Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment (2001, Elsevier Press), and over 100 publications on real estate and housing policy, racial segregation, urban redevelopment, and tourism. Laura Grindstaff is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and a faculty affiliate in Gender Studies, Performance Studies, and Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the cultural dimensions of sex/gender, race, and class inequality, with a particular emphasis on American media and popular culture. She is the author of The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows as well as numerous articles and essays on aspects of popular culture ranging from sports and cheerleading to reality TV and social media. Arianna J. King is earning her Ph.D. in Urban Studies at Tulane University. She holds a master’s degree from the University of New Orleans in Urban Studies and is a current member of the African Studies Association, American Anthropological Association, and the Rural Sociology Society. Her research has appeared in the Advances in Gender Research series (2016, Elsevier Press). Her current research leverages interdisciplinary approaches to explore gender and urban space in Ghana. David Lazer is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, and Co‐Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His research focuses on the nexus of network science, computational social science, and collaborative intelligence. He is the co‐inventor of the Volunteer Science research platform. Ming‐Cheng M. Lo is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Lo’s research focuses on culture, illness experiences, and civic engagement. She is the author of Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press 2002; Japanese edition, 2014). A recent series of articles addresses the roles of cultural capital and non‐dominant cultural resources in health, healthcare, and environmental justice activism. Noriko Matsumoto is a lecturer at the University of Vermont (Department of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program). Her work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (2013), and The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective (2011, coauthor). She is the author of Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb (Rutgers University Press, 2018). Michelle Meagher is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada, where she teaches courses on the history

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Contributors Bios

of feminist thought, representations of gender, and popular culture. Her current research draws together the fields of feminist art history and periodical studies to examine the ways that feminist art, theory, and politics were produced, defined, and circulated by American periodical communities of the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Joseph J. Merry is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Furman University. His research primarily investigates class‐based and racial/ethnic inequalities in education. In particular, previous work examines educational influences from three major areas: the family, schools, and the realm of academic activities that occur outside of formal schooling, such as private tutoring. He holds a BA degree from John Carroll University and MA and PhD degrees from The Ohio State University. Maria Paino is an Assistant Professor in the department of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice at Oakland University. Her research focuses on inequalities and organizational processes particularly in education and clinical contexts. Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and the founder editor of the journal Sexualities. His works include Sexual Stigma (1975), Telling Sexual Stories (1995), Intimate Citizenship (2003), Sociology: The Basics (2nd ed, 2016) and Cosmopolitan Sexualities (2015). His most recent book is Narrative Power (2019). Jason Radford is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago and visiting researcher at Northeastern University. His research focuses on organizational effectiveness and computational social science. He runs the Volunteer Science research platform where he creates online experiments to study groups, networks, and organizations. Kimberly B. Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2013. Kimberly’s research explores how macro‐social inequalities are reproduced or overturned through behavior and emotion dynamics in social interactions and small groups. Her publications examine behavioral and emotional responses to stereotyped groups and unfair reward distributions, evaluate the degree of consensus in identity sentiments within and between cultures, explore how stable interaction patterns emerge from uncertain perceptions of identities, and consider emotions as both symptoms and sources of inequality. Christopher P. Scheitle is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. His most recent book is Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think (Oxford, with Elaine Howard Ecklund). In addition to his research examining religion and science, Dr. Scheitle has recently conducted research on topics such as religious discrimination and crimes against places of worship. Russell K. Schutt, PhD is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Research Associate in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and Research Associate at the Veterans Health Administration (Edith Nourse Rogers Veterans Administration Hospital). His research focuses on the relation between the social environment and individual functioning and orientations, in the context of



Contributors Bios

xi

homelessness, mental illness, service systems, and organizational and legal processes, with recent related publications including Homelessness, Housing and Mental Illness (2011, Harvard University Press) and Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research, 9th edition (2019, SAGE), and Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (2015, Harvard University Press, co‐edited with Larry J. Seidman and Matcheri S. Keshavan). He has received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Alan Sica is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Social Thought Program at Pennsylvania State University. He was editor‐in‐chief of two ASA journals, Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociology, and also editor/publisher of a third journal, History of Sociology. He has taught at Amherst College, University of Kansas, University of Chicago, University of California, Penn State, and University of Pennsylvania. He has written or edited over a dozen books about social theory, and scores of articles and reviews. Brittany C. Slatton is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas Southern University. She recently served as the 2017 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas. Dr. Slatton’s work focuses on critical race studies and the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality. You can find her publications in journals such as Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, Sociology Compass: Culture, The Journal of Sociology and Social Work, and Genders. Christian Smith is the Wm R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and Project Director of the Global Religion Research Initiative. Among his many books is Religion: What it Is, How it Works, and Why it Matters (2017, Princeton University Press). Lynn Smith‐Lovin is Robert L. Wilson Professor of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. She has received the Cooley‐Mead Award from the ASA Section on Social Psychology, the James S. Coleman Award from the ASA section on Mathematical Sociology, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the ASA sections on Emotions and on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity. Her research examines the relationships among identity, action and emotion. She has served as President of the Southern Sociological Society, Vice‐President of the American Sociological Association, and Chair of the ASA Sections on the Sociology of Emotion and on Social Psychology. This work was partially supported by the Army Research Office Grant W911NF‐15‐1‐0180 to the second author, Lynn Smith‐Lovin (subcontractor to Dawn T. Robinson, University of Georgia) Jeffrey Stepnisky is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where he teaches courses in classical and contemporary sociological theory. With George Ritzer, he edited The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (2nd edition), and has co‐authored the textbooks Classical Sociological Theory, and Modern Sociological Theory. He has published essays on self, subjectivity, and most recently, the concept of atmosphere, in places such as The Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior and Space & Culture. Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton UK, specialising in sport/leisure studies and cultural studies/cultural sociology. He has authored/edited 40+ books/volumes and 150+ book chapters/articles. His research

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has informed many broadcasting and press outlets. Work on the Olympics and FIFA has, with John Sugden, pioneered a critical investigative sociology. Tomlinson’s latest book “scheduled for publication in 2020” studies English football cultures through the lens of the life of former FIFA president Sir Stanley Rous. Charles F. Wellford, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is past President of the American Society of Criminology. He is a fellow of ASC and a Lifetime National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. Currently, he is co‐principal investigator, with Cynthia Lum, of a large‐scale study of criminal investigations and Chair of the Research Advisory Board for the Police Executive Research Forum. His most recent paper, co‐authored with students from Maryland and the University of Chicago, addresses the topic of gun markets. Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy is a Professor of Sociology at John Carroll University. Her book, Consumer Culture and Society, was published in 2017. She is the co‐ author with George Ritzer of Essentials of Sociology, 3rd Edition (2018) and Introduction to Sociology 4th Edition (2019). In addition to chapters in edited book volumes her work has appeared in Social Movement Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Peace and Change. Currently, she is researching the limited, but significant and active role of low‐income consumers in American society. Robert D. Woodberry is director of the Project on Religion and Economic Change and a senior research professor at Baylor University. Most of his research analyzes the long‐term social impact of missions and religious change on societies around the world. He also studies optimal ways to measure and sample religious groups on surveys. His research appears in the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, American Political Science Review and elsewhere. Vicki Yang is a PhD student in sociology and demography at Princeton University. Richard York is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is Chair of the Section on Animals and Society of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and was the Chair of the Environmental Sociology Section of the ASA in 2013–14, a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2013–14, and the Co‐Editor of the journal Organization & Environment from 2006 to 2012. He has received the Fredrick H. Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award (2017) for lifetime achievement, the Teaching and Mentorship Award (2011), and the Outstanding Publication Award twice (2004 and 2007) from the Environmental Sociology Section of the ASA; the Gerald L. Young Book Award in Human Ecology from the Society for Human Ecology; the Rural Sociology Best Paper Award (2011) from the Rural Sociological Society; the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Section on Animals & Society of the ASA (2015); and the Honorable Mention for the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting from the Theory Section of the ASA.

Introduction George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy

Sociology is a highly diverse and ever‐changing field. As a result, different observers of the field – and its subfields – will necessarily see and emphasize somewhat different realities. In part, this is a function of the diverse orientations of the observers. It is also related to the point in time at which the observations take place. The field is continually changing at least in part because the social world is in constant flux. As a result, analyses of the state of sociology and its sub‐fields at one point in time will be different, perhaps very different, from those at another point in time. These thoughts are very relevant to a discussion of both the chapters that are carried over in revised form from the first edition of this Companion to Sociology (published in 2012) and the new chapters included in this second edition. Many contributors to the first edition of this Companion graciously revised their chapters (several with new co‐authors) for this edition of the Companion to Sociology to better reflect recent developments in their specialty fields. They include Alan Sica, Russell Schutt, Kimberly Rogers, Lynn Smith‐Lovin, Nachman Ben‐Yehuda, Charles Wellford, Ken Plummer, Brittany Chevon Slatton, Joe Feagin, William Cockerham, Christian Smith, Robert Woodberry (Christian Scheitle was added as a co‐author to the Smith‐Woodberry essay), Kevin Fox Gotham (Arianna King was added as a co‐ author to the Gotham essay), Richard York, and Riley Dunlap. New or very different entries were authored by Jeffrey Stepnisky, Nicholas Crossley, Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo, Medora Barnes, Joseph Merry and Maria Paino, Kevin Gillan, Miguel Ceteno and Vicki Yang, Noriko Matsumoto, Chris Andrews, Mary Chayko, Michelle Meagher, Jason Radford and David Lazer, Wendy Widenhoft Murphy, Alan Tomlinson, and Robert Antonio and Alesandro Bonanno. The revised chapters in Part I of this edition the Companion provide a thorough reexamination of the foundations – sociological theories (classical and contemporary) and research methodologies (quantitative and qualitative) – of the discipline. Similar to the first edition, the chapters that compose Part II deal with the most basic substantive topics in sociology. They are: identity and social interaction, social networks, culture, deviance, criminology, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, families, education, religion, medicine and health, urban sociology, environmental sociology, social movements, armed conflict and war, immigration, sociology of consumption, social media, feminist theory, and intersectionality. These are the topics

xiv Introduction typically covered in introduction to sociology texts and courses, but here they are dealt with in a more sophisticated and advanced manner. The chapters are written for professional sociologists and graduate students rather than undergraduates. While several chapters in Part II cover the same topics (e.g. family, culture, education, social movements, war) as those in the previous edition, many of the authors are different and the discussions, in most cases, differ enormously. This is due to differences in the orientations of the authors involved and a result of the passage of almost a decade from the publication of the first edition of this Companion and the production in the interim of a great deal of new work on those topics. Several topics mentioned above have been included in Part II of this volume because they became more firmly established in the discipline after the publication of the last edition of this volume. In addition, several topics from the previous volume are now included as new chapters in Part II. They include consumption, social media, and war, because those topics are no longer at the margins of sociology. In the past several years, sociologists, especially in the United States, have devoted more attention to consumption (the Sociology of Consumers and Consumption became an official section of the American Sociological Association in 2013). We have also witnessed the proliferation of social media platforms and other user‐generated websites since this topic was deemed “hot” in the last edition of this volume. Many sociologists are studying social media not only as a means of communication but for understanding these social networking sites and the internet more generally as “living” research laboratories where they can collect data via observation and participation. Like consumption and social media, the sociology of war has also become a more popular topic in recent years due, in part, to the fact that the United States has been at war in Afghanistan since 2001, as well as ongoing wars in Yemen and elsewhere. The refugee crisis in the European Union, stemming in large part from the Syrian civil war and other armed conflicts, has further motivated sociologists to examine the causes and consequences of war. Other new topics included in Part II, such as social networks, feminist theory, and immigration, have also become increasingly important since the last edition. While the study of social networks was already a cutting‐edge topic a decade ago, today social networks are even more heavily researched, discussed in introductory textbooks, and readily recognized as important aspects of social interactions and relationships. Feminist theory has also increasingly become ensconced in sociology and will continue to inform the discipline given, among other things, the increasing awareness of the effects of sexism, patriarchy, and the power of the #metoo movement. The current backlash against immigration in the United States and several European countries is partially responsible for the rise of populism that they are now experiencing. Part III showcases topics that are beginning to capture the attention of an increasing number of sociologists: debt, sports, big data, and capitalism in the era of Donald Trump’s presidency and Brexit. Taking the lead from anthropologists, the sociology of debt (and its ancillary, credit) aims to establish the social significance of personal and public debt in relation power and inequality. The global popularity of sports and the growing number of academic sports studies departments have helped sociologists who study sports to underscore the importance of this social phenomenon to the field and in everyday life. Fandom, race, gender, and the commodification of leisure are just a few

Introduction xv issues emphasized by the sociology of sports. Big data also takes into account variables like race and gender, building these social categories and others into aglorithms that attempt to better understand and predict social behavior. These algorithms are also used by practitioners to determine our preferences and ultimately affect our decisions. Technology and social media make it nearly impossible to escape the reach of big data today. This threatens our privacy, autonomy, and to some critics, democracy. In addition to technology the growth of populism in the West has many concerned about the durability of democracy. The election of right‐wing populists in Brazil, Italy, Poland, and Hungary (to name just a few), the increasing presence of alt‐right activists (e.g. in the United States and Germany), and the growth of protectionist economic policies have left some sociologists wondering if we can resist the political and economic authoritarianism associated with capitalism today. Sociology, like the social world, is continually changing. This edition seeks to keep pace with these changes while retaining a focus on the essential core of the discipline.

Part I Introduction

1 Classical Sociological Theory Alan Sica

Defining “The Classical” What is meant today by “classical theory”? Scholarly interests in the current period, like so much else in cultural life, are undergoing rapid change owing to the worldwide computerization of knowledge. Whereas nineteenth century theorists, writing mostly in German or French, might have expected reading audiences to number in the hundreds, perhaps a few thousand, today’s potential “market” for sociological ideas is limitless, spanning much of the globe in English or another modern translation. Whereas early European theorists had to content themselves with a vague notion of what was being written in North and South America or Asia that might have influenced their thinking, daily interaction now among globalized scholarly groupings has become expected, even routinized. Though sometimes confusing the issues at hand, this cross‐fertilization has often deepened and broadened notions of “the classical.” Given all that, one would imagine that the canon long recognized as “classical theory” might have changed in fundamental ways over the last 20 years or so, as access to computerized knowledge proceeded apace. An exact metric reflecting this historic change in globalized enlightenment could conceivably be constructed using big data sources, but until that is done systematically, other, more traditional means of measuring scholars’ enthusiasms might be used. Take, for instance, a British serial founded in 2001 called The Journal of Classical Sociology. Thus far, it has dealt far more with theory than with the actual historiography of sociology as an institutionalized discipline in universities (recalling that it was only named as such by Auguste Comte on April 27, 1839). Not surprisingly, many articles have appeared in recent issues of this journal that deal exclusively with the generally recognized founders of social theory: Karl Marx, Emile

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. This continued veneration of a rather few thinkers, among dozens of possible contenders, has become standard practice among theory specialists and their readers for generations, and shows no signs, at least among this group of writers, of waning. Special issues of JCS, such as “Durkheim in Germany,” “Weber/Simmel Antagonisms,” “Marx and Marxism,” “New Durkheim Scholarship,” and “Special Issue on Georg Simmel,” have been published in the last several years as well. Yet within the last two years, articles have also found a home in this journal that attempt to resuscitate interest in a range of other classical thinkers who were at one time quite well known but are no longer included in course syllabi or reading lists for doctoral comprehensive exams – the standard site of canon‐formation. These rediscoveries include Raymond Aron, Reinhard Bendix, Raymond Boudon, Patrick Geddes, Arnold van Gennep, Maurice Halbwachs, Leonard Hobhouse, Johan Huizinga, Robert K. Merton, Gunnar Myrdal, Talcott Parsons, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart‐Glennie, and Thorstein Veblen. Some of these thinkers have died in the last several decades (Aron, Bendix, Boudon, Merton, Myrdal, and Parsons), whereas most of the others did their important work in the early twentieth century. And yet for all these refreshed efforts, mostly among younger scholars, to “mine the classics” (or Restoring the Classic in Sociology [How 2016]), the four uniquely creative and noninterchangeable theorists around whom the majority of archaeological analyses still revolves remains unchanged since World War II: Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel. (Simmel’s ideas had been vigorously pursued between 1894 and about 1935 in English translation, then resurfaced about 1990 as part of the “postmodernism debate.”) There are voices that bemoan this situation, but they as yet remain small when compared with the loud volume of orthodox commentary. Along similar lines, ever since 2000 Max Weber Studies has showered its dedicated audience with hundreds of articles and book reviews pertaining to Weber’s work or extensions of his ideas into our world. The latest issue bears the inscription “Special Issue: Hinduism and Buddhism: Reflections on a Sociological Classic 100 Years On, Part One,” and occupies 180 pages. Senior and junior international experts vie for the attention of their Weberian colleagues with articles about Indian religion and politics, comparative legal traditions, Hinduism and other worldviews, Weber’s rationalism when applied to India, and so on. It’s worth recalling that Weber wrote The Religion of India over 100 years ago, regretting that he did not read Sanskrit, and surely believing then that the book would be superseded long before a century had elapsed. And yet experts continue to debate its significance vigorously. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that there also exists another journal, Durkheimian Studies, now in its twenty‐fourth year, as well as Simmel Studies, begun in 1990 as the Simmel Newsletter. Both these outlets feature articles in German, French, and English. Meanwhile as well, work on Marx and his tradition of socioeconomic analysis is booming, particularly after the global economic crisis of 2008. In addition to this continuing fascination with classical European theorists, a new path has recently been carved into the forest of our theoretical ancestors by scholars who argue that W.E.B. Du Bois and what they call “The Atlanta School” have not been given their due as co‐founders of American sociology. This follows a still‐earlier effort to enshrine female theorists into the canon, which, though honored and



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a­ ppreciated among its politically motivated adherents, has not changed textbook writers’ listing of “who’s who” among essential theorists. (See Lengermann and Niebrugge [1998, 2007] for treatments of and excerpts from Harriet Martineau, Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Julia Cooper, Marianne Weber, Beatrice Potter Webb, and others.) It now goes without saying that omitting all female theorists from the history of sociological thought is indefensible, yet they remain largely unread and undiscussed on campus because so few courses make room for them in the typical college curriculum, even at the graduate level. That none of them offered a comprehensive theoretical program has also detracted from their perceived appeal and contemporary applicability. But the case of Du Bois is more recent and contentious. While it has become obvious that women’s roles must be acknowledged, it is less clearly the case that African‐American sociologists, whose numbers were relatively small until the 1970s, offered a distinct mode of sociological research and thinking that could seriously compete with what was offered by Caucasian scholars at the same time. Most specifically, the “Chicago School” headed by Albion Small, W. I. Thomas, Robert Ezra Park, and Ernest Y. Burgess between about 1894 and 1935, has been criticized for its alleged racist tendencies and allied refusal to acknowledge Du Bois as an intellectual leader within the sociological camp. Park’s strong relationship with Booker T. Washington – who became Du Bois’s political nemesis after 1903 – is particularly objectionable to those who currently champion the latter’s role in early American sociology. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro was indeed an astonishing ethnographic performance for a young, underfunded, and isolated scholar to create. And the research about African‐Americans that he and his students did at the Atlanta University between 1897 and 1910 was pioneering as well. Yet it is difficult to argue persuasively that Du Bois’s sociological theorizing per se constitutes a separate universe of discourse, equally valuable to others writing at the time in the United States and abroad, and that he was consciously sidestepped as a “founding father” of sociology by his white peers (see Morris 2015, for the case in favor this interpretation). The fact that he and Max Weber shared a brief relationship adds to the complexity of the question: Who influenced whom, and how? (For a wisely pertinent appraisal of intergenerational understandings of scholarship, see Momigliano 1965.)

Continuity and Change in Evaluating “The Classical” Thus, it can readily be seen that the precise definition of which bodies of writing should constitute “classical” social theory regularly changes, reflecting alterations in the intellectual and political goals of those who create theory, as well as those who teach it. Only quite recently has it become the case that the Holy Trinity: Marx‐ Weber‐Durkheim, is widely viewed as a convenient surrogate for “classical theory” in toto, even serving as the title to some theory textbooks. That these three titans are essential to this tradition is undebatable, but the ­supposition that they adequately represent “everything still worth knowing” from the history of sociological theory is unsupportable. When Pitirim Sorokin, the first

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sociologist ever hired by Harvard University, published his Contemporary Sociological Theories in 1928 (two years before he left Minnesota for Harvard), his index names over 1000 scholars whom he showed had contributed to its development. Other important textbooks of the period were similarly generous in their portrayal of who should be included in theory’s past and its consequent present (e.g. Becker and Barnes 1938; Bogardus 1940). In a field often organized for pedagogical purposes around “great thinkers,” favored names come and go with almost seasonal predictability. For example, during the Great Depression, major US publishers reissued the works of Karl Marx in student editions, while during the 1950s, it was dangerous to teach his work in US colleges for fear of becoming subject to politically motivated punishment. Similarly, the Italian economist and political theorist, Vilfredo Pareto, was widely known to the literate public in the 1930s, and regarded as an indispensable social theorist for scholars who worked in this area. Yet following the Second World War, after his named had been incorrectly linked to Benito Mussolini’s, he was promptly and permanently banished from “the canon.” The Italian fascist dictator was portrayed as Pareto’s “student,” whereas in fact he had only attended a few of Pareto’s lectures on economics around 1900, encouraged to do so by his Russian lover, Angelica Balbanoff (Mussolini 1928, p. 14). The case of Georg Simmel was less subject to gross political forces, yet his reputation waxed, waned, and waxed again in what has become a familiar pattern. He was interjected into US sociology during the 1890s by his American student Albion Small, editor of the American Journal of Sociology, and for the next 20 years became the most often translated European theorist of his generation (Levine et al. 1976). His ideas played an essential role in the creation of social psychology, exchange theory, and urban sociology, yet from the 1930s through the 1970s, he took a back seat to other theorists. When Talcott Parsons set about reshaping sociology’s theoretical foundation in the 1930s, he omitted a chapter on Simmel, already written, when assembling his transformative book, The Structure of Social Action. He realized that Simmel was incommensurable with the other figures he chose to analyze, that his way of theorizing did not mesh well with the story Parsons wished to tell regarding an alleged “convergence” among Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Alfred Marshall, the economist (Levine 1957; Parsons 1937). Although important textbooks continued to include chapters on Simmel (e.g. Ashley and Orenstein 1985; Ritzer 1988), he was not ­generally viewed as a member of that small group of theorists who were indispensable to an understanding of the discipline’s legacy. Only in the 1990s with the rise of postmodernism as a school and methodology was he rediscovered, in some ways redefined, and now seems again as “contemporary” as ever (among many, see Frisby and Featherstone 1997). Examples of this kind abound, of course, since styles change in the academic world just as they do in any other human endeavor. History shows that genuine ­permanency is impossible to maintain in any sphere of human learning or the arts; it is worth remembering that Plato, Shakespeare, Bach, and Vivaldi were all neglected for long periods of cultural history, and other iconic presences in our own time will surely fall from view before the end of our century. Someday music by the Beatles will likely become a small footnote to cultural history, and the novels of Kurt



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Vonnegut will seem as old‐fashioned and unreadable as today do dozens of Victorian novelists who were household names in their time, yet now wholly forgotten. Not only has the theoretical pantheon seen significant repositionings regarding its personnel during the last half‐century, but the range of learning that scholars agree to identify as “social theory” has also undergone continual refashioning. Unlike today, between the two World Wars a US college student might well have been introduced to social theory of the classical mode by examining the ancient Egyptians, Persians, or Greeks (e.g. Becker and Barnes 1938; Bogardus 1940; Ellwood 1938; Hertzler 1936). For instance, consider Joyce Hertzler’s unique volume, The Social Thought of the Ancient Civilizations, published in 1936 by McGraw‐Hill, still today a major source of sociology textbooks. This 400‐page work, written by a Nebraska sociologist, begins with the Egyptians (“Imhotep and His Philosophy: ‘Eat, Drink and Be Merry’”), moves to Babylonian (now Iraqi) thought, then through Hittite, Persian, and Indian ideas, concluding with investigations of Chinese and Hebrew social analysis. Hertzler closes by providing the student with a summary of the lastingly important notions offered by proto‐sociologists in these major civilizations, and argues that knowing about these systems of thought achieves two major goals. First, it demonstrates that “there is nothing new under the sun” when it comes to the most critical matters facing humans in social groups: how to control misbehavior and encourage normatively approved behavior, how to distribute goods and services fairly, how to maintain stable, satisfying families, how to encourage social cohesion rather than dispersion, how to use supernatural events and sentiments, and so on. Second, the proverbs and morality tales that circulated among all ancient civilizations, the purpose of which was always to transmit “social theory” to ordinary ­people, were far more entertaining and provocative than modern social science and sociological theory. This is in part why they were so well‐regarded, even cherished, for so many centuries in ways that today’s social science arguments seldom are. If one compares the contents, say, of the King James Bible or the Bhagavad‐Gita with current articles in any social science journal, substantive parallels can surely be drawn, yet these “holy books” inspire people with emotionally satisfying narratives in ways that “bloodless” social science cannot. The rhetoric of storytelling and moralizing, the creation of appealing parables, shares very little with the “objective” language adopted during the twentieth century by social scientists in their effort to emulate the imagined “objectivity” of the natural sciences, and the technology they made possible. Hertzler was surely correct in these claims, and he wrote the book in part to substantiate them, probably reflecting his own broad educational and cultural background that no longer characterizes sociological “training.” The well‐known sociologist, Emory Bogardus, offered the first edition of The Development of Social Thought a few years later, in 1940. After racing through the same historical texts and personalities in a few pages that Hertzler had required an entire book to traverse, he launches into the sociological ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Aurelius, early Christian thinkers, the Middle Ages, and then shifts into what we now regard as the “early modern period.” He writes about Thomas More’s Utopia (the predecessor to Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, plus dozens of other dystopian novels), the Enlightenment Philosophes, and Thomas Malthus (founder of demography), consuming a third of his long book before arriving at Auguste Comte – who invented the term sociologie in 1839 (Pickering 1993, p. 615). From

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here, Bogardus pursues a long list of thinkers who no longer appear in any textbooks of “classical” social theory, but who were at that time still regarded as vital figures in the history of societal analysis. After an obligatory chapter on Marx (whose place in the pantheon remains secure despite political events since 1989), he allocates chapters to “[Henry] Buckle and Geographic Social Thought,” Herbert Spencer, Lester Frank Ward (first president of the American Sociological Society in 1905), William Graham Sumner (first teacher of sociology at Yale), Francis Galton and eugenics, now entirely repudiated in sociological circles, Ludwig Gumplowicz, and conflict theory, Peter Kropotkin on cooperation and anarchism, Gabriel Tarde on imitation, the indispensable Emile Durkheim, and the founder of Chicago Sociology, Albion Small. Bogardus then produced chapter‐length treatments of Franklin Giddings, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Charles Horton Cooley, Vilfredo Pareto, Edward A. Ross, W. I. Thomas, Robert E. Park, Charles Ellwood, Karl Mannheim, Howard Odum, and Radhakamal Mukerjee. With the solid exceptions of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel, none of these thinkers is any longer considered critically necessary for inclusion in the basic sociological theory course taught in every US sociology department, and even specialists in the field likely know little about them. There are niche enthusiasms for Cooley and Thomas, honorable memorialization of Comte and Sumner, occasional textual reference to Tarde and Mannheim. Yet 90% of Bogardus’s textbook treatment (which went through four editions in the next 20 years) has been sloughed off in today’s “marketplace of ideas.” The reasons for this diluting of theory’s past are many, some obvious, some not. Yet it is undeniably true that a very great deal of serious thinking about social life, individual or collective, has been thrown into the “dustbin of history” (Marx’s phrase) without benefit of scholarly scrutiny. It is surely comforting, if delusory, to believe that sociological theory, like physics or chemistry, has “moved beyond” its founders’ plethora of notions, hunches, hypotheses, and arguments – that we no longer should study their writings, any more than today’s astronomers need to master Copernicus’s work before advancing their field. Were this true, it would surely ease the labors required to become expert in the study of social theory. Those who adhere to a natural science model of sociology make exactly this claim, and have been doing so at least since the days of the “social physicist,” George Lundberg, in the 1930s (Lundberg 1939; also Lundberg 1947). In fact, the lineage of this belief‐system goes back to the seventeenth century and exploded in the 19th – that earnest longing to launch social science into the same high regard the natural sciences have enjoyed since the seventeenth century when Newton showed the way. Sorokin’s treatment of what he calls “the mechanistic school” begins with the philosophers Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Grotius, Malebranche and others, all of whom aimed during the seventeenth century to create a “social mechanics” (Sorokin 1928, pp. 2–62). The social physicists of the seventeenth century tried to do the same as the physicists themselves. In the first place they constructed the conception of a moral or social space in which social, and moral, and political movements go on. It was a kind of space analogous to physical space and superposed [sic] upon it. To the position of a material object in physical space, there corresponded, in social space, the conception of status, as of sex, age, occupation, freedom, religion, citizenship, and so on. In this



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way, they constructed a system of social coordinates, which defined the position of man in this moral space as exactly as the system of geometrical coordinates defines the position of a material object in physical space. Physical mechanics explains the motions, also, of physical objects by the principles of inertia and gravitation. Similarly, social mechanics regarded the social processes as a result of the gravitation and inertia of human beings or groups…. The social power and authority were interpreted as resultants of the pressures of “social atoms” (individuals) and “social molecules” (groups). (Sorokin 1928, pp. 8–9)

This mode of analysis continued into the eighteenth century with the philosopher George Berkeley and others. It blossomed in the nineteenth century in the work of H.C. Carey, whose Principles of Social Science (1858) preceded the more celebrated writings of Herbert Spencer (First Principles, 1862), and claimed that “the laws which govern matter in all its forms, whether that of coal, clay, iron, pebble stones, trees, oxen, horses, or men” are the same; “man is the molecule of society”; and social interaction operates under the “great law of molecular gravitation” (Carey 1858, pp. 62, 41–42; cited in Sorokin 1928, p. 13). These were heady arguments in the mid‐nineteenth century, and Carey was not alone in proposing programs of social analysis built on them. But in the end, as Sorokin points out, these “childish mechanical analogies” (p. 39) did not pan out since the built‐in irrationalities of human life are impossible to model, even with sophisticated math.

The French Mode of Classical Theorizing There were other, competing approaches to the problem of dealing with human action in somewhat less “childish” ways, less tied to the belief that Homo sapiens could be understood by means of mechanical or molecular imagery. A few examples from a large pool of possible instances might illustrate how eager were gifted thinkers to make use of scientific reasoning, even if physics was not their preferred model. Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) came up with a “jury theorem” in 1785 based on simple probability reasoning, which shows, given strict assumptions, the likelihood of a small group arriving at a “correct” decision. He also invented Condorcet’s paradox (or voting paradox), which demonstrates that majority preferences can be undone under certain conditions involving what is now called nontransitivity, so that the “correct” outcome is impossible to attain (Baker 1975, pp. 197–263). In the same era, Henri Saint‐Simon (1760–1825), Comte’s mentor and c­ ompetitor, even while developing a so‐called “new religion” in the 1820s, nevertheless concurred that social life could be organized around indubitable laws of industrial life. He persuaded his followers that correct analysis of social processes would allow society at large to avoid the many miseries that inspired Marx and Engels to create their emancipatory theories (as in Engels 1987 [1845]). Like the Marxists, but much earlier, he believed that through scientific reorganization and management of industrialization, the poor could be protected from the ravages of factory life, proposing that the welfare of the weakest should be a society’s highest goal. (A similar argument was considered “new” in 1971 when John Rawls published his Theory of Justice, long after Saint‐Simon had been forgotten.)

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Very unlike Marx and Engels, though, Saint‐Simon thought that industrial “managers” could combine their technical administrative skills with high moral reasoning, thereby emancipating the working class from the chains that Marx claimed were the unavoidable accompaniment to industrial life. For all their differences, they agreed that science as a slogan and practice was the road to societal salvation, one that sidestepped the ideological and spiritual battles that always seemed to surround religiously motivated programs for social change. The most scientifically accomplished of these early proto‐sociologists was Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), a gifted mathematician and official Belgian astronomer. He invented the body‐mass index measurement still used as an indicator of healthy body weight. While compiling statistics and observations relating to shooting stars, celestial movement, and seasonal vegetation changes, Quetelet found time to propose “social physics” in 1835 (as well as the first scientific criminology; Quetelet 1835) that Lundberg and other twentieth‐century theorists regarded as the foundation of their positivism. By using a statistical construct that he called the “average man,” he was able to employ Dutch and Belgian data to show that certain human behaviors followed recognizable patterns, and deviated more or less predictably from what we now call “the normal curve.” He was particularly successful in correlating certain social characteristics with particular types of criminal behavior, coming up with 17 statements that summarized his findings, e.g. “1. Age is without contradiction the cause which acts with the most energy to develop or moderate the propensity for crime” (Quetelet 1984, in Sica 2005: pp. 166–68). From this work Durkheim and subsequent researchers took their lead when studying what has since come to be called deviance. For example, in his most successful demonstration of “empirical” sociology, On Suicide (1897), Durkheim notes: When Quetelet directed the attention of philosophers to the surprising regularity with which certain social phenomena are repeated in identical periods of time, he thought that he could explain it by his theory of the “ordinary man,” which has in fact remained the only systematic explanation of this remarkable feature of societies. According to him, there is a definite type in each society which the majority of individuals reproduce more or less exactly, with only a minority deviating from it under the influence of ­disruptive force. (Durkheim 2006, pp. 332–333)

After mentioning Quetelet’s name in the body of his text, Durkheim added a ­knowing footnote: Notably in his two works, Sur l’homme de la développement de ses facultés ou Essai de physique sociale, 2 vols., Paris, 1835, and Du système social et des lois qui le régissent, Paris, 1848. While Quetelet was the first to try to explain this regularity in a scientific manner, he was not the first to observe it. The real founder of moral statistics was Pastor Süssenlich, in his work Die Göttliche Ordnung in den Veränderungen des menschlichen Geschlechts, aus der Geburt, dem Tode und der Fortpflanzung desselben erwiesen, 3 vols, 1742.

Nowadays no one remembers nor reads Pastor Süssenlich, who lives on only in Durkheim’s footnote. But it is instructive to realize that a search for precursors – or



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adumbrationists, as Pitirim Sorokin named them in his classic work – seldom fails to find someone who thought of a technique of analysis or an illuminating idea before those who are currently most often credited with a specific intellectual “discovery.” These early proponents of a scientific sociology – Condorect, Saint‐Simon, and Quetelet – were the best known exemplars of what more recently has been named “humanothermodynamics.” The central tenet of this field is that people can be portrayed for analytic purposes as “molecules” in a vast social system, and therefore studied in the same way physicists explore the subatomic world. Naively perceived, it makes sense to some optimistic thinkers that human action should be “model‐ able” in ways similar to techniques of analysis so successful in chemistry and physics. The goal, of course, ever since the eighteenth century, has been to predict human action in order to propel people into behavior which strengthens rather than endangers social order, or to provide them with more pleasurable individual lives by helping them avoid pathological conditions of their own making. The idea behind this is always the same: Social life is difficult to interpret, so scientific reduction is necessary in order to clarify the consequences of various actions or lack of actions. “Laws” of social life have thus been sought ever since the Philosophes saw what the natural sciences had achieved after they determined how the “laws of nature” functioned (Mirowski 1989; Urry 2004). A famous modern example of this tendency came from Charles Darwin’s grandson, C. G. Darwin, who published The Next Million Years in 1952, where he proposed that “statistical mechanics” be used to study human behavior by conceiving of individuals as “human molecules” in a “conservative dynamical system” (Darwin 1952). More alarmingly, he predicted that humans would run out of food by 2000. Even though this school of thinking has found few followers within the ranks of American sociologists, the latent notion – that social laws ought to be discoverable through quantitative investigation and the application of probability – runs deep among many social researchers, even in unspoken form. Almost all quantitative research clings to this “domain assumption” (Gouldner 1970) in an unquestioning, unstated way, since without it there would be little justification in carrying out thousands of studies each year that portray human behavior as meaningfully reducible to ­correlation coefficients.

Scotland’s Classical Contributions Another vital inspiration for classical social theory came from Scotland during the mid‐eighteenth century, where a talented, interpersonally connected group of men composed literate, even entertaining, treatises that shared very little with the French philosophes’ view of human society, and their utopian recommendations for its restructuring along modern lines. Inspired in part by the philosophy of Francis Hutcheson (1894–1746), including his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations of the Moral Sense (1728), the so‐called “Scottish moralists” wrote clear prose about socially important issues that give their work continuing importance (see Broadie 1997). Those who participated in what has been called “the Scottish Enlightenment” (Camic 1983) included Adam Smith (1723–1790), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), John Millar (1735–1801), and others like Millar’s friend, the great philosopher David Hume (1711–1776).

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Millar, a law professor, was more a sociologist than a philosopher, writing about what we now call social stratification (The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 1771), one part of which was “Of the Rank and Condition of Women in Different Ages.” He also managed to anticipate Emile Durkheim’s famous dissertation (Durkheim 1893) by more than a century with “Social Consequences of the Division of Labour” (Millar 1806). His observations gave rise to what is now called comparative sociology, as in this passage from his 1771 book: In the most rude and barbarous ages, little or no property can be acquired by particular persons; and consequently, there are no differences of rank to interrupt the free intercourse of the sexes. The pride of family, as well as the insolence of wealth, is unknown; and there are no distinctions among individuals, but those which arise from their age and experience, from their strength, courage, and other personal qualities. The members of different families, being all nearly upon a level, maintain the most familiar intercourse with one another, and when impelled by natural instinct, give way to their mutual desires without hesitation or reluctance. They are unacquainted with those refinements which create a strong preference of particular objects, and with those artificial rules of decency and decorum which might lay a restraint upon their conduct (Millar 1806; in Sica 2005, p. 55)

A common thread through all the Scottish moralists’ writings was an overriding concern for the ways that industrialization, beginning to interject itself into quiet rural Scotland, was threatening to corrode interpersonal trust and the many societal virtues associated with it. Millar clearly argues in this passage that an “arcadian” condition of tranquility preceded modern, capitalist interactions, likely a reflection of comparing his life in Glasgow with work on his 30‐acre farm. From this basic idea he adumbrates Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class by 130 years in pointing out that “preference of particular objects” – what Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen 1899, pp. 68–101) – would also work to destabilize that “familiar intercourse with one another” which in preindustrial, preurbanized societies promoted harmonious interactions. He is not, like Rousseau or Hobbes, offering a utopian or dystopian vision of humankind’s imagined history, but instead is simply reporting what he has seen in historical documents as well as everyday life in Scotland. It was this “common sense” philosophy that endeared Millar (the most popular law professor of the era) and his confederates to generations of readers. The most famous of the Scots was Adam Smith, whose An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) has formed the backbone of what Marx called “bourgeois economics” ever since it was published. But for social theorists, his more important book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). It is difficult for some readers to reconcile the dog‐eat‐dog ethics that today’s economists claim they see in Smith’s book on wealth creation with the soft‐hearted portrait of humankind he champions in his moral theory, though surely for Smith they were all of a piece. Smith’s professor at Glasgow University, Francis Hutcheson, gave him the philosophic tools to consider the fundamental nature of humans as they interact. Anticipating Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who inspired Max Weber and Georg Simmel, Smith proposed that sympathy and empathy for another person’s suffering



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or experiences are the hallmark of humanity’s peculiar and unique condition of being. He opens the book with this famous paragraph: How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others when we either see it or are made to conceive it in a very livelky manner. (Smith 1761, p. 1)

These observations, basic to Smith’s worldview, are worlds removed from the fierce “survival of the fittest” ethic that pervades modern capitalism in the global economy, where no quarter is given to one’s competition, and their suffering is a source of joy – and profits! According to Smith, and contrary to raw capitalist motivations, in order for ­civilized society to function properly, its citizens must be able to judge the “propriety or impropriety” of one another’s actions. This capacity turns around correct appraisals of gratitude, resentment, and other typical responses to social action, and Smith believed that a key measure of societal sophistication lay in being able to interpret accurately the interactional repertoire of responses people give to one another, and which are witnessed by others. When today people sometimes say about a given event or condition, “It may be legal, but it’s just not right!” – say, regarding Wall Street salaries compared with those of factory workers or teachers – they are registering exactly the emotions and analyses that Smith felt compelled to analyze in 1759. Not surprisingly, the book has been continuously in print ever since, and has served as a beacon of sanity among competing ideologies, each trying to explain or justify the modern world.

Auguste Comte Invents “Sociologie” Auguste Comte created and noted the word sociologie in his notebooks on Saturday, April 27, 1839, because others had coined the expression “social physics” and he wished to distinguish himself from all his predecessors, including especially his former friend and employer, Saint‐Simon (Pickering 1993, p. 615); with the recent completion of Pickering’s monumental biography of Comte, more information is now accessible concerning him and his setting than for any other classical social ­theorist except for Marx. There is no equivalently detailed work for Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, nor any other social theorist of note). Comte embodied all the sterling qualities of early “social science” and in equal measure all its foibles. A precocious and gifted mathematician who tutored in this field when young, he turned his back on math to embrace history and philosophy as he created his multi‐volume works, The Positive Polity (6 volumes, 1830–1842) and The System of Positive Polity (4 volumes, 1951–1854). In this he imitated Turgot, Condorcet, and other philosophes who believed that history, carefully studied, revealed patterns of rise and fall, stasis and change, which could be systematized and turned into roadmaps for the human future. Comte loathed the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, patriarchalism, and medievalism in the France of his day, yet he understood the centrality of belief‐systems for

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human populations generally, and the role that unthinking acceptance of dogma played in controlling large groups. His hope was to link science with a particular reading of the historical record so that societies which in the past had been ruled by authoritarian violence could be guided instead by “sociological priests.” Their authority would be linked in the popular mind with specialized knowledge of how societies can and should operate, that is, from the sociologie he proposed. The story of Comte’s following in Britain and the United States is a long tale, which includes heroic translating labors by the novelist and travel‐writer, Harriet Martineau, and earnest propagandizing from the world‐class philosopher, John Stuart Mill. A sense for this cult can be gained from a pamphlet published in New York in 1856, the year before Comte’s death, called A Book for the Times: To exterminate Political Vermin and Moral Quacks. Social Physics; From the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. This is actually a retitled excerpt (pp. 399–440) from Comte’s Positive Philosophy. The title page quotes Comte: By including social science in the scientific hierarchy, the positive spirit admits to success in this study only well‐prepared and disciplined minds, so trained in the preceding department of knowledge as to be fit for the complex problems of the last. The long and difficult preliminary elaboration must disgust and deter vulgar and ill‐prepared minds, and subdue the most rebellious. This consideration, if there were no other, would prove the eminently organic tendency of the new political philosophy. (Positive Philosophy, p. 434)

All this for a mere 25 cents ($6.63 today). Comte’s characterization of the past was not charitable, and his hope for a positivist future of his own design must seem from our vantage point deliriously optimistic. Yet he proposed with endless energy and repetition a program of planned social change that he thought would eliminate most of humanity’s discomforts, political and otherwise, and would bring human behavior into line with the latest scientific achievements and ways of thinking. As he explained: The theories of social science are still, even in the midst of the best thinkers, completely implicated with the theologico‐metaphysical philosophy… The philosophical procedure which I have undertaken to carry through becomes more difficult and bold, from this point onward, without at all changing its nature or object; and it must so far present a new character as it must henceforth be employed in creating a wholly new order of scientific conceptions, instead of judging, arranging, and improving such as already existed… In its scientific connection with the rest of this work, all that I can hope to do is to exhibit the general considerations of the case, so as to resolve the intellectual anarchy which is the main source of our moral anarchy first, and then of the political… I propose to state, first, how the institution of a science of Social Physics bears upon the principal needs and grievances of society, in its present deplorable state of anarchy… [thus] society is preserved from chimerical and mischievous schemes… there is a deep and widely‐spread anarchy of the whole intellectual system, which has been in this state of disturbance during the long interregnum, resulting from the decline of theological‐metaphysical philosophy. At the present time, the old philosophy is in a state of imbecility… we shall see the necessity of introducing an entirely new spirit into the organization of society, by which the useless and passionate struggles may be put



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an end to, and society led out of the revolutionary state in which it has been tossed about for three centuries past. (pp. 399–400)

This fiery rhetoric, so remote from the calmly measured tones that typify today’s social science writing, is nevertheless the direct progenitor of all the social sciences that have followed. In his detailed attack on the “theological‐metaphysical” ways of thinking – by which he meant in short the ancient and medieval worldviews – and his protracted celebration of positivism (the “scientific method” still universally taught as good), he laid a broad path for sociology that has never been questioned. The unspoken assumption of all modern Comteans, even those who know nothing of his work, is that “objective” appraisal of society, however it is carried out or defined, will “naturally” lead to improved social life once its denizens recognize the folly of their ways. Comte assigned to sociologically alert priests the task of persuading, not forcing, the masses to obey “laws” of social behavior which their research had unearthed. It was an article of faith for him that the “modern mind” would respond with alacrity to intellectual arguments based on scientifically gleaned findings. Growing up in the shadow of the French Revolution, he knew, of course, that “the madness of crowds” was a real danger to social order, yet he thought his system could end wanton violence and the terrors it brings. He also believed that in the modern world the condition of women would be vastly improved, and in this one notion, at least for women in the richest societies, his hopes have been well founded. Yet very little of the history of humanity’s last century supports his most cherished beliefs, yet they live on, just as Comte thought they should, in the unexamined hearts of social scientists everywhere. Like it or not, know it or not, they are all Comteans.

The Lasting Classical Voices We arrive at five thinkers whose claim to “permanent” residence in the pantheon of social theory is as firm as can be imagined given current norms of intellectual lineage‐ formation: Karl Marx (1818–1883), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), Georg Simmel (1858–1918), and Max Weber (1864–1920). Without each of their unique visions of how industrialized society functioned in the mid‐ to late‐nineteenth century, we could hardly speak a line of modern sociology, since they gave us a vocabulary that remains indispensable. Many of their ideas have steadily migrated from the lecture hall to newspapers and then into common parlance, e.g. rationalization, division of labor, anomie, marginality, survival of the fittest, class warfare, the Protestant ethic, charisma, and so on. The literature on Marx has for decades operated within an international frame of reference that continues, even after official communism’s apparent demise, to produce thousands of new entries per annum. Not long ago, the venerable British firm Routledge published Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (Musto 2010), a collection of 32 Marxological studies that probe a compendium of working papers from 1857 to 1858 preparatory to Das Kapital that Marx never published. It remained unknown until 1939, when a German edition was published in Russia, and was unavailable in English until the 1970s. The clothbound version of this new commentary sold well enough to justify a paperback

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edition. This is roughly equivalent to a book being offered today that at length and with utmost seriousness would investigate unpublished working drafts of Brahms’ symphonies from the 1870s. Yet the Marx volume “still sells,” whereas the imagined Brahms volume would surely not. So long as contemporary societies produce conditions of “alienation” and “reification,” operate through “the cash nexus” and “commodification,” “immisserate” laborers while capitalists flourish, destroy the global environment in pursuit of profits, and subordinate broad groups of people to elite control, Marx and Engels’ works will be studied, taught, and elaborated. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) of the youthful Marx, the “Communist Manifesto” (1848), and The German Ideology (1845–1846) advance insights and arguments that have played well in existential philosophy and psychology as well as literature and drama. They capture graphically and with memorable rhetoric the powerless and hopeless sensations experienced by that great majority of humanity who work for capital but do not own it – who have nothing to sell but their “labor power.” The “late Marx” of Theories of Surplus Value (3 vols., 1861–1863), Capital (vol. 1, 1867), and The Civil War in France (1871), to name but a few, are works that speak more to political‐economic and governmental issues, and exhibit more utility when analyzing global trade, war, and the systematic exploitation of labor, both domestic and international. Marx’s proudest analytic achievement, the “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” (Capital, Vol. 3, Book III, Part 3) and its associated labor theory of value, continues to fascinate analysts who are not mesmerized by the limiting parameters of “capitalist logic.” And without Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism,” students of consumer culture would lack a fundamental analytic tool. Sociologically, Marxist ideas have become the bedrock of research in social stratification, gender relations, political sociology, and other ­subfields, even including the sociology of culture. The works that Marx and Engels created during their 40‐year partnership, and that Engels continued alone for another 12 years, will continue to inform, correct, and inspire social theory until such time that a post‐exploitative utopia can be formed, or until people no longer care to interpret the meaning of social relations that function within the strictures of “private property.” Herbert Spencer was born two years after Marx, but into an entirely different intellectual and political orbit – as shy about public appearances as Marx was bold, as afraid of familial complications as Marx was intrepid. Spencer was invited to New York City’s Delmonico’s Steak House for a grand dinner on November 8, 1882, where Andrew Carnegie and a host of politicians, religious leaders, intellectuals, and businessmen feted him, to his astonishment and discomfort. They ate a 12‐course dinner with a dozen wines that began at 6:00 and ended at 9:30 with cigars, followed by speeches about Spencer’s greatness  –  they called him “the Aristotle of our age” – and their own, which his ideas, so they thought, explained and justified (Werth 2009, pp. 276–295). In “The Theory of Population” (1852), he invented the phrase “survival of the fittest,” seven years prior to Darwin’s Origin of Species, and thus became a favorite of the robber barons, especially Carnegie, since it seemed to justify their plutocratic control of the American economy during the late nineteenth century. They comforted themselves with this denatured Spencerianism: since they had all the money and power, they must ipso facto be “the best.” Yet Spencer emphasized in his Principles of Biology (1872) that “fittest” did



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not mean best or most desirable in moral or societal terms. As in Darwin, it simply denoted creatures who, given their environment, were most likely to survive. That this situation when applied to human arrangements can result in some of the “worst” people thriving – consider heartless marauders during war – was perfectly obvious to Spencer, but much less so to the capitalists of his period for whom any governmental regulating of their activities was anathema, and any labor organizing a destabilizing force to be destroyed at once. Without realizing it while he created his “organic analogy” between the physical and social bodies, he became the intellectual symbol for laissez‐faire government. Yet his Principles of Sociology (1896) offered far more than a simple‐minded legitimation of “Wild West Capitalism” of the kind typified by Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and their peers. Spencer was first of all a dedicated scientist who studied as much natural history as he failed to study human history (which separates him distinctly from Comte, Marx, and Weber), or literature, art, music, and philosophy. His forté was careful observation, not scholarly analysis of previous authors’ works. By drawing careful, even exhausting, analogies between the structure of the human body and the various social institutions and social structures of all the societies he could find, he believed he had discovered the same “laws” of social organization that Comte and Marx had pursued by other means. Spencer was not a moralist; in fact, his closest associates often remarked on his “total lack of sensuality” and “lack of emotional depth” (Collier in Royce 1904, p. 188). British capitalist society, from which he was insulated in his study, did not offend him, as it did Marx and Engels, due to its systematic oppression of workers, and the cyclical collapses of its finances. Instead, he was keen to understand what central principle organized all natural life, human included, and he decided that “evolution” was the correct answer, a set of immutable forces that must be left free to do its worst or best without any governmental intrusion. During the late twentieth century Spencer’s name was dusted off from library neglect and inserted, often incorrectly, into debates about “socio‐biology.” But as with Comte, for all the curt references to his name in this literature, very few scholars bothered to read Spencer to find out what he was truly doing. If his multivolume studies of biology and ­psychology were out of date even before they appeared, his three fat books called The Principles of Sociology (1876–1896) showed Spencer at his best, along with his The Study of Sociology (1873). He not only argued strenuously for the legitimacy of this newfangled field, but also showed in enormous detail that an evolutionary theory of societal development could make sense of the anthropological record as it was then known. Using information systematically compiled and organized by three research assistants whom he hired (who over 20 years and at great cost produced the 12‐volume Descriptive Sociology), he decided that societies went through periods of increased differentiation of functions as they “matured,” and that military societies necessarily gave way to industrial societies. The former are authoritarian, brutal, hold women in low esteem, and do not invite innovation, whereas the latter tend toward democracy, the equalization of gender roles, the rich economic fruits of peace rather than war, and an opportunity for continued positive development. It was for arguments like these that Spencer’s books were used as required textbooks in sociology courses throughout England and the United States well into the twentieth century.

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About Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel, a very great deal has been written in all the major languages; entire scholarly journals are dedicated now to each of them separately, and hundreds of monographs, textbooks, and summaries of their work are readily available. Analyzing their works and lives has become an academic “industry”; one recent bibliography concerning Weber lists nearly 5000 items in English alone (Sica 2004). There are interesting links and differences among them, particularly in view of the fact that their lives almost perfectly overlapped. Durkheim wrote an unflattering review of a book written by Marianne Weber, Max Weber’s wife and intellectual partner, but otherwise never referred to Weber himself in his own works. Durkheim’s nephew, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, testified that Weber had in his personal library a complete set of scholarly journals that Durkheim founded and edited, yet he never cited Durkheim’s work in any of his own. Simmel did not refer to Durkheim, but was a frequent houseguest of Weber’s, and a recipient of Weber’s personal and professional kindness. Simmel, an unorthodox scholar and talented lecturer, was not offered a professorship in Germany, in part due to anti‐Semitism, despite Weber’s vigorous sponsorship, and the fame Simmel enjoyed at Berlin University. Yet Durkheim’s profoundly Jewish identity did not stop him from creating French sociology from nothing, rising to the top academic position in the nation, even in a society with deeply anti‐Semitic tendencies (witness the Dreyfus Affair). Durkheim seldom invoked historical data in his work, but wrote a long book about aboriginal religion in Australia called The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1911), which has become a classic. He did no fieldwork, instead relying on others’ reports. Weber was formally educated both as an attorney and an historian (ancient as well as medieval), and once spent a summer in a relative’s textile mill carrying out a “time and motion study.” His major work, posthumously titled by his wife as Economy and Society, reflects the centrality that economic relationships always had in Weber’s sociology. Simmel did no fieldwork in a formal sense, but so keenly studied Berlin society, where he was a lifelong resident, that he was able to formulate the principles of social psychology without access to a lab for experiments. From Durkheim we get a solidly “sociologistic” worldview, where “personality” is an illusion and social organization dictates the structures and functions of human life, individually and collectively. He also wrote the first manual on sociological methods, the most important study of suicide by a sociologist, and propelled Spencer into continuous use by including his ideas in his dissertation, The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim 1984 [1893]). Weber’s sociology (a term he refused to use until very late in life) comprised sociologies of law, of music, of ancient and modern economic institutions, of bureaucracy, of comparative religions, or political power, and many more ingredients, surely the broadest and most encompassing portrayal of what sociology could accomplish when in the right hands. Simmel helped Americans, especially at Chicago, legitimate sociology as a new field in the 1890s through translations of his essays. More importantly, his social psychological perceptions linked young Marx’s understanding of alienation and reification with recent postmodern “interventions” regarding identity, sexuality, and marginality. None of the other classical theorists shared Simmel’s philosophically astute rendering of private consciousness as it tries to negotiate the difficulties as well as the opportunities of the modern metropole.



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Taken together, these classical theorists, and their predecessors, set a high standard of insights and ideas for their sociological descendents, which, some would argue, has not yet been surpassed. Yet with fresh biographies of Max and Marianne Weber now available (Meurer 2010; Radkau 2009), a recent Durkheim biography in French (Fournier 2007), a now complete translation of Simmel’s Soziologie (1908) finally available (Simmel 2009), and the Marx/Engels Collected Works completed (Marx/ Engels 1975–2010), perhaps the time will soon come when contemporary sociologists will be able to come to terms with their past in a more complete and satisfactory way.

References Ashley, D. and Orenstein, D.M. (1985). Sociological Theory: Classical Statements. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Baker, K.M. (1975). Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard P. and Harry Elmer Barnes (eds. and comps) (1938). Social Thought from Lore to Science. New York: D. C. Heath and Co. Bogardus, E. (1940). The Development of Social Thought. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Broadie, A. (ed.) (1997). The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology. Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate Books. Camic, C. (1983). Experience and Enlightenment: Socialization for Cultural Change in Eighteenth Century Scotland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carey, H.C. (1858–1859). Principles of social science. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott. Comte, A. (1856). Social Physics from the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. New York: Calvin Blanchard. Darwin, C.G. (1952). The Next Million Years. London: Rupert Hart‐Davis. Durkheim, E. (1951 [1897]). On Suicide: A Study in Sociology (trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson). New York: Free Press (Originally published in France). Durkheim, E. (1984 [1893]). The Division of Labor in Society. (With an introduction by Lewis A. Coser; trans W. D. Halls). New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (2006). On Suicide. Tr. by Robin Buss. Intro. by Richard Sennett and notes by Alexander Riley. London, UK: Penguin Books. Ellwood, C. (1938). A History of Social Philosophy. New York: Prentice‐Hall. Engels, F. (1987 [1845]). The Condition of the Working Class in England. New York: Penguin Books. Originally published as Die Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse in England. Leipzig: Otto Wigand. Fournier, M. (2007). Emile Durkheim: 1858–1917. Paris: Fayard. Frisby, D. and Featherstone, M. (eds.) (1997). Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London: Sage Publications. Gouldner, A. (1970). The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Hertzler, J. (1936). The Social Thought of the Ancient Civilizations. New York: McGraw‐Hill Book Co. How, A. (2016). Restoring the Classic in Sociology: Traditions, Texts and the Canon. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Lengermann, P.M. and Niebrugge, G. (1998). The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory 1830–1930: A Text/Reader. New York: McGraw‐Hill, reissued by Waveland Press, Long Grove, IL 2007.

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Levine, D. (1980 [1957]). Simmel and Parsons: Two Approaches to the Study of Society. New York: Arno Press. Levine, D., Carter, E.B., and Gorman, E.M. (1976). Simmel’s influence on American sociology. American Journal of Sociology 81: 813–845; 1112–32. Lundberg, G. (1939). Foundations of Sociology. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Lundberg, G. (1947). Can Science Save Us? New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1975–2010). Collected Works (51 Volumes). New York: International Publishers. Meurer, B. (2010). Marianne Weber: Leben und Werk. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Millar, J. (1806). The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks or, An Inquiry into the Circmstances Which Give Rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society, 4e. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. Mirowski, P. (1989). More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1965. Review of A.H.M. Jones’ The Later Roman Empire 284–602. The Oxford Magazine, March 4, p. 264. Reprinted in Momigliano’s Quarto contibuto alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico. Rome: Edizioni di storia de letteratura, 1969, pp. 645–647. Morris, A.D. (2015). The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Mussolini, B. (1928). My Autobiography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Musto, M. (ed.) (2010). Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later. London: Routledge. Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw‐Hill Pubs. Pickering, Mary 2009 [1993]: Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume 1; Vol. 2 (2009), Vol. 3 (2009). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Quetelet, A. (1835). Sur l’homme et le Développement de ses Faculties, ou Essai de Physique Sociale, vol. 2. Paris: Imprimeur‐Libraire. Quetelet, A. (1984). Adolphe Quetelet’s Research on the Propensity for Crime at Different Ages (trans. Sawyer Sylvester). New York: Anderson Publishing Company. Radkau, J. (2009). Max Weber: A Biography (trans. Patrick Camiller). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Ritzer, G. (1988). Sociological Theory, 2e. New York: Knopf. Royce, J. (ed.) (1904). Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and Review, Together with a Chapter of Personal Reminiscences (James Collier [his Secretary]). New York: Fox, Duffield, and Co. Sica, A. (2004). Max Weber: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Sica, A. (ed.) (2005). Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Boston: Pearson/ Allyn and Bacon. Simmel, G. (2009). Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, Vols. 1 and 2 (trans. Anthony Blasi et al. Boston: Brill. Smith, A. (1761). The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2e. London: A. Millar, in the Strand; and A. Kincaid and J. Bell, in Edinburgh. Sorokin, P. (1928). Contemporary Sociological Theories. New York: Harper & Brothers. Urry, J. (2004). Small worlds and the new ’Social physics. Global Networks 4 (2): 109–130. Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: The Macmillan Company. Werth, B. (2009). Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America. New York: Random House.

2 Contemporary Social Theory Jeffrey Stepnisky

Often, the term classical social theory refers to broad intellectual perspectives that have “stood the test of time” and address issues important to early modern society (i.e. the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) (Calhoun et al. 2012, p. 1). In contrast, contemporary theory is used to identify the set of theories that were developed in Europe and North America from the mid‐twentieth century into the present. They are contemporary in the sense that the issues they raise seem relevant to our own moment (Calhoun et  al. 2012). In part, though, the distinction between classical and contemporary is arbitrary. At which point, for example, do the ideas of a sociologist like Erving Goffman, writing from the 1950s to the 1980s, considered by many to be one of the most influential sociologists of the late twentieth century, become classic? Drawing these lines is further complicated because classical sociological thought is also still in formation. New interpretations of classical theorists are constantly proposed not only because they broaden our understanding of these theorist’s ideas but because they show how these theories can help us to understand the present moment, in previously unappreciated ways. For example, in the 1990s Georg Simmel, generally considered a classical theorist, was reintroduced as a postmodern theorist (Weinstein and Weinstein 1993), and more recently, as an affect theorist (Pyyhtinen 2010). So too, feminist theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, though historically not included in the canon of sociological thought, has been introduced for her insights into the contemporary themes of gender and sexuality. And African‐American sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois is now seen as ­prescient in his focus on the topics of race, colonialism, and the “color line.” Complications aside, there are good reasons to make such temporal distinctions. Even though the history of sociological theory is populated by diverse theories, different periods are defined by ideas, and conflicts between ideas, that capture the spirit and problems of the times in which they were developed. The reasons for this

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can be attributed to factors such as intellectual trends within the discipline, and external political and economic forces. For example, in the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s, theories informed by positivist philosophy were popular because they produced utilitarian knowledge attractive to government funding agencies (Steinmetz 2008). Or, in the 1960s, structuralism became popular in France, as an effort to overcome the limits of the existential philosophy that had dominated the war years, and as an alternative to American style positivism (Heilbron 2015). Though, as this essay develops, I describe some of the intellectual and socio‐historical factors that have shaped the field of sociological theory, the intent is not to provide a rigorous account of how these forces shaped the field. The point is that, despite the difficulties in drawing clear‐cut lines between periods, or identifying theorists as classical or contemporary (or modern or postmodern or premodern), there are good reasons to make distinctions between different periods of sociological theory. They give us insight into how, during particular moments, groups of social thinkers, responding to the world in which they lived, dealt with important conceptual problems: What is society? What is the nature of sociological knowledge? What is the relationship between the social theorist and sociology? What is the relationship between social theory and the world(s) in which it is embedded? As such, this essay is organized around three periods. The first, roughly from the mid‐twentieth century to 1968, builds on developments out of the first half of the twentieth century. This is a period of grand theory construction connected, if only loosely, to a positivist philosophy of science, and accompanied by an optimism that sociologists can develop theories that explain society and, in some cases, solve social problems. The second section of the essay covers a period from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century. This period, growing out of the political protest of the 1960s, contributes critical theories that address problems of identity, grounded in ideas about language, culture, and conflict. It is also a period in which are developed formidable critiques of the positivism and abstraction of earlier theories. This critique culminates in the development of postmodern theory. What follows postmodernism? I suggest that in the twenty‐first century, in response to the failures of positivism and postmodernism, but also in response to global consciousness of phenomena like risk, environmental crisis, digital, and biomedical technology, a central problem for sociological theory is the concept of the “real.” Where, as critical realist scholars point out, most twentieth century sociological theories were concerned with problems of epistemology (How can we best know the social world?) realism returns to problems of ontology (What must be real so that we can produce sociological knowledge?). This introduces some challenging intellectual problems: What is the object of sociology? Has sociology limited itself by focusing only on the reality of human beings? Or is it more accurate to view society (if we can even use that term anymore) as an entity “assembled” through interactions between humans and non‐human entities (technology, animals, nature)?

Period 1: Positivism, Functionalism, and Its Others Positivism shaped the field of sociology through the 1950s and 1960s. In the United States, Steinmetz (2008) attributes this to the influence of Fordism, government and military funding of social science research, and the hope that social science could



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provide knowledge to explain and predict social behavior. This is not to say that all sociologists of the period were positivists. Positivism was criticized by Marxist philosophers from the German Frankfurt school, American conflict theorists like C. Wright Mills, French structuralists, and even, though less forcefully, the dominant sociological theorist of the period, Talcott Parsons. Nevertheless, it is worth spending a short time describing the positivist philosophy because it introduces an influential attempt to define the nature of sociological explanation, specifically the relationship between theory and observation. Positivism is also important, as Peter Halfpenny (1982, p. 120) points out, because it is a position against which, since the 1950s, many theorists have defined their own positions: “the challengers take positivism as their target, still assuming that it is the dominant form of sociology to be discredited and transcended by their preferred alternative.” Though, as Halfpenny (1982) says, the word positivism has had at least 12 different meanings, there are several traits typically associated with the term. For one, positivism deals with problems of epistemology. How can people know the world? Positivists argue that theory, aided by rules of logic, is developed empirically, by linking observations of the world to propositional statements about the world. It is also reductionist. It favors simple over complex explanations and attempts to account for all social behavior through a limited set of propositions. Further, the most cautious varieties of positivism limit theory to descriptions of relationships between immediately observable phenomena, rather than speculation about hidden, underlying phenomena that might cause these relationships. Finally, the goal of observation is to develop “laws” that can account for behavior across a range of situations. In the positivist view, then, theory is built out of simple statements that describe observations that collectively constitute a set of laws. A variety of this approach, most familiar to sociologists, is the hypothetico‐deductive method described by philosopher Karl Popper. Also, though not always explicitly linked to a positivist philosophy, when sociologists employ statistical techniques to describe relationships between social phenomena they are often referred to as positivist. Among the sociologists of the period, George Homans is the clearest example of a sociologist who developed theories grounded in a positivist philosophy of science. Homans was a founder of exchange theory. The approach is reductionist. Building on psychological behaviorism, it assumes that social life can be explained through basic processes of reward and reinforcement. He builds his social theory out of a set of  simple propositions. For example, in his “success proposition,” Homans states: “For all actions taken by persons, the more often a particular action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to perform that action” (Homans 1974, p.  16). Though Homans restricts his propositions to statements about individual behavior, he nevertheless claims that the stability of social structures can be explained through analysis of exchange relationships. Peter Blau built on this observation when he used exchange theory to explain more complex social structures, such as group formation, the relationship between individuals and collectivities, or the differentiation between leaders and followers. Richard Emerson, who inspired network exchange theory, also started with the assumptions of behaviorism, though he added the concept of power‐dependency to emphasize the role that power plays in exchange relationships: “The power of one party of another in an exchange relation is an inverse function of his or her dependence on the other party” (Yamagishi et al. 1988, p. 837).

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Finally, another example of a theory guided by positivism is James Coleman’s now very influential rational choice theory. Rational choice theory assumes as its starting point the rational actor. Individual behavior is guided by preferences to achieve valued ends. Decisions about how to achieve these ends are constrained by the ­scarcity of resources and rules imposed by social institutions. Within these contexts, individuals calculate how to best satisfy needs and wants, or “maximize utility.” As Jasso (2011) points out, given basic assumptions about rational calculation, Coleman argued that it was possible to use mathematical logic to deduce the possibilities for action and the organization of society. Despite the importance of positivism to midcentury American sociology, Talcott Parsons is remembered as the sociologist who defined theory and theory construction during that period. Though Parsons engaged in some empirical work, his overriding goal was to develop concepts and categories, “frames of reference,” that could, in principle, be tested against empirical observation (Lidz 2011, p. 512). Though Parsons has been much criticized for his grand and abstract theorizing, he introduced, or at least clarified the significance of, many of the key terms and concepts that remain central to sociological analysis: normative order, social control, the social system, social institutions, and the professional role, among others (Lidz 2011, p. 554). Unlike positivists who develop theory through reason and observation, Parsons developed theory through the study and synthesis of the work of other theorists, thus advancing the tradition of sociological theory as the study of text. His first effort at theoretical synthesis was presented in the  Structure of Social Action (1937), where he compared the work of classical theorists T. H. Marshall, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto. He concluded that, despite their differences, these theorists “converged” on a common theory of action, which he called the “unit act” (Lidz 2011, p. 517). This theory prioritizes action, as a key component of social analysis, and ascribes to it four elements: ends, means, norms, and conditions. As Lidz (2011) points out, the concept of norms is particularly important to the unit act and all of Parsons’ subsequent theory. Norms address what Parsons considered to be the central problem of sociology: social order. How is it that, despite competing interests and desires, humans can achieve and maintain social order? Parsons argues that it is through normative structures. These establish social ideals and provide the rules for the coordination of everyday activity. In addition to this emphasis on the relationship between norms and action, Parsons is remembered for his later work on functional analysis, for which he is often described as a structural functionalist. Introduced in rudimentary form in the Social System (1951) Parsons’ argued that every kind of system (e.g. personality, organic, cultural, social) must be able to handle four problems: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, latency (AGIL). In a social system, each of these functions is associated with a subsystem. Adaptation to environmental needs is handled by the economy. Goal attainment is taken care of by the polity. Integration is assured through the societal community, for example, the legal system. And latency, or pattern maintenance, is handled through fiduciary systems like religion and family. To Parsons, consistent with his earlier emphasis on values and norms, the fiduciary system was the most important structure, as it provided the basic interpersonal trust upon which social order was built.



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Overall, then, Parsons’ goal with the four‐function paradigm was to develop an “abstract, formal, and universal ground for sociological analysis and explanation” (Lidz 2011, p. 527). The theory was meant to describe not just his own American society, but all kinds of societies. The positivists did not like this approach to theory because it was far too removed from simple propositions grounded in empirical observation. Marxists, feminists, and critical scholars of the next, post‐1960s period criticized it because, in its emphasis on consensus and social order, it lacked a sufficiently critical edge, and/or submitted all societies to one type of predetermined analysis. Parsons’ contemporary, C. Wright Mills, objected because in its effort to develop abstract analytic categories, grand theory lost contact with social life and therefore the ability to directly speak to social problems: “Grand theory” Mills said, “is drunk on syntax, blind to semantics” (Mills 1959, p. 34). An alternative came from the structural functionalist Robert Merton. Merton pioneered a middle‐range approach to sociological theory. Middle‐range theories sit between all‐encompassing abstract theories, and “the minor but necessary working hypotheses” of day‐to‐day empirical research (Merton 1968, p. 39). Middle‐range theories are derived from empirical observation rather than deduced from the logics of a total system. Nevertheless, middle‐range theories are not merely collections of empirical observations, but can be applied to understand phenomena from “differing spheres of social behavior and structure” (p. 69). An example of a middle‐range concept developed by Merton is role‐set. Merton proposes that social statuses (e.g. mother, teacher, medical student) come not with a single role, but with multiple roles, which often have competing expectations. The role of medical student is defined in relationship to their teacher, but also nurses, social workers, doctors, etc. This middle‐range concept allows Merton to describe the function of a role in structuring modern society, but also to ask further questions about the complexities of roles: How, for example, do people manage the conflicts of a role‐set? Merton’s middle‐range approach to theory has been influential because it emphasizes the importance of applicable theoretical concepts. In so doing, it draws out a tension around the self‐conception of the sociological theorist: Is the theorist a kind of philosopher whose job it is to read text, think “big” thoughts, and reflect upon the nature of social life? Or is the job of the theorist to provide support, and conceptual guidance, for the empirical wing of the discipline. Indeed, it is here, in this period, that the distinct disciplinary roles of “theorist” and “researcher” begin to emerge more distinctly within sociology. These distinctions would be further solidified in the  next period under discussion with the establishment of theory specific sociology journals: Theory and Society (1974), Theory, Culture & Society (1982), and Sociological Theory (1983), among others. Micro‐sociological perspectives also provided a more tangible, and for many, more satisfying alternative to Parsons’ abstraction. This included perspectives such as exchange theory, but also fields such as symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and dramaturgy. Following on the work of classical theorist George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer’s formalization of symbolic interactionism placed the concept of role, or more specifically, role‐taking, at the center of sociological analysis. Social structures emerged as persons learned to view their “selves” through the symbolically mediated perspectives of other persons and their societies (the “generalized other”). Ethnomethodology was developed by Harold Garfinkel, a student

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of Parsons, who like Parsons was concerned with the problem of social order. Garfinkel created a unique language for sociology, which emphasized the local, ­situated, organization of interaction. “Members” of social orders develop, and then put into play, the basic features of everyday life, as life unfolds. In other words, for Garfinkel, social structure is not an entity imposed, as it were, upon persons, from outside their lives. Rather, persons structure their daily activities from within the midst of life through the creation of situation specific vocabularies, objects, and procedures that constantly reference (or “index”) the unfolding activity. Most influential, though, was Erving Goffman. Though Goffman shared some ideas with symbolic interactionists, he is generally credited with introducing a unique school of thought: dramaturgy. As Lemert (1997) points out, Goffman’s use of this theatrical metaphor owed itself to the changing landscape of postwar American society. Television and advertising had entered the homes of middle‐class America, drawing attention to the put‐on, performative dimension of social life. And, despite the postwar consumer boom and rising GDP, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the related McCarthy trials, contributed to paranoia in American life. People did not know whether the surface of everyday life matched the underlying reality. This mood was captured in Goffman’s cynical idea that selves are the product of performances, conducted as members of teams (at home, at the workplace, at the grocery store), to preserve the sacred façade of selfhood. He distinguished between cynical performers who knew that they were playing a role, and sincere performers who were still playing a role, but were nevertheless taken in by their own performance. Anticipating arguments to be developed by postmodernists, Goffman (1959, p. 253) claimed that the self is not some authentic essence that exists behind the scenes, driving action, but rather a “dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.” Despite the unique metaphor, like Homans, Coleman, Parsons, Merton, and Garfinkel, Goffman was interested in the description of social order, what he called “the interaction order.” Thus, dramaturgy is one provocative metaphor of many (see also Goffman’s use of stigma, total institutions, and frame analysis) designed to demonstrate how relations between people are structured in increasingly complex societies. Before moving onto the second period, it is worth noting the theoretical developments in Europe. There is no doubt that after World War II, the well‐funded American sociology shaped the field of sociological theory. Nevertheless, members of the German Frankfurt school developed Marxist tools, largely unheard of in the United States, to analyze culture, and more specifically, a growing American consumer culture. Like Parsons, these “Western” Marxists produced grand theories, total systems of thought, that sought to explain, in abstract terms, the whole sweep of Western history. Yet, there are important differences in these types of theory. For  example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno introduced the concept of “culture industry” to describe the role that mass media and popular culture play in distracting the American middle classes from the exploitation and alienation  inherent to capitalist economies. Where Parsons saw culture as a means of ­grounding social consensus, Western Marxists saw culture as a tool of power that maintained social division. Lastly, this is the period in which the school of structuralism gained influence in  France. Though structuralism was not immediately associated with sociology



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(it  came out of disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, and even varieties of Marxism and psychoanalysis), it did significantly impact social theory in the latter part of the twentieth century, as described in the next section of this paper (Heilbron 2015). Structuralism emerged in opposition to the existential and phenomenological philosophy that had dominated early‐twentieth‐century Europe. Associated with philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, existentialism focused on the moral dilemmas and responsibilities faced by the modern individual. Structuralism replaced this subject‐centered focus with an analysis of impersonal structures (Heilbron 2015). Most articulations of structuralism traced their origins to the early‐ twentieth‐century writings of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said that language is a system made up of signs that gain their meaning from their relationship to other signs within the system. In this, he challenged the common‐sense view that signs acquire their meaning by pointing to things in the world (referents). Cat is cat not because it points to the furry thing with whiskers, but because, in the language, it is opposed to the sign, dog. So too, by implication, social life is organized through such binary categories. Thus, language, and society, could be treated as a self‐ contained system rather than a collection of words, or roles, that pointed to something beyond themselves. Like Parsons’ structural functionalism, this French variety of structuralism was abstract and universal. It studied the invisible, deep, underlying organization of language (langue) rather than the everyday use of language (parole), and it provided an approach that presumably was applicable to societies in all times and places. It’s also important to make a point about meaning. Like positivists, structuralists were concerned with meaning. How does language, social life, and social theory acquire its meaning? For positivists, meaning is established when we can clearly define the relationship between propositions and their referents. This was also relevant for theory construction. Meaningful, truth‐laden, theories are built up out of such referential propositions. Ideas and theories that cannot be directly tied to observable referents were meaningless. Structuralism, on the other hand, traced meaning to the relations established within sign systems. With structuralism, then, the problem is no longer with the relationship between words and things, but rather, the relationship of words to words.

Period 2: Conflict, Culture, Language, and Identity In contrast to the postwar economic boom and the confident growth of American consumer culture, the 1960s are remembered as a period of conflict and turmoil. Protestors challenged the violence of the Vietnam War, drew attention to the global inequalities perpetuated under imperialist systems, and marched in support of ­second‐wave feminism and civil rights. Starting in the 1970s, the world‐system entered a period of economic decline, a situation that accounts for the popularity of Marxist‐inspired theories through the late twentieth century and into the present (Wallerstein 2008). At universities, the 1960s culminated in the “events of May 1968.” This set of, initially, student protests started in Nanterre, France, but spread to US schools like Columbia and Berkeley. Among other grievances, protestors railed against an outdated university curriculum, and inattention to issues around race and gender inequality. Overall, as Immanuel Wallerstein (2008) has written, the 1960s

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resulted in a move away from grand attempts to develop unified visions of sociology and a shift toward theories concerned with identity and the tools of identity construction: language and culture. This is not to say that the staple concepts of the previous period – social structure, institution, role – disappeared. Exchange and rational choice theorists, along with those inspired by functionalists, continue to develop theory into the present. Others, influenced by the criticisms coming out of the 1960s, have reconceptualized core concepts. For example, one of the most influential theorists in the latter part of the twentieth century was Pierre Bourdieu. He took ideas like structure and role and reconceived them through the concepts like field and habitus. For Bourdieu, the social world is composed of field positions that are defined, in relation to one another, by the kinds of capital that they accrue (economic, social, cultural). Capital is a source of social power that, then, becomes part of people’s habitus; their everyday taken‐for‐granted orientation to the world. This relationship between field and habitus ensures the reproduction of social orders. Importantly, and consistent with the problems I explore in this section, Bourdieu emphasizes “reflexivity.” This refers to the idea that even the producer of knowledge – the sociologist – lives out of a habitus, of which they must be aware, as they produce social knowledge. Bourdieu aside, feminist theory is an example of a perspective that challenged the hegemony of positivism and structural functionalism. Institutionally, in sociology, feminist theory is marked by the emergence of groups like Sociologists for Women in Society (1971), and the foundation of journals like Signs (in 1975) and Hypatia (in 1982). Most feminist theories are critical theories because they challenge the patriarchal structures of modern societies. They also critique the masculine orientation of sociological knowledge. For example, Dorothy E. Smith (1987) equated grand and positivist perspectives with a masculine‐standpoint. Modern societies, she argued, were bifurcated into two spheres. The public sphere of work, science, politics, and civil discourse was organized through bureaucratic structures and abstract rules. It embodied masculine rationality and produced knowledge (e.g. sociological and psychological theories) that reflected the masculine standpoint; a perspective which Donna Haraway (1988, p. 581) memorably described as “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” The private sphere of the home was inhabited, for historical reasons, mostly by women. Drawing on interpretive sociological traditions like phenomenology and ethnomethodology (but also with a good dose of Marxism), Smith emphasized that the private sphere produces a unique set of lived experiences, common to many women, which are the grounds for the articulation of consciousness, identity, and knowledge distinct from those valorized in the public sphere. The feminine standpoint is local (as opposed to universal), embodied (as opposed to rational), relational (as opposed to individualist) and concerned with the problems of care (as opposed to mastery and control). Though often ignored, the knowledge produced in this private sphere grounds the abstract knowledge produced in the public sphere. Importantly, Smith’s point is not simply that we need to add the point of view developed through women’s (and other marginalized person’s) experience. Rather the feminist standpoint, with its focus on embodiment and material relations of everyday life, provides a richer starting point for all sociological theory. If it is to be useful and meaningful, theory must always remain in contact with the experiences of the people whose lives it purports to theorize.



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Patricia Hill Collins, in her analysis of African‐American women’s standpoint, puts a finer point on it. Alongside theorists like legal scholar and co‐founder of critical race theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Collins developed intersectionality theory. Standpoints are created at the intersection of multiple social locations. Collins started with race, class, and gender but in subsequent years the intersections at which unique identities, and therefore alternate forms of knowledge, develop have multiplied to include nation, (dis)ability, and sexual orientation, among others. Like Smith, Collins relies on an interpretive approach to sociology, which places culture, text, and self‐ expression at the center of analysis. Importantly, in contrast to the poststructuralist and postmodern theories that I will describe in a moment, Collins (2000 [1990], p. 42) identifies herself as a “humanist.” She places the human agent, in her search for empowerment and solidarity, at the center of analysis. This aligns Collins with the broader “cultural turn” of 1980s and 1990s sociology. The problem with abstract theories, but especially theories inspired by positivism, is not only that they have tended to reflect the points of view of a social elite (e.g. white, heterosexual, males), but that they undermine the complexity of meanings that inform human sociality. In Charles Taylor’s (1985) words, humans are self‐interpreting, meaning‐making agents, the richness of whose lives is crafted out of the languages into which they are born. As such, self‐understanding is best understood in the context of broader cultural and linguistic frames. Humans interpret their selves and deepen their relationships to others through complex symbol systems, especially through the narratives (shared stories), made available in their culture. In his Modernity and Self‐Identity, Anthony Giddens (1991), for example, explores the relationship between selfhood and contemporary self‐help narratives. Jeffrey Alexander (2003, p. 11) summarizes the significance of this “cultural turn” by saying that it emphasizes “cultural autonomy.” Where Marxists treat culture as an effect of an economic superstructure, and Parsons’ functionalism treats culture as a means to achieve consensus, Alexander treats culture as a thing that must be analyzed on its own terms. Culture, as structure, as narrative, provides context for self‐understanding and action, and a means for achieving solidarity. But culture is also a contested sphere in which narratives conflict with one another. This returns us to Patricia Hill Collins. Some persons, as Collins points out, can easily identify with the dominant narratives of a society. Others, such as African‐American women, are not represented in dominant narratives, or social theories, and must articulate their experiences, their sense of self, through alternate media. As such, in her Black Feminist Thought, Collins (2000 [1990]) shows how American black women, across classes, have developed their identities, communities, and sense of social justice, through cultural forms invisible to mainstream society: the music, literature, and conversations of African‐ American women. This provides the starting point for the development of social theories grounded in cultural sources other than conventionally rationalist scientific research. Intersectionality theory, of the kind advanced by Collins, places racial identity at the center of analysis. This is an outgrowth of the civil rights movement in the United States. It is also connected to processes of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, and the recognition that modern societies are organized, usually for the worse, around categories of race. This has led to the growth of post‐colonial theory, one of whose inspirations is philosopher, psychiatrist, and anti‐colonial revolutionary

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Frantz Fanon. In particular, in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon drew attention to the problem of recognition (a theme also important to neo‐Marxian critical theorist Axel Honneth 1995). Drawing on existential and Hegelian philosophy, Fanon said that self‐consciousness and identity develop through a dialectic of recognition. The concept of recognition has become a staple in contemporary liberal democracies, as they attempt to address issues of cultural difference, and the legacies of colonialism. In the Hegelian version of the process, persons acquire self‐consciousness, and therefore the capacity for human freedom, only when recognized by others as independent consciousnesses. But, frequently, colonial subjects and their descendants see this in a different light. As Fanon put it, colonialism, upon which modern societies were formed, obstructs the process of consciousness formation. It turns colonized subjects into objects, rather than into free persons who could struggle for consciousness in the first place. In this context, the “polite” processes of identity recognition are insufficient. In Wretched of the Earth (1961), then, Fanon argues that to earn consciousness, those who have suffered colonial violence must fight back, sometimes using physical violence, against their oppressors. In an update to this form of analysis, Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard applied Fanon’s argument to understand the situation of North American Indigenous persons. In Red Skin, White Masks (2014) Coulthard argues that the politics of recognition is insufficient to reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed. The problem starts with inadequate definitions of culture. In the Western political and sociological imagination, culture is primarily a symbolic form developed in language, music, religion, and popular culture. But, Coulthard argues that in his Dene society, culture is not only crafted out of symbolic media, but through practical relationships to land and place (a theme also introduced by Raewyn Connell (2007) in Southern Theory). While liberal governments have focused on recognizing symbolic culture, they have been unwilling to recognize the relationship between culture and land. This, Coulthard argues, is because the recognition of land and land use brings the politics of recognition into conflict with the political economic interests of capitalist industry, as is evidenced by recent conflicts over oil pipelines in the Dakotas and Western Canada. Alongside these standpoint, cultural, and recognition theories, poststructuralism and postmodernism are the most influential approaches to come out of the 1980s and 1990s. The theories reviewed so far offer critiques of positivism, functionalism, structuralism, and even versions of Marxism. However, poststructuralism and postmodernism most clearly take aim at the epistemological foundations of those prior perspectives. In short, poststructuralists and postmodernists (in varying degrees) challenge the idea that there are legitimate foundations, external realities, and everlasting laws upon which social science can lay its claims to truth. These theories, like the structuralism described at the end of the previous section, hold that society is constructed in language and symbol systems. However, where structuralists assumed that they could discover universal truths about the structure of language (e.g. all ­languages are organized around binary oppositions), poststructuralists argued that language was differently structured in different historical eras. In this respect, poststructuralists relativized sociological knowledge. There is no universal truth, no key to understanding and explaining society in all times and places, only reality as constructed through the knowledge structures of a given era. Michel Foucault, likely the



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most influential poststructuralist, frequently distinguished ­between the epistemes (knowledge structures) of classical, premodern/medieval, and modern societies. Moreover, in contrast to structuralists, poststructuralists emphasized the relationship between language, knowledge, and power. Poststructuralism adds to the critical tool kit an analysis of power distinct from that offered by Marxism. Foucault, for example, argued that power works through discourse. Discourse refers to the symbolic categories and forms of talk that modern “disciplines” use to constitute and act upon their subject matters. Famously, Foucault argued that modern power operates not through the physical force of a sovereign ruler (a king violently executing a subject), but rather, through disciplinary knowledges; discourses and the associated practices of modern fields like psychiatry, criminology, psychoanalysis, sexology, and medicine. Here, discipline has a dual meaning. On the one hand, it refers to scientific and scholarly knowledge. On the other hand, it refers to the ­shaping and controlling of people. In the modern world, power operates through disciplinary discourses to turn people into “docile” subjects. The far‐reaching implication is that subjectivity, personhood, is a social construction that, serves the interest of power. In fact, in contrast to the standpoint theories that start with “lived experience,” poststructuralism and postmodernism question the reality of a subject (i.e. self or person) who can be an authentic locus of experience. They “de‐center the subject.” Like Goffman, who argued that the self is an effect of performance, poststructuralists and postmodernists argue that the subject is an effect of language, something the very attributes and intentions of which arise from within language. This is tricky because it means that there is no position outside of language through which people can know themselves, or even fully oppose the power that made them up in the first place. Poststructuralist gender theorists like Judith Butler have made similar arguments about gender and sexuality. There is no such thing as a real gender or even a real sexuality that sits as a thing, in itself, outside of language and performance. Rather, people engage in performances that make gender and sexuality appear to be real things. Moreover, in the modern world, these “performatives” have often served to reproduce structural inequalities such as heteronormative social organization. One of the goals of poststructuralism, then, is to deconstruct taken‐for‐granted identities in a way that shows that they are contingent, language‐based, phenomenon that can be changed, even though, as both Butler and Foucault have insisted, change is not easy. Lastly, I want to distinguish poststructuralism from postmodernism. Often the two are equated because they both challenge the epistemological foundations of modern, Enlightenment, philosophy, and science. That said, postmodern social theory, more explicitly than poststructural theory, analyzes the characteristics of so‐called postmodern society; the world born out of the late twentieth‐century proliferation of electronic technology (television, telephone, and now digital media), the growth of biomedicine, and the spread of consumer culture. Some postmodern theorists describe the postmodern situation using the tools of modern social science. That is, they believe that sociologists can provide social scientific explanations of this postmodern world. Zygmunt Bauman, for example, has said that in comparison to the stable structures and institutions of modern society, postmodern societies are “liquid,” and thus require new approaches to understanding selves, relationships, and ethics. Alternately, literary and social theorist Frederic Jameson (1984) argues

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that one of the key attributes of modernity and modern social theory is depth. For example, structuralism analyzed the difference between the deep structures of language and the surface uses of language. In contrast, the postmodern world is superficial. It is made up of fleeting, pastiche images that intensify feeling rather then enabling meaningful thought and reflection. It encourages the development of personal style over the development of connections to shared history. Ultimately, Jameson, a Marxist, invoking modernist explanations, argues that the postmodern is just the latest strategy employed by capitalism to produce profit and distract the exploited and alienated classes from revolt. Other, “radical” postmodern theorists believe that in the postmodern moment, even sociological knowledge is compromised. The premier postmodern theorist, sociologist Jean Baudrillard, argues that the current moment is dominated by media produced simulations. In the modern era, people could distinguish between reality, and the ways it was represented in, for example, art and science. In the postmodern moment the distinction between representation and reality collapses. We now live in a world in which media simulations of reality become hyperreal, “more real than the real,” and more captivating, emotionally satisfying, than reality itself. Baudrillard insists that the idea of “society,” of “self,” are media constructions the effect of which is to keep in play the illusion that there is a foundational reality that grounds our lives, even though this reality has disappeared long ago. Instead life is flow, the circulation of images, designed to capture attention and reproduce the “code” of consumer culture. In this system, the idea of “theory,” as a reasoned, empirically based explanation of society, is suspect, something caught up in its own simulated idea of itself. If true, the implications are staggering and lead, at least potentially, to the relativism and nihilism for which radical postmodernism is often accused. Sociology, and social theory, is just a game that sociologists play with themselves reproducing the images and simulations of the times in which they live. In the latter part of his career Baudrillard’s response to this conclusion was to develop playful and ironic writing, designed no longer to describe and explain, but to provoke reactions. While these experimental, interdisciplinary, artful styles of sociology were popular in the 1980s and 1990s, few now consider themselves postmodernists in this radical sense. That said, Baudrillard’s analysis of simulation and hyperreality seems even more relevant, now, in a moment where terms like fake news and the accompanying confusion over the distinction between reality and media representations of reality have become commonplace.

Period 3: Return to the Real Postmodernism and poststructuralism were influential theoretical perspectives into the 1990s. But most agree that the deconstructive, relativist, anti‐science spirit that animated the most radical of those perspectives no longer inspires social theory. The question then: What comes after postmodernism? There are many answers. For example, though as indicated at the beginning of the previous section Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology developed, roughly, in the same period as poststructuralism and postmodernism, it has outlived postmodernism and is now an especially influential theory.



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An interesting recent application of Bourdieu is Mustafa Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2015) The Racial Order. There they combine Bourdieu’s field analysis with Durkheim’s cultural theory and American pragmatism to describe the make‐up of many contemporary racial fields. Also, up until this point in the chapter, I have neglected theories of space and spatiality. Though developed through the latter half of the twentieth century, in response to theories that fetishized temporality (e.g. dialectical Marxism), theorists like Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey are now quite important. Space, they argue, is not just an empty backdrop upon which human action plays out. Rather, space is a contested material and symbolic construction that embodies the needs and interests of social and political orders. Or, for a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was believed that globalization theory, as developed in the work of scholars like Roland Robertson, Anthony Appadurai, George Ritzer, Saskia Sassen, and Joseph Stiglitz, would supplant postmodernism as a unifying theme for social analysis. These theories analyzed phenomena like the global flow of capital, the cross‐border movement of people (migration and tourism), the spread of popular culture through media, and the growth of global cities. Despite, or perhaps because of, recent political events that seem to threaten the global order (e.g. Brexit, the American withdrawal from international agreements), the analysis of global processes remains as relevant as ever. Among the alternatives, however, I conclude this chapter with a discussion of realism and its implications for sociological theory. Realism describes a significant conceptual issue that unites various perspectives in the early twenty‐first century. Realists include thinkers as diverse as speculative realists (DeLanda 2016; DeLanda and Harman 2017; Morton 2013), analytical sociologists (Hedstrom 2005), critical realists (Archer et al. 1998; Bhaskar 1997 [1975]; Gorski 2013; Sayer 2000; Smith 2011), and even interpretive theorists once associated with the linguistic and cultural turns (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015). The growing interest in realist philosophies does not mean that the positivisms, functionalisms, structuralisms, Marxisms, feminisms, and constructionisms have disappeared (though some may have transformed in confrontation with the arguments of realism). Rather, realism is a logical response to the excesses of the language‐based theories of the late twentieth century. Realism, in most of its forms, argues that both positivism and postmodernism focused too much on problems of epistemology and consequently too much on the analysis of language and culture, which were seen to have constructed both our knowledge of reality and even reality itself. Yet developments in the real world have thrust discussions about the reality of reality back into consciousness. For example, in his description of second modernity, Ulrich Beck (1992) argued that modern industries and technology have produced entities that carry unknown, unforeseeable risk, the effects of which exceed the human grasp. One example is the 1986 nuclear catastrophe at Chornobyl, Ukraine, which unleashed unseen radiation, that traveled across national borders, and affected persons and ecosystems in still unknown ways. Recently, philosopher Timothy Morton (2013) has coined the term “hyperobjects” to refer to these kinds of ­phenomena. Hyperobjects are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” and include things like “black holes, oil fields, solar systems, biospheres, Styrofoam, the machinery of capitalism, and global warming” (i). As this list ­demonstrates, for Morton, hyperobjects can emerge out of human action (like the

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unintended consequences described by Beck) or from far outside the realm of human activity. In either case, these objects are not, or at least are no longer, a “function of our knowledge” (ii). These “mind independent” entities (Gorski, p. 667) may not always be visible to us, but their effects on human society and behavior can be measured, and mechanisms that connect these entities to society, described. Affect theory is a popular extension of poststructuralism that describes such a mind independent reality. There are several kinds of affect theory. These range from theories that focus on phenomena like collective feeling and social “atmosphere,” to theories that draw on findings in the life sciences. Brian Massumi, a lead affect theorist, puts it like this: A common thread running through the varieties of social constructivism currently dominant in cultural theory hold that everything including nature, is constructed in ­ discourse … The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa. (2002, pp. 38–39)

In the focus on nature these affect theories share common ground with sociobiology. However, sociobiology, inspired by positivism, offers explanations that reduce social behavior to mere expressions of genetic traits. In contrast, affect theory focuses on biological forces and energies that operate alongside ontologically distinct phenomena (that is they retain unique characteristic and properties) like culture and language. Affect, by this definition, is a field of energies that operates below the social order. It is, as Gregg and Seigworth (2010, p. 3) put it “subpersonal” and “subsocial.” Here, affect theorists focus on the body’s capacity to “affect and be affected” by forces of which it is unaware. For example, Teresa Brennan suggests that group integration is not solely a social and cultural achievement, but also depends on prediscursive affective connections. Drawing on research in the field of psychoneuorendocrinology, Brennan (2004, p. 9) identities “chemical entrainment,” the process by which “one person’s or one group’s nervous system is brought into alignment with another’s,” as an example of such a subsocial affective bonding mechanism. Affect theory also addresses themes of power and social control. In contrast to the Foucauldian approach that describes how subjectivities are created and managed through discourse, affect theorists study how new technologies and biomedical knowledges allow for the control and “capture” of affect. Drawing on Eugene Thacker’s research, Patricia Clough (2008) for example, introduces the concept of biomedia. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, the body was treated as a self‐ contained organism. In contrast, the biomediated body, of the present moment, is opened, through technologies like psychotropic medications, to flows and movements from beyond itself. In the context of capitalism, the challenge for biomedicine, Clough (2008) argues, is to understand how affect can be used to generate profit. Biomedicine acquires knowledge about the capacities of different kinds of bodies, through, for example, diagnostic testing. This knowledge, in turn, can be used to promote and circulate products like “pills” and “testing technologies.” These at once shape the body’s capacity to affect and be affected, and generate profit, biocapital, for industry. The question, Clough (2008, p. 5) says, is not just “what can particular bodies do” but “what can particular bodies “be made to do?”



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Another concept that is used quite broadly in twenty‐first century social theory is assemblage. Like affect theorists, some assemblage theorists draw on the work of postmodernist Gilles Deleuze who, along with colleague Felix Guattari, described society as a set of “machinic assemblages.” The foremost interpreter of Deleuze’s assemblage theory is philosopher Manuel DeLanda (2016, p. 37), who has described societies as “assemblages of assemblages.” Closer to sociology, Bruno Latour, science studies scholar and actor‐network‐theorist, has developed an influential version of assemblage. For both DeLanda and Latour, one of the virtues of the assemblage concept is that it flattens social theory. Flatten has two meanings. First, it challenges the idea, first introduced by Emile Durkheim, but taken for granted by most sociologists since, that “society” is an entity unto itself, a social fact, a metaphysical reality, that hangs above persons influencing or even causing action. For Latour, there is no such thing as the social, in Durkheim’s sense. Rather, society is made up through the organization, or assembly, of various elements, both human and non‐human: “… social, for ANT, is the name of a type of momentary association, which is characterized by the way it gathers together in new shapes” (Latour 2005, p. 65). While social forms emerge in the act of assembly, there is no such thing “society” that can serve as the ultimate explanation of how these things come together in the first place. Rather, assemblages, drawing on ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel, emerge from within the practical activities of everyday life itself. Second, assemblage theories are flat in the sense that they do not elevate, ontologically, any being or agent. The human, so often privileged in social theory, is just one among many component parts (technology, nature, animal), each of which have unique properties that enable the assembled whole. This idea brings assemblage theories in line with other post‐human and post‐social perspectives. For example, another science and technology scholar, Karen Knorr‐Cetina (2001), argues that we have entered a post‐social world. By this, she means that societies are no longer organized around broad, shared, homogenous values and concepts, but rather through relations between persons and nonhuman objects. Like modern relations between persons, these “object relations” (p. 520) depend on acts of reciprocity in which humans imagine themselves from the perspective of the objects they engage (e.g. environmental movements imagine themselves from the perspective of the natural environment) and vice versa. This even enables forms of human‐object solidarity. Knorr Cetina uses the bond between a person and their computer as an example of a post‐social relation. Another example of a theorist who has described the relationship between humans and nonhumans is biologist, feminist, and social theorist Donna Haraway. Haraway argues that people are hybrids constructed in relation to nonhuman agents. In the 1980s, Haraway become famous when she said that humans are cyborgs – a hybrid of human and technology. More recently she has described the importance of “companion species” (e.g. dogs) in the development of modern societies. Whether talking about computers, dogs, or the natural environment we now (and perhaps, as Latour suggests, have always) lived in a world where humans do not unilaterally control the organization of the social. Instead, humans, if they are to assemble enduring forms of sociality, must work to recruit and “mobilize” nonhuman agents that have capacities, abilities, and agencies distinct from humans. Among the many realisms on offer, critical realism has had the most significant influence on Anglo‐American sociological theory. As a philosophy of science, critical

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realism does not explicitly theorize the social. Nevertheless, it is important because it helps sociologists to understand the nature of their object of study, society, as well as the ways in it relates to other objects: persons, biological systems, ecosystems. After years of discourse analysis and cultural theory, it reintroduces to sociology, in more nuanced form, concepts historically associated with positivism and scientism like explanation, mechanism, and causation. Critical realism was first formulated in the 1970s by philosopher Roy Bhaskar but has since been developed by sociologists like Margaret Archer, Philip Gorski, and Christian Smith. In contrast to the flat ontologies already described, critical realism develops a stratified, depth view of reality. The levels of reality are made up of objects (molecules, biological systems, human consciousness, social structure), each with unique properties that have the capacity to affect other objects. Moreover, interactions between objects at one level can lead to the emergence of ontologically unique entities at higher levels. Also, these new entities, and the processes they enable, can feed downward to constrain the behaviors of entities that exist at lower levels. For example, Durkheim’s social facts (a higher‐order phenomenon) emerged out of human interaction (one order below social facts), became entities sui generis, which also have the capacity to structure the human interactions out of which they emerged (Sawyer 2002). While critical realism may sound like it’s stating an obvious fact (reality is composed of layers that are related to one another), it is quite important in the way that it attempts to orient sociology in response to the historically influential philosophies of positivism and postmodernism. Against the reductionism of positivism, critical realism recognizes that explanations of society must be complex and include entities that cannot be directly perceived, controlled, or even fully understood. In fact, Gorski (2013, p. 659) insists that “non‐intentional social structures such as fields or networks and culture can usually be observed only indirectly via their causal effects.” And where explanation in positivism was limited to describing observable patterns of relations, critical realism, borrowing a term from Robert Merton, seeks the often unobservable, but certainly detectable, “causal mechanisms” that produce social reality. Finally, it is precisely because critical realists recognize that different layers of reality operate through different mechanisms that they also recognize the central role that culture, language, and human self‐interpretation play in the constitution of societies. In this way, critical realism builds on the insights of the linguistic and cultural turns without giving into what Rob Stones (1996, p. 20) called postmodern “defeatism.” Sayer (2000, p. 8) says such social phenomena are “intrinsically meaningful,” but this does not make explanation impossible since, as Weber and subsequent interpretive theorists pointed out, “reasons can be causes.” In other words, people’s motives inform actions, and therefore play a role in developing causal accounts of social life. This said, like affect and assemblage theories, critical realism recognizes that humans and their societies are located within complex systems, the mechanisms of which are not reducible to language or social structure. In this view, theory is not just a self‐enclosed discourse hopelessly caught up in its own language games, but a struggle to describe as truthfully as possible the mechanisms that govern social life, and the possibilities and prospects for using this knowledge to improve our shared situation. The appeal of such a project, in the midst of a world that seems increasingly unstable and unknowable, should be apparent.



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References Alexander, J. (2003). The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Archer, M., Bhaskar, R., Collier, A. et al. (1998). Critical Realism: Essential Readings. London: Routledge. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bhaskar, R. (1997 [1975]). A Realist Theory of Science. London: Verso. Brennan, T. (2004). The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Calhoun, C., Gerteis, J., Moody, J. et al. (eds.) (2012). Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3e. New York: Wiley‐Blackwell. Clough, P. (2008). The affective turn: political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1): 1–22. Collins, P.H. (2000 [1990]). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory. Social Science and the Global Dynamics of Knowledge. Australia: Allen & Unwin. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh University Press. DeLanda, M. and Harman, G. (2017). The Rise of Realism. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Dreyfus, H. and Taylor, C. (2015). Retrieving Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Emirbayer, M. and Desmond, M. (2015). The Racial Order. Chicago, Ill: Chicago University Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self‐Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor books. Gorski, P. (2013). What is critical realism? And why should I care? Contemporary Sociology 42 (5): 658–670. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In: The Affect Theory Reader (ed. M. Gregg and G. Seigworth), 1–28. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press. Halfpenny, P. (1982). Positivism and Sociology: Explaining Social Life. London: Allen and Unwin. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledge: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14: 575–600. Hedstrom, P. (2005). Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge University Press. Heilbron, J. (2015). French Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Homans, G.C. (1974). Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jameson, F. (1984). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review 146: 53–92. Jasso, G. (2011). James S. Coleman. In: The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists: Volume II—Contemporary Social Theorists (ed. G. Ritzer and J. Stepnisky), 219–239. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell. Knorr Cetina, K. (2001). Postsocial relations: theorizing sociality in a Postsocial environment. In: Handbook of Social Theory (ed. G. Ritzer and B. Smart), 520–537. London: Sage. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor‐Network‐Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Lemert, C. (1997). Goffman. In: The Goffman Reader (ed. C. Lemert and A. Branaman), ix–xliii. New York: Blackwell. Lidz, V. (2011). Talcott parsons. In: The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists: Volume 1—Classical Social Theorists (ed. G. Ritzer and J. Stepnisky), 511–558. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Merton, R.K. (1968). Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Mills, C.W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Pyyhtinen, O. (2010). Simmel and ‘The Social’. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sawyer, K. (2002). Durkheim’s dilemma: toward a sociology of emergence. Sociological Theory 20: 227–247. Sayer, A. (2000). Realism and Social Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Smith, D.E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Smith, C. (2011). What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press. Steinmetz, G. (2008). American sociology before and after World War II. In: Sociology in America: A History (ed. C. Calhoun), 314–366. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press. Stones, R. (1996). Sociological Reasoning: Towards a Past‐Modern Sociology. New York: MacMillan. Taylor, C. (1985). Self‐interpreting animals. In: Philosophical Paper 1: Human Agency and Language, 45–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, I. (2008). The culture of sociology in disarray: the impact of 1968 on U.S. sociologists. In: Sociology in America: A History (ed. C. Calhoun), 428–437. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press. Weinstein, D. and Weinstein, M.A. (1993). Postmodern(ized) Simmel. London: Routledge. Yamagishi, T., Gillmore, M.R., and Cook, K.S. (1988). Network connections and the distribution of power in exchange networks. American Journal of Sociology 93: 833–851.

3 Quantitative Methods Russell K. Schutt

Introduction It is hard to overemphasize the importance of quantitative methods in sociology and next to impossible to describe all of the specific methods that can reasonably be termed quantitative. But understanding how quantitative methods arose, as well as identifying the problems to which they have been applied and how well they have performed will improve appreciation for both their importance and variety. This chapter begins by reviewing the history and philosophy of quantitative methods and provides an overview of the major goals and strategies by which quantitative methods can be distinguished. In addition, after reviewing different quantitative methods and the problems they have both solved and overlooked, an overview of new developments in quantitative methods will be considered.

History and Philosophy Quantitative methods are a collection of techniques that rely on numbers to represent empirical reality and that adopt a positivist philosophy in which it is presumed that the social world is knowable by observers who quantify its characteristics. Quantitative methods were part of sociology at its inception, infusing the discipline with the prevailing spirit of discovery and situating it within the historical advance of science in the 19th century with its willingness to challenge prevailing orthodoxies and its spirit of discovery. For the purpose of understanding the subsequent privileged role of quantitative methods in the advance of science, one event stands out above all others. With the

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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development and (nearly) posthumous publication of his heliocentric theory of the solar system, Nicolaus Copernicus shattered the prevailing assumptions that either common sense or traditional beliefs were reliable guides to understanding the world in which we live (Tarnas 1991). Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1978 [1543]), by contrast, demonstrated that years of careful quantitative measurement of the physical world and commitment to crafting a theory to explain those measurements could reveal fundamental principles about how the world operates, irrespective of the preferences of its human occupants (Adamczewski 1973). It was not that Copernicus’s theory immediately transformed understanding, for it was almost two centuries before religious opposition finally abated. What Copernicus succeeded in doing was to change the focus of debate about the physical world from what was most consistent with Church teachings or prevailing philosophies to what best predicted observable phenomena. The positivist spirit had triumphed, the Scientific Revolution had begun, and quantitative methods were its foundation (Tarnas 1991, pp. 248–271). The equation of science with quantitative methods did not diminish for 300 years. Speaking to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London in 1883, William Thomson Kelvin explained: I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be. (Scripture 1892, p. 127)

Sir Francis Galton translated Lord Kelvin’s enthusiasm into a simple maxim for scientists: “Whenever you can, count” (Newman 1956, p. 1169). Social scientists were advised to resist the tendency “to rest contented with merely qualitative results where quantitative measurements could be made with the exercise of brains and patience” (Scripture 1892, p. 127). Neither the triumph of the scientific worldview in the West nor its expression in quantitative methods was universal or permanent. Philosophers were troubled by the realization that human observations of the world could not be free of imposed conceptual judgments and that causal effects could not actually be observed (Tarnas 1991, p. 368). Certainty that empirical investigation in general and quantitative methods in particular could yield a verifiable understanding of the natural world also began to erode in the twentieth century due to the advance of science itself. Einstein’s (1921) recognition of the interchangeability of matter and energy and of the relativity of space and time (Calder 1979), as well as Heisenberg’s identification in the subatomic world of the impossibility of measuring simultaneously the position and momentum of a particle – the famous “uncertainty principle” – forever called into question the belief that quantitative measurement provides the necessary foundation for explaining natural phenomena (Reece 1977). Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) reconceptualization of scientific progress as successive “revolutions” that overthrow prevailing paradigms further undermined the positivist belief that scientific methods were gradually increasing understanding of the world as it “really is.”



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These professional developments and philosophical debates both laid the foundation for quantitative methods in sociology and infused its subsequent construction. Two trends emerged. First, positivists continued to extend the reach of quantitative methods so as to describe an ever‐larger fraction of the social world in ways that reflected growing awareness of its complexity. Their efforts often took account of less quantifiable social phenomena and accepted a “post‐positivist” assumption that the observations – including numbers – recorded by human beings inevitably will reflect to some extent the subjective orientations of the observers, but they remained committed to the core positivist belief in a knowable, objective external reality. Relativist challenges to positivism encouraged some qualitative researchers to adopt an alternative “interpretivist” approach that focused on understanding the meanings people attached to their experiences and abjured the concept of an objective “real world.” Quantitative methodologists rejected this trend, but some began to incorporate qualitative techniques, developing “mixed methods” that promised to yield greater insight into subjective as well as objective social phenomena. At the same time that some of the distinctions between quantitative and qualitative methods have eroded, technological advances have increased the availability and power of quantitative methods. Quantitative data from thousands of research projects can now be obtained online at the Interuniversity Consortium on Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and many other research organizations and programs. Data from many of these studies (11,118 at ICPSR, as of 7/7/2019) can be analyzed online, with no more than an Internet provider and a web browser (https://www. icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies). Increasing availability to researchers of big, or “passive,” data is also transforming the landscape of research. Measures ranging from online orders to Google search foci to Tweet characteristics can be available for investigation of social contacts and social behavior (https://www.allaccess.com/merge/archive/28030/2018‐update‐what‐ happens‐in‐an‐internet‐minute). Much more of the world’s social activity now occurs online and is recorded in quantitative datasets. There is therefore little doubt that possibilities for quantitative research will continue to multiply.

Goals and Strategies Specific quantitative research methods can be classified by the primary goal they are designed to achieve and by the general strategy they employ.

Quantitative Research Goals A positivist perspective on the social world privileges one paramount goal for quantitative research: to understand the external world as it “really” is. This is the goal of validity, and it presumes that each methodological technique should be evaluated by its ability to reveal empirical phenomena without distortion. It has three aspects  –  measurement validity, generalizability, and causal validity  –  which themselves each subsume multiple quantitative techniques (Schutt 2019).

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Measurement validity is achieved when data collected with the specified operational procedures reflect the empirical status of or variation in the phenomenon that the measure was designed to capture. Measurement validity is the cornerstone for quantitative methods, since unless the researcher has measured what he or she thinks has been measured, all analyses and statements based on those measures will mischaracterize empirical reality. Developing valid measurement begins with conceptualization – defining clearly what is meant by the term of interest – and then continues with operationalization  –  the process of specifying the operations that will yield empirical evidence of variation in a particular aspect of that concept. Generalizability is achieved when findings based on the units actually observed can, as intended, be applied to the larger population of units from which they were obtained or to other units that were not observed. Of course this aspect of validity is not a concern if we have collected data about every unit of interest and make no attempt to generalize findings about these units to a larger population or to different units. But this limited purpose is rarely the case in quantitative research. Whether they have collected data from a small group of college students, a large sample of employed persons, or a census of an entire nation, researchers usually want to draw conclusions about larger populations, a more complete collection of units, and sometimes other times and places than those from which data were actually obtained. The specific methods used shape the likelihood of such generalizations being valid. Causal validity is achieved when conclusions about causal effects – what causes variation in the empirical phenomenon of interest – reflect the operation in empirical reality of the influence understood as causal. So, for example, the conclusion that receiving more education results in higher income is causally valid if, among the persons studied, those who received more education earned higher income as a result. By contrast, the same conclusion is invalid if higher parents’ education led to higher respondents’ education and to higher respondents’ income, but higher respondents’ education itself had no bearing on respondents’ income once parents’ education was taken into account. Specific quantitative methods also differ in their research strategy. A deductive research project begins with a formal theory: a set of logically interrelated propositions about empirical reality. A specific hypothesis  –  a tentative statement about empirical reality involving the relations among two or more variables – is deduced from that theory and then tested. If the results of the test support the hypothesis, then the theory from which the hypothesis was deduced is considered to be on stronger ground. If the test does not support the hypothesis, then the theory from which the hypothesis was deduced is considered to have been weakened. This hypothetico‐deductive mode of inquiry is considered by many to be the quintessential scientific method. An inductive research project differs from a deductive project first and foremost in terms of its starting point. Inductive research begins with observations about empirical reality  –  observations that may include both empirical phenomena and relations between them. An explanatory framework is then induced from what has been observed. Many inductive research projects stop at this point, but some generate new propositions that are subsequently tested using a deductive strategy. Although an inductive strategy is more often assumed in research using qualitative



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methods – and often commonly used as a point of contrast with the presumption of a deductive strategy in quantitative methods – inductive reasoning is often an important element in quantitative research. Purely descriptive research involves a more limited research strategy. If the goal of a research project is only to describe the empirical phenomena of interest, the project may be concluded when the phenomena of interest have been measured and the findings reported. No attempt is made to relate the observations to a general explanatory framework or even to evaluate the support for any specific predictions. Although these three strategies can be viewed as alternatives, they may be combined in research projects. In fact, most quantitative research projects include an element of descriptive research, since what has been measured is often reported as a description of the setting and/or people studied. In addition, many quantitative projects designed with a deductive research strategy add an inductive component as the researchers try to make sense of unanticipated patterns they observe in their data.

Quantitative Research Strategies The following sections present specific quantitative methods in relation to the aspect of validity on which they focus. After the aspect of validity is introduced, the problem that achieving this aspect of validity poses for researchers is discussed and the traditional solution or solutions to this problem offered by specific quantitative methods are explained. Finally, the chapter highlights new directions being taken to better achieve the goal in light of new challenges.

Measurement Quantitative measurement was a key element in the Scientific Revolution, and many of that era’s scientists as well as subsequent historians emphasized its singular importance: “[I]t is possible that the deepest meaning and aim of … the whole scientific revolution of the seventeenth century … is just to abolish the world of the ‘more or less,’ the world of qualities and sense perception … and to replace it by the … universe of precision, of exact measures” (Koyré 1965, pp. 4–5). Three hundred years after the Scientific Revolution, again associating a positivist philosophy with enthusiasm about quantitative measurement, Nobel laureate Max Planck declared, “An experiment is a question which science poses to nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer” (1949, p. 110). Hubert M. Blalock Jr. (1982, p. 7), one of sociology’s foremost quantitative methodologists in the late twentieth century, tied sociological research methods directly to this tradition: “[T]here is a sufficient number of commonalities so that we can hardly afford to throw away whatever success models may be available to us.” He defined measurement as “the general process through which numbers are assigned to objects in such a fashion that it is also understood just what kinds of mathematical operations can legitimately be used, given the nature of the physical operations that have been used to justify or rationalize the assignment of numbers to objects” (1982 , p. 11).

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The Problem It is at the point of measurement that fundamental differences between the physical and social sciences are most apparent. Whereas in the physical sciences, the properties of measured phenomena – whether atoms of carbon or cords of wood – are often homogeneous, key phenomena in the social sciences are notoriously variable – including people in different cultures and people in the same culture at different times. As a result, it cannot be assumed that a measure will perform in the same way across different studies. The complications that this measurement heterogeneity creates are legion (1982, pp. 17–20). In practical terms, recognizing the challenge posed by the goal of measurement validity has meant focusing attention on the inability of the researcher to observe directly what he or she seeks to measure. The problem that this creates is represented in classical test theory (CCT) as the difference between the variation captured by a specific measure and the underlying phenomenon  –  the true score or latent variable – that it is designed to measure. In algebraic form, this problem is captured as the size of the error term in the following classical equation:

Observed score

True score Error

The larger the error term relative to the true score, the less the observed score tells us about the phenomenon of interest. Since there is no a priori way to distinguish the true score from the error component of an observed score, and since there are many sources of error – from systematic bias in response to misleading questions to random variation in response to unclear terms  –  improving and confirming measurement validity  –  that an observed score reflects what it is intended to measure (the true score) – becomes a central methodological concern (Viswanathan 2005). Although it may seem that formulating survey questions is no more demanding than asking questions in a conversation, the central problem is that every survey respondent must interpret each survey question in the same way. If questions or their response choices include ambiguous words or phrases, or convey biased sentiments, the odds increase that different respondents will interpret them differently. The more heterogeneous the sample of survey respondents, the greater the problem is likely to be.

The Solution How can the size of the error term be reduced relative to that of the true score component in obtained measures? In survey research, question wording can be improved through pretesting strategies and systematic experimentation. Questions designed to measure the same concept can also be combined so that the resulting composite index scores better represent the corresponding latent trait, or true score. Single Questions Pretesting methods can reveal problems with question wording and response choices. Simply asking experienced interviewers to administer a planned questionnaire to a small number of respondents similar to those to be included in a study can identify



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difficulties that cause hesitancy or confusion. Cognitive interviewing is a more systematic technique, in which the interviewer asks a question of one respondent and then probes with follow‐up questions to elucidate the respondent’s interpretation of the question and response choices (Schaeffer and Presser 2003, p. 82). Respondents may also be asked to “think aloud” as they answer questions in order to determine their mental operations as they formulate an answer. Pretesting methods should result in greater question clarity through a process of successive refinement of question wording, but they are not a panacea for survey design. Although much has been accomplished in improving methods of pretesting, progress continues to be inadequate (Presser et al. 2004). Systematic experiments by Stanford’s Jon Krosnick (1999) and others have added considerable quantitative evidence of the consequences of different ways of wording and organizing key questions and their response choices. The resulting improved guidelines range from choices for wording responses to achieve equal intensity intervals between them to cautions against using so‐called Likert‐style response choices (“strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” “strongly disagree”), which elicit agreement bias and so lead to a 10–20% overestimate of the level of agreement.

Indexes Writing clear and unambiguous questions is a sufficient challenge, but single questions are simply not sufficient for measuring many of sociology’s most important concepts. From alienation to delinquency to political views, many abstract concepts cannot be assessed adequately with a single question. An index combines responses to questions or other measures that are each indicators of a common concept. The logic of index construction from the standpoint of CCT is that the measurement errors for each of the multiple items in an index will cancel each other out, so that the index score will be close to the subject’s true score (Viswanathan 2005, pp. 16–18). The traditional solution to the problem of measurement can end with a test for the inter‐item reliability of the index – indicating the extent to which chance error has been reduced – and for its validity – to indicate whether the measure is measuring the intended concept (Schutt 2019, pp. 268–272). However, index construction also often includes an inductive stage in which the researcher analyzes inter‐item correlations for evidence of multiple dimensions within the index. For example, an index measuring job satisfaction may include some questions that focus on intrinsic sources of satisfaction and so are more highly intercorrelated and other questions that focus on extrinsic sources of satisfaction. Different approaches to identifying subdimensions include exploratory factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and cluster analysis (Jacoby 1991).

New Directions There are important new directions in measurement theory, attention to social context, quantification of qualitative data, and translation of survey instruments.

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CCT provides a conceptual framework for developing, testing, and refining measures. However, appropriate use of CCT requires meeting its assumptions about the errors represented in the error term: their expected value must be zero; they must not be correlated with the corresponding true scores; they must be uncorrelated over successive observations; and they are uncorrelated with all other variables in whatever system of equations is being investigated (such as a multiple regression model) (1982, p. 31). Some investigators have concluded that these assumptions are not reasonable and so have turned to alternative approaches. The most prominent alternative approach is item response theory (IRT), with Rasch models as the most common such technique (Embretson and Hershberger 1999). Rather than treating all items in a test or index as equivalent and creating a total score by adding them together, IRT takes into account the difficulty of individual items with respect to the latent trait that is being measured. The expectation is that fewer respondents will be able to pass more difficult items (or, similarly, fewer respondents will answer positively to items at a more extreme position on the underlying trait). There is no point in asking “easy” questions if a respondent has already answered a more difficult question; more accurate measurement will come from presenting such a respondent with more questions that are difficult to answer (Embretson and Hershberger 1999, pp. 9–10). Computerized testing facilitates measurement based on IRT principles by making it easier to present items based on responses to preceding items.

Social Context Increasing attention to the measurement of social context reflects both more recognition at a theoretical level of the importance of taking account of group‐ level and place‐based influences as well as new tools for compiling and distributing such measures. Measures based on social network analysis have been used in studies ranging from crime to health and politics (Yang et  al. 2017). Measures based on so‐called “passive data” such as records of 911 calls, property values, and utility usage are increasingly available from sources like the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) for analysis of geographically based social phenomena (e.g. O’Brien and Winship 2017).

Quantification of Qualitative Data The proliferation and increasing sophistication of computer programs that facilitate analysis of qualitative data have made it easier to develop and experiment with detailed coding systems for what may originally have been such nonquantified data as text, pictures, and videos. At the same time, the accumulation of text in social media and other online sources and the widespread use of cameras in smartphones generates so much data that quantification often seems to be a prerequisite for its analysis (e.g. Salmons 2016; Testa et al. 2011).



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Translation Growing interest in cross‐national comparisons as well as increasing immigration has also required adaptations in measurement practice in the United States – where 13% of adults were foreign born in 2014 – and many other countries. Translation is often a necessary step in designing questions to be used in a survey of the general population. Best practices in translation of survey instruments include use of a team that includes some familiar with the relevant cultures (Church 2010).

Generalization Quantitative methods begin with measurement, and it might be said that they end with generalization. The best measures are of little use if the descriptions they provide cannot be generalized to the people, groups, or other entities about which the researcher had hoped to learn. Of course, if it were possible to measure every entity of interest, there would be no need to consider methods for improving researchers’ ability to generalize their findings, but even when it is possible to obtain data from an ostensibly complete census, the actual coverage of the census must be considered, as must be the basis for generalization to other times and places.

The Problem We need go no further than the US Constitution to begin to understand the problem. The decennial census is mandated by article 1, section 1 of the Constitution of the United States of America. It is planned and administered by a massive government agency, and citizens are legally required to complete their census form. There are tangible benefits to census completion in the resulting allocation of government services and political representatives. Yet in the 2010 US Census, only 67% of US households returned their mailed census form, leaving the rest of the population’s participation to be elicited by 635 000 temporary workers (US Census Bureau 2010a). In 2000, a comparable army of employees missed an estimated 3.3 million persons, compared to 281.4 million who were counted (Erikson 2001). It is not certain what the future holds: the mailback response rate declined from 78% in 1970 to 65% in 1990, but regained some of that lost ground due to an extensive mobilization campaign in Census 2000 (Hillygus et al. 2006, p. 20). Yet for Census 2020, the addition of a question about citizenship has raised predictions of a serious undercount of undocumented immigrants (Wines 2018). If the $5.5 billion spent to count almost every person in the 2010 US Census still leaves some uncertainty about generalizability to groups that fail to respond at high rates, what can researchers do who have only a tiny fraction of the resources of the US government at their disposal (US Census Bureau 2010b, c)? One response is to rely on Census data itself when planning analyses of sociological research questions. This is a very reasonable option for those whose research questions can be addressed with Census data, and there are also many datasets available for reanalysis from other government and private data collection efforts (Schutt 2019, chapter  14).

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However, in the usual circumstance when new data must be collected to answer previously unaddressed questions or to study different populations, researchers must rely on samples – subsets of the population – to which they can devote many more resources in order to achieve a higher rate of response.

The Solution The methodology of random sampling and the use of inferential statistics provide means for, respectively, selecting a sample in order to maximize the likelihood that it is representative of the population from which it was selected and estimating that likelihood. In a truly random sampling process, cases are selected without bias from the population of interest, meaning that each element in the population has an equal probability of selection. More complex sampling strategies may involve stratifying the population in terms of key characteristics, such as income or race, and then sampling randomly within strata in order to ensure appropriate representation of each stratum, or sampling first clusters of elements, such as states, cities, or blocks, and then sampling elements within those clusters. These strategies may be combined, and they may be adjusted so as to overrepresent within a sample elements in relatively small strata or clusters, but even in these samples the probability of selection of each element is known and can be adjusted ex post facto to yield a representative sample of the larger population. Three problems remain: 1. Random selection from a population will not itself produce a representative sample if many of those selected decline to participate or otherwise are unavailable. 2. Statistical inference allows estimation of the odds that a statistical finding is due to chance, but the process can be and is frequently misunderstood and misused. 3. Statistical inference is not directly relevant to generalizations beyond the population from which a sample was drawn. The problem of survey nonresponse is a major impediment to confident generalization of results obtained with an otherwise randomly selected sample. A typical mailed survey with just one mailing will elicit at best a response from 30% of the selected respondents, but extensive follow‐up efforts with nonrespondents and design of the survey to exacting specifications so that it is clear, attractive, and credible, can result in a final response of 70% or even higher. The use of answering machines and caller ID as screening devices and the negative penumbra emanating from excessive telemarketing have combined to drastically reduce the rate of response to phone surveys: from 80% in 1979 to just 9% in 2016 (Schutt 2019, p. 290). Response rates remain high for in‐person interview studies, but costs are prohibitive for all but well‐funded projects. Once data have been collected with a probability sampling strategy and a reasonable response rate achieved, the process of statistical inference begins with the recognition that the value of a statistic calculated with the obtained sample – such as a mean (arithmetic average) – is only one of an infinite number of values for the statistic that



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would have been obtained if random samples were selected from the population, ad infinitum (presuming replacement of all elements back to the population after each random sample is drawn). Just by chance, some of these sample statistics will have a value close to the true value of the statistic in the population  –  the population parameter – and others will be far from that value. The hypothetical distribution of all possible values of a statistic for samples of a particular size is termed a sampling distribution. Recognition of the inherent uncertainty in knowing that a sample statistic comes from an unknown point on a sampling distribution would paralyze efforts to generalize from random samples were it not for the discovery that the sampling distribution for each statistic with a sample of a particular size has a characteristic, and knowable, shape. For the mean and many other statistics, that shape is a normal distribution. Since the normal distribution has a known shape and properties – particularly, the area under the normal curve is invariant with respect to multiples of the sampling distribution’s standard deviation (termed the standard error) and the standard error decreases as sample size increases – knowing that the sample statistic comes from a distribution of known shape means knowing a lot. Armed with this knowledge, a statistician can then estimate the degree of confidence that can be placed in an estimate that the population parameter falls within a particular range of values. Thus does a statistical description of a sample become a generalization to a population: “We can be 95 percent confident that the mean level of anxiety in the population is between 3.7 and 5.2.” Bertrand Russell (1962, pp. 63–64) expressed the paradoxical result: Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error … every observer admits that he is likely to be wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.

A similar inferential process occurs when statistics are compared between two or more groups, or in fact whenever a statistic is used to characterize the relationship between two or more variables. Could the difference in means between two (or more) groups have been due to chance? Could the increasing average income that was observed as the average level of education increased have been a chance association? Tests of significance are used to answer such questions. They proceed in three stages: 1. Specify what a truly random process would produce, such as no divergence between the means of two groups. 2. Calculate a statistic capturing the difference between that result and what was actually obtained (such as a difference of 17.5 between the two groups rather than a difference of 0). 3. Locate the value of the obtained statistic on the sampling distribution for that statistic (given the number of cases and the variability of the sample) and determine how likely it is that the obtained value of the statistic could have diverged as much as it did from the value expected on the basis of chance.

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Seeking to avoid a rush to the conclusion that a difference (i.e., “something”) has been found, quantitative methodologists have settled on a convention that a difference is not considered “statistically significant” unless it is likely to have occurred on the basis of chance no more than 5 times in 100. However, even when used appropriately, inferential statistics cannot support generalizations to populations that have not been sampled – a study of students at one school cannot be generalized with any knowable degree of confidence to all students, nor a sample of residents of one city to all urban residents, or a sample from one nation to all nations. Perhaps the results in such situations are generalizable in the way desired, but that possibility cannot be estimated from the sample results themselves.

New Directions New directions have been required in response to difficulties with some traditional methods of data collection and have been made possible by technological progress. Statistical Inference Stopping with the result of the test of statistical significance is a mistake. To maintain a singular focus on whether an effect exists in the probabilistic sense while ignoring the magnitude of that effect is to neglect substantive results and turn sociology and other social sciences into a “sizeless science”: To cease measuring oomph [or effect size; emphasis added] and its relevant sampling and nonsampling error is to wander off into probability spaces, forgetting – commonly forever – that your interest began in a space of economic or … [sociological] significance. (Ziliak and McCloskey 2008, p. 9)

Growing recognition of the problem of overlooking the strength of relationships in quantitative research has led to more attention to “effect size” statistics – standardized estimates of the amount of change or difference (Lipsey and Wilson 2001). Response Rates New directions are also being charted in the effort to improve survey participation rates. As the percentage of households without internet access continues to drop (it was about 12% of households in North America in 2017), web‐based surveys have become an increasingly attractive alternative to phone and mailed designs (Hewson et  al. 2016; Rainie 2010). The most rigorous web‐based survey method involves samples of respondents who are recruited at the household level without regard to internet access and then provided with a free computer and internet access if they are not already connected (Couper 2000; Heeren et al. 2008). Internet‐based surveys of populations in which internet use is almost universal, such as college students, can also be very successful (Dillman 2007).



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Systematic Reviews A systematic review is a structured approach to summarizing and assessing a body of research on a single or several closely related research question(s). A careful, thorough search process is used to identify the relevant publications and then a structured form is used to code the characteristics and outcomes of each study (Schutt 2019, pp. 44–46). Many published systematic reviews are archived on searchable websites, including www.cochranelibrary.com (health care) and http:// www.campbellcollaboration.org/library.html (social interventions). While a systematic review can reveal the extent of measurement consistency and the strength of evidence in support of causal assertions, another important function is to identify the replicability of key findings across multiple times and places – their cross‐population generalizability.

Causation The central task of science is to explain how the natural world works, and many quantitative methodologists in sociology accept this same causal mandate to guide their research and theorizing. More specifically, quantitative researchers develop and test “nomothetic causal explanations,” in which a common influence is identified on variation in some phenomenon across a number of cases. From this standpoint, a causal effect occurs when variation in an independent variable is followed by variation in a dependent variable, ceteris paribus (all else being equal). Learning how to formulate hypotheses positing causal influences of an independent variable on a dependent variable is an essential part of any sociology research methods course.

The Problem What makes establishing causal effects a challenge – and even an impossibility, from the perspective of some philosophers of science  –  is the stipulation that a causal effect has only been identified when all else that might have caused variation in the phenomenon of interest is equal. This ceteris paribus assumption presumes a counterfactual situation that can only exist hypothetically. Whatever the posited cause of an outcome, the other circumstances associated with its occurrence cannot be replicated in exactly the same place, at exactly the same time, with exactly the same people, but now without that cause being present. Lacking a perfect counterfactual comparison, most quantitative methodologists accept a causal assertion as being justified if the evidence meets three criteria: 1. Association. There must be an association between the presumed cause and effect. 2. Time order. Variation in the presumed cause must occur prior to the variation in its presumed effect 3. Nonspuriousness. The variation in the effect must not be due to some influence other than the presumed cause.

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The extent to which each of these criteria can be met is determined by the research design and the statistical procedures used to analyze data collected with that design.

The Solution Experimental design is widely accepted as the gold standard for meeting the three criteria for confirming a causal effect. In a true experimental design, two (or more) groups are assigned to receive different levels of the independent variable, or hypothesized cause (often treatment compared to no treatment), and after the treatment their scores are measured on the dependent variable of interest. Thus, the criterion of an association between the presumed cause and effect can be achieved. Scores on the dependent variable are measured in the different groups both before and after the treatment, thus allowing determination of whether the criterion of time order has been met. Most importantly, cases are assigned randomly to the two (or more) groups, thus allowing confidence that nothing but chance has influenced the value of the independent variable experienced by each case. This ensures (within a margin of statistical error) that there is no “selection bias” in assignment to the groups, so any association found between the independent variable and the dependent variable is not spurious due to the effect of preexisting differences between the groups. Of course, many sociological hypotheses that involve causal relationships cannot be tested with a true experiment. People cannot be randomly assigned to a race or gender, or to have a specific income or to have been abused as children. In lieu of control for potential sources of spuriousness through experimental design, quantitative methodologists often turn to survey designs and multivariate statistical analyses to reduce the threat of spuriousness. The basic approach is to measure the other variables that could affect the causal relation of interest and then to hold variation in these variables constant while testing the relationship between the independent variable of interest and the dependent variable. Many multivariate statistical techniques can be used for this purpose, with their appropriateness depending on the particular characteristics of the variables and the specific analytic problem. Multiple regression analysis is the most widely used multivariate statistical approach in sociology, and it is the foundation for many more advanced techniques. Propensity score methods is a related quantitative approach for lessening the risk of selection bias in nonexperimental research. An individual’s propensity score is “the conditional probability of being treated given the individual’s covariates” (D’Agostino 1998, p. 2265). The propensity score is calculated for each individual using discriminant analysis or logistic regression to estimate the likelihood that individuals would be in the treatment group or control group based on their characteristics (covariates). Once the propensity scores are calculated, they can be used to equate individuals in the treatment and control groups using techniques such as matching pairs of cases in the two groups or controlling for the propensity scores in a regression analysis. The result can be a closer equivalence of the treatment and control groups than otherwise is obtained, with a concomitant reduction of the risk of spurious conclusions about the treatment effect. However, the propensity score can only take into account potential influences on treatment selection that have been measured, so it is not a substitute for careful design of the original research.



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New Directions As quantitative methods for identifying causal effects, both experimental design and multivariate statistics have been extended with approaches that focus on two additional factors in addition to the three traditional criteria for establishing causality: causal mechanism and causal context. Causal Mechanism Causal mechanism can be defined as the process by which a treatment has its effect on a dependent variable. With respect to experimental research, it is often termed “opening the black box” of the treatment–outcome relationship. For example, reanalysis of qualitative observational data collected in the experimental study by Sherman and Berk (1984) of the police response to domestic violence allowed them to identify how police officers’ interactions with the suspect influenced the extent to which the “treatment” imposed by the police officer (arresting or warning the suspect) changed the suspect’s likelihood of reoffending (Paternoster et al. 1997). Intervening variable is the term used in multivariate statistics for what is called “causal mechanism” in experimental research. In multivariate nonexperimental studies, the effort to identify variables that transmit a causal effect from an independent to a dependent variable can lead to complex causal models in which one or more paths of influence are proposed and then statistically tested. Path analysis apportions correlations between hypothesized causal variables between direct paths that lead to one or more dependent variables and indirect paths through hypothesized intervening variables to those same dependent variables. Structural equation modeling proposes latent variables to capture the shared variation between multiple indicators and then tests the relations between these latent variables (Goldberger and Duncan 1973). Contextual Effects Contextual effects can be evaluated in experimental research by replicating an experiment in diverse contexts. Again, the Sherman and Berk research provides a useful example. In order to determine whether the beneficial effect on recidivism of mandatory arrest in cases of domestic violence occurred in other contexts, the original study in Minneapolis was replicated in five other cities (Sherman 1992). The disparate results obtained made it clear that requiring arrest rather than less severe punishment in domestic violence cases did not have a consistent effect on recidivism. Thus, this variation in police practices could not be understood by itself as a cause of variation in recidivism; other conditions had to be met. Multilevel modeling, or hierarchical linear models, is an increasingly popular multivariate statistical method that takes account of clustering of individuals within groups and improves estimates of effects of context. The primary motivation for multilevel modeling is the realization that individuals who are clustered together in such units as schools, classes, or blocks will tend to be more similar to each other than to individuals in other such clusters. When a random sample of individuals is selected through a multistage process in which first the clusters and then individuals

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within the clusters are randomly sampled, this clustering must be taken into account when calculating significance tests (inferential statistics). If ordinary multiple regression analysis is used to estimate effects with such multilevel samples, the results can be very misleading (Hox 1998). Survey Experiments Survey experiments, also termed factorial surveys, are used increasingly to extend the power of randomized experimental design to surveys involving representative samples. In survey experiments, random segments of the total sample received questions that have different wording, content, or are preceded by different vignettes. For example, Emma McGinty et al. (2015) used a survey experiment to test the hypothesis that persons said to have a mental illness or drug addiction would elicit more positive public attitudes if they were portrayed as successfully treated as compared to those described as untreated and symptomatic. In a survey administered to an online national panel, respondents were randomly assigned to read 1 of 10 vignettes that varied in their descriptions of illness and treatment.

Conclusions Quantitative methods continue to play a central role in sociological research, but without the unfettered adulation of quantification that characterized the Scientific Revolution and much of American sociology in the early to mid‐twentieth century. Increasingly sophisticated approaches have been developed in response to recognition of the limitations of what previously were considered to be adequate solutions to research problems. Recognition of nonhomogeneity of measured units is increasing attention to IRT as a guide in quantitative measurement; the limitations of tests of statistical significance fuel growing attention to effect size statistics; awareness of the inherent ambiguity of causal assertions has resulted in greater attention to causal mechanisms and causal context; evidence of misleading results due to common violations of multivariate statistical assumptions has led to greater use of multilevel modeling and other more sophisticated analytic techniques. The growth and formalization of qualitative research methods and greater acceptance of mixed methods have also infused quantitative methods with greater sensitivity to the importance of inductive research strategies and the potential contribution of in‐depth qualitative data for improving measures and specifying causal influences (Clark and Creswell 2008). Continued growth of the internet and sources of big data, increasingly powerful computational facilities, more sophisticated statistical procedures, and the challenges of investigating an increasingly diverse and interconnected social world will continue to fuel these trends. There is no more hope in the twenty‐first century than there was in the twentieth that quantitative methods in general or statistics in particular will provide the key envisioned by Florence Nightingale to “the plan of God” (McDonald 2003, p. 74), but it is certain that they will continue to enrich sociology’s contributions to understanding the social world.



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4 Qualitative Methods Mitchell Duneier

Within the field of sociology, qualitative methods tend to refer to ethnography, ­interviewing, and historical sociology. Ethnography involves an investigator’s in‐depth immersion in the world of the people he or she studies and delineates a relationship between what people say and what they do. Interviewing – conducted over an extended period or on a one‐shot basis – privileges actors’ subjectivities and definition of the situation. Whereas ethnography and interviewing tend to rely on actors of the present moment, historical sociology mainly focuses on past events using written records contained in archives. These three areas of research sometimes overlap (such as when historical sociologists use oral histories to get their data, or when interviewers live in a community and allow their ethnography to inform their questions), but on the whole they form distinct traditions and have different pivotal agendas. Historical sociologists tend to evaluate work on the basis of its success in making causal explanations on the basis of systematic comparisons. On the other hand, ethnographers and interviewers find that while the subjectivities they gain access to may help them to make valid causal claims, such claims are not the great strength of these methodologies and usually form the weakest parts of otherwise useful qualitative studies. Thus, it may be the case that due to differences in the priority given to causal understanding, historical sociology may be more akin to quantitative sociology, with interviewing and ethnography constituting the core areas of the qualitative tradition that is more distinct from quantitative sociology. Qualitative modes of inquiry emerged in dialog with more quantitative methods as the discipline of sociology made a transformation from being an almost completely theoretical field. From the turn of the nineteenth century to the publication of W. I. Thomas’s (1918–1920) work on Polish immigrants, there was a lot of armchair

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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speculating, and many notions were developed about how the world worked that were not really grounded in a great deal of evidence. But sometime around the 1920s in American sociology, largely at the University of Chicago, there developed a more intense commitment to the idea that these theoretical speculations were not enough, that sociology as a discipline needed to ground its concepts and theories in facts and data. This goal for sociology was represented by two figures who were both professors at the University of Chicago: Robert Park and William Ogburn. Park was an ex‐ newspaper reporter before he became a sociologist. He had studied philosophy in Europe, but he had also worked for the Minneapolis Star. His beliefs about how to make social research more scientific really came from a combination of those backgrounds. He was interested in developing theories, but he wanted those ideas to relate directly to the actual lives of people, and to be based on the careful accumulation of evidence about their lives. He told his students that they needed to get the seat of their pants dirty and wear out their shoes in real research. In other words, he was a believer in shoe leather as a means of discovering the truth. Park thought that the most important thing for a sociologist was to go around the city, into all of the nooks and crannies, and find out what was going on by meeting the people who were the subjects of sociological theories. Following Park’s lead, the University of Chicago’s sociology department used the city as a laboratory. These early sociologists took on roles in the communities to see how they lived, they did interviews with them, and they did a great deal of firsthand observation. Their research reports tended to be highly systematic, well written, and oriented toward improving conditions in the city and the country. At the same time, another prominent sociologist at the University of Chicago in that era was William Ogburn. He did not believe that the future of sociology could lie in shoe leather, in well‐written books, in findings that could not be quantified, or in efforts to influence public policy. He believed that these aspirations were the domains of ethics, religion, journalism, and propaganda. In his 1929 presidential address to the American Sociological Society, he argued that sociology needed to become a science. The goal, he argued, was not “to make the world a better place to live,” or to set forth “impressions of life” or “guiding the ship of state,” but only “discovering new knowledge” (Ogburn 1930). Ogburn wanted sociology to be a much more boring discipline than it was in the work of Park. He wanted it to be a field that would look a lot more like the natural sciences in the way it was presented and the way it was oriented. Whereas Park had clear ideas about what the subject matter of sociology should be – immigration and the life of the city – Ogburn did not. He was much more focused on studying anything that could be measured with numbers. These two figures – Park and Ogburn – coexisted at the University of Chicago for many years, and both of them had a clear vision for what sociology could be. Whereas both were committed to the idea that sociology needed to be a science, this meant different things for each of them. For Park and his students, the up close, personal, emotional, and scientific side of sociology coexisted with the aspiration to develop explanations about the social world. These explanations needed to be in dialog with the experiences of actual living, breathing human beings. The fundamental idea was to find out whether the things that we learn in interacting with people can help improve the dominant sociological theories about them.



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Ever since Park and Ogburn sat at opposite ends of the Chicago department, there has been a danger that the division between qualitative methods and quantitative could be too strongly marked. For many years, there was a division between scholars who were trained in statistics and others who were not; quantitative and qualitative sociologists believed their work was governed by completely different assumptions about how to study the social world. The two kinds of researchers looked with ­suspicion on one another. Within some departments, it was typical for scholars in different camps to persecute one another by holding up promotions or maintaining feuds and alliances that were determined by membership in the qualitative or quantitative camp. Alternatively, it was typical for departments to be strong in one or the other of the approaches. Thus, from 1950 to 1990, the Wisconsin sociology department was known as the premier center for quantitative methods, and departments like the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and San Diego (UCSD) were known for their prowess in qualitative methods. What a difference a few decades make! Today in the field of sociology, almost all students are trained in statistics and those interested in using methods that are not statistics‐based go on to receive additional training. During the 1980s and 1990s, US sociology underwent a sea change such that departments like Santa Barbara became as well known for some of their quantitative research. Thus, William Bielby, a sociologist of labor markets and culture who used statistical methods to study discrimination, served as chair of the UCSB department, and went on to become president of the American Sociological Association. Likewise, during the 1980s and 1990s, the demographers in the Wisconsin department made a conscious decision to diversify their famous quantitative faculty by hiring a number of people known for doing qualitative work. By the end of the first decade of the new century, a conversation analyst, Douglas Maynard, had served as chair at Wisconsin and nobody in US sociology thought that was strange. A context for this transformation was the rise of postmodernism, an intellectual movement that rejected the possibility that “any of us can know an ‘out there,’ a real object of investigation existing apart from the systems of signification through which the world is described and understood” (Smith 1992, p. 498). In studying the social world, postmodernists believed there was no such thing as real facts of life and that the idea of science holding a mirror up to society to show how it works was nothing less than naïve. Science was not merely a way of revealing social relations (including power relations), but also a modality through which power is exercised. The rise of such concerns, particularly those elements that appeared to reduce “the terrain of knowledge and meaning in the social and human sciences” to “pure subjectivity” (Smith 1992, p. 499), may have had the effect of uniting quantitative and qualitative researchers who did not share these concerns as pivotal agenda. Thus, the attack on realism that came from postmodernism tended to make most qualitative and quantitative scholars feel they had something significant in common. A smaller subset of qualitative sociologists who embraced postmodernism remained outside of this consensus and tended not to have access to posts in the leading sociology departments. The result was that the postmodern critique was rendered more peripheral than it was in anthropology, where it came to dominate ethnographic and historical studies. To what extent has the emerging consensus been based on an idea that qualitative and quantitative methods have the same logic of inference? During the 1990s, King,

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Keohane, and Verba laid out this perspective in the influential Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference and Qualitative Research (a book known as KKV), which would go on to become one of the most widely cited methodological statements on qualitative methods. According to these authors, the criteria for good research are the same for either type, and this view has come to be accepted by many researchers (especially quantitative researchers) who found KKV compelling. King, Keohane, and Verba are political scientists, and though their work has been adopted by many sociologists, the concerns of the book are driven by the discipline of political science in which comparative historical work and historical case studies are the core of qualitative work, whereas ethnography and even interviewing are less central. As a result, KKV’s emphasis on causal inference as the dominant agenda of good qualitative research may have greater application in political science than in sociology, where the pivotal agenda of nonhistorical qualitative work is not necessarily the working out of causal mechanisms. There are differences between interviewing and participant observation on the one hand and quantitative sociology on the other. First, the fact of the former’s contact with human subjects means that these methodologies are inherently at risk of being exploitative. Those who work with statistical data rarely have to worry that the people from whom the data are derived will feel manipulated or have a sense that the researcher has benefited at their expense. The subjects of qualitative research frequently live with memories of the way they were treated for years into the future. Part of the scientific imperative of qualitative research is an ethical dimension which quantitative researchers can easily sidestep. Second, there is constant demand on qualitative sociologists to be reflexive about their own social position, such that the grounds of their action are made explicit. While it is likely the case that such attentiveness would be beneficial to quantitative social science, it is not a normal part of quantitative studies. Whereas there is a ­tendency in quantitative studies for authors to let the data “speak for itself,” the tendency in qualitative work is usually the opposite: making sure the lens through which the reality is refracted is made explicit. In a sense, this is one of a number of ways that qualitative researchers meet the demand upon quantitative researchers to be “public about procedures” (King et al. 1994). Third, the possibility of investigator effects is a particular danger of qualitative research. Due to their contact with the subjects of their studies, interviewers and ethnographers must always be concerned about the possibility of bringing about the conditions they are trying to explain. This happens through leading questions, but it also occurs by spending long periods of time with subjects who can engage in behaviors in response to the fieldworker’s presence. It is frequently very difficult for consumers of qualitative research to judge the extent to which this has occurred. Fourth, whereas quantitative research has ways of being clear about uncertainty built into its confidence intervals, qualitative research has no agreed‐upon procedures for achieving such a sense on the part of readers. Although quantitative research is also defined in contrast to qualitative research, the end of the age of conflict between the two styles was accompanied by a widespread belief that research that mixes quantitative and qualitative data has the potential to provide the special kind of understanding that occurs when biases of one method are highlighted and counterbalanced by the biases of a totally different



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method. Yet, this often‐repeated claim tends not to hold true much of the time. All too frequently, when the two kinds of work are mixed, we get the kind of understanding that we would expect when the biases of one method are reinforced by the biases of a very similar method. One typical procedure in such work is for an investigator to begin by using the things learned from large surveys to conduct in‐depth structured interviews with a sub‐sample of the original population, in some cases conducting multiple in‐depth interviews with the very same people. In these interviews, the topics are predetermined on the basis of what is already known from the larger survey, where the topics were, in turn, predetermined on the basis of whatever the investigator thought was important (only in rare instances ethnography). In other words, whereas in the best qualitative research there are many things we don’t know about but are told anyway (Becker 1996), in mixed‐method research of the type described here, the types of things we learn but did not know are of a very restricted kind  –  namely, directly related to the statistical patterns of the larger survey. The procedure becomes one of cherry‐picking quotations from statements by subjects about their personal experiences in order to illustrate the findings. Many quantitative researchers who take this approach think that they are benefiting from qualitative data, but the first question they should ask themselves is whether the materials contain the kind of surprises that are the hallmark of an ethnographic encounter. Whereas the survey researcher or the experimenter has a pretty good idea of the kinds of things he or she will learn about by dint of a questionnaire, the ethnographer who puts him or herself in natural settings is going to be confronted by aspects of social life that he or she didn’t ask about but learns about anyway. The point is that what makes ethnography particularly rigorous is that we do not “insulate” ourselves from data, but, by putting ourselves in the field for long stretches of time, we confront “surprise data, things you didn’t ask about but were told anyway” (Becker 1996). The second question a quantitative researcher using data in this way might ask is: When looking for quotations that support the quantitative findings, what is there in the interviews that the reader is not getting to see? Ethnographers know that if you spend enough time with subjects, they frequently say contradictory things, and what they say is heavily influenced by the questions that they are asked, as well as the stage in their life that they are at. Has the researcher cherry‐picked a statement that illustrates the quantitative finding, whereas later in the interview the subject said something contradictory? Does the researcher know the data well enough to make such a judgment, or was the quotation pulled from the document by a research assistant who was sent on a mission to find the relevant evidence? In collaborative research, was there a division of labor in which qualitative researchers pulled the quotes without all authors seeing the full transcript? With all the pages of interview transcripts generated, did anyone ever get to know the data well enough to understand all the contradictions? It is usually much simpler to find a quote that matches up with a predetermined finding than to depict the complexity that exists within the same groups or individuals. Another important reason that mixed‐method work frequently makes it seem as though the biases of one method are reinforcing the biases of another is that the two methods that get mixed both rely on asking questions. In a sense, they are essentially

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the same. Ethnographers who rely on participant observation share with Oscar Lewis the fundamental concern that “the structured one‐shot interview does not give us some of the kinds of information that we sorely need [in low‐income family research]… Right now… there is a crying need to be aware of – and to try to record and interpret – the complexity, change and variability in [low‐income] family life and organization” (Lewis, quoted in Liebow 1968, p. 9). Within ethnography, for example, by contrast to the interview method, fieldwork seeks to make ghetto domestic life intelligible through observations of residents in the context of their kin‐ and non‐kin‐based networks. In the work of such scholars, unlike those who rely on surveys and interviews, one gets a sense that talk can be cheap, or at least not fully adequate for making valid inferences. By looking at such studies we see what has been lost as interviews have become the dominant form of qualitative evidence in poverty research. In Tally’s Corner, for example, Elliot Liebow regards talk and action as dissimilar units that can only be understood in comparison to one another. His book is a project in comparative sociological explanation, whereby the major strategy is to compare what his subjects say against the wider context of what he has learned about them. He focuses not merely on what they talk about but also on what they don’t say, which topics don’t come up, what kinds of things don’t get referred to in a spontaneous way, and what they won’t admit. He contrasts what people say they want to do against a more realistic appraisal of what is possible in their lives, given their particular abilities. He assesses subjects’ interpretations at a moment in time by looking at how events unfolded later. He is perceptive about the ways that subjects’ explanations for their behavior are public presumptions and common narratives that do not bear on the actual lives of the people who use them. He compares what people say in one conversation against what they say in another. He is sensitive to the way that both boasting and modesty can be self‐serving. He compares declarations of intent against what subjects actually do later on. He speaks with both male and female partners, gauging what his male subjects say about their relationships against the views of their wives and lovers. With the proliferation of ethnographic interviewing today, there is a danger of forgetting how cheap talk can be. Researchers increasingly use interviews to try to discover the reasons that people did things in their lives, to discover motivation. They let their subjects’ attributions of cause and effect stand, as they take explanations of why things happened to them at face value. They write as if there is a clear correspondence between confident statements by subjects and reality, rather than understanding how what their subjects tell them are actually public poses, public displays, or public ­fictions. These interview studies are usually based on anywhere from a dozen to a couple of hundred respondents. Investigators tend to use the data to tell readers the specific or rough percentage of people who characterize their experiences in a particular way. Treating data in such a manner would be appropriate if it were generated by a simple random sample from a well‐defined population. Yet, respondents in these interview‐based studies are almost always chosen through snowball samples. Nor are scholars who employ these contemporary approaches to qualitative work able to take the time to follow individuals in their networks, groups, and communities. There have, of course, been some real achievements with interviews. Here I think of the work of Kathryn Edin, who asked welfare and working mothers the basic



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question, “How much money do you spend in an average month on different goods and services, and how do you pay your bills?” (Edin and Lein 1997). Piecing the story together took considerable shoe leather, including many interviews spread over several months, and eventually her subjects provided budgets that more or less balanced, showing that none lived on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) alone, and that none reported all of their income to the welfare department, findings consistent with Carol Stack’s earlier observation to that effect (Stack 1974). But despite such outstanding exceptions, I believe that the kind of depth we saw in the studies of Liebow and Stack is getting lost in contemporary poverty research. As Edin and Lein wrote in Making Ends Meet, it is possible that because they observed the behavior of mothers at a point in time, they found little of the mutual exchange between kin that Stack did. “Had we been able to follow mothers over time, we might have seen some of our mothers move into a position to help others in their network” (Edin and Lein 1997). Instead of trying to use interviews to illustrate central tendencies with ethnographic data, quantitative researchers should be more open to finding the evidence that points out the biases inherent in their quantitative work. This will lead to moving away from the interview in mixed‐method work and to highlighting the ways in which people speak against the main perspectives identified by the survey. Such information is very valuable, not only if it adds up to represent a significant number of people but also because all neighborhoods and communities are constituted of relations between the different kinds of people. The goal should be to place perspectives in a context by illuminating connections between various elements or kinds of people in a community or setting. Likewise, another goal of good ethnographic work is not to simply report what people say but to highlight the connection between what people say and what they do, and demonstrating the relationship between how subjects define situations and what they take for granted. Much mixed method work takes the statements of subjects at face value rather than evaluating what they say against what they do. An interesting juxtaposition of observational and interview data on the same topic can be found in a recent study by Cherlin et al. (2008). They conducted longitudinal interviews and observations of a sample included in a larger survey and demonstrated that over time more respondents were in marital and cohabiting relationships than said they were, and many said they were not interested in having romantic relationships, even though it turned out they were involved in a wide variety of relations, which would not have been detected from the answers to the interviews. In Cherlin et al.’s mixed methods, the methods really were different (observation and interviewing), so the biases of one method did not end up reinforcing the biases of the other. Carol Stack’s All Our Kin (1974) provides an early model of mixed method research because she constantly kept her eye on the importance of using her qualitative data to provide a better context for the quantitative data. The research for All Our Kin was conducted only after a review of the AFDC case files for the county she studied, enabling her to determine the typical patterns before she chose Ruby Banks as her key subject. Yet, Stack did not begin by assuming that the quantitative data could tell the whole story. She described a phenomenon whereby children end up living with adults who are not their biological parents, showing the ways that close kin cooperate in childcare and domestic activities. Stack reveals how

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the processes that determine where children live are not random, but “the outcome of calculated exchanges of goods and services between kinsmen” (1974, p. 67). She begins by looking at the data from the program on AFDC, which shows how common fosterage is and suggests that 20% of dependent children live with a woman other than their mother. She goes on to show that these statistics are “much lower than actual instances,” as her research shows “disagreement between the record and the actual residency patterns… In the process of switching the residence of children, mothers, or grantees rarely report these residence changes to the welfare office” (1974, p. 68). Based on her observations and detailed life histories of adults and children, Stack estimates that at least one‐third of children have been kept by family members other than their mothers once or twice during their childhood. In and of itself, this would have been interesting, but Stack takes it one step further. If one goes by data alone, the assumption might be that these dispersed children are not actually living with their biological mother. Stack uses ethnography as a tool to uncover the underlying patterns which show with whom the children are actually living. Her field observations demonstrated that of 139 dependent children who were reassigned to a grantee other than their mother, about half of those children’s mothers resided in the same home as their children. Many of these mothers were teenagers when their first child was born, and their own mother (the child’s grandmother) was the welfare grantee for purposes of receiving benefits from public aid. Stack creates several dialogs between numbers and patterns on the ground. When she observed that children were cared for or informally fostered by their father’s mother or sisters (a pattern in contrast to stereotypes of the commitment of fathers and fathers’ families to their children), she returned to the county AFDC data once again. She discovered that when mothers were officially asked by the welfare agency who they would want to raise their child in the event of their own death, more than a quarter named the child’s father’s kin, rather than their own. This observation disrupts the characterization of urban black families as uniformly matrifocal in that “both a child’s mother’s and father’s socially recognized kinsmen are expected to assume parental rights and duties” (Stack 1974, p. 73). Today in the study of poverty, all too often the essential function of qualitative data is to serve or assist quantitative studies by putting a human face on the numbers produced by economists and demographers, or else qualitative data is seen as most useful when it is shown to be typical or representative of larger macro‐level trends or populations. While Stack frequently uses quantitative data to place her ethnographic findings in the proper context, she is also sensitive to the “confusion that can arise when statistical data is interpreted out of context” (1974, p. 71). As she shows, ethnography has the possibility of unearthing culturally meaningful questions that can inform the ways in which surveys ask questions, and can give meaning when relevant to quantitative findings.

References Becker, H.S. (1996). The epistemology of qualitative research. In: Ethnography and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry (ed. R. Jessor, A. Colby and R. Shweder), 53–71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Cherlin, A., Cross‐Barnet, C., Burton, L., and Garrett‐Peters, R. (2008). Promises they can keep: low income women’s attitudes toward marriage and motherhood. Journal of Marriage and Family 70 (4): 919–933. Edin, K. and Lein, L. (1997). Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low‐Wage Work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. King, G., Keohane, R., and Verba, S. (1994). Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference and Qualitative Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Liebow, E. (1968). Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. Boston: Little, Brown. Ogburn, W.F. (1930). The Folkways of a Scientific Sociology. The Scientific Monthly 30 (4): 300–306. Smith, M.P. (1992). Postmodernism, urban ethnography, and the new social space of ethnic identity. Theory and Society 21 (4): 493–531. Stack, C. (1974). All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row. Thomas, W.I. (1918–1920). The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group, Vol. 1, Primary‐Group Organization (1918). Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Vol. 2, Primary‐Group Organization (1918). Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Vol. 3, Life Record of an Immigrant (1919). Boston: Badger; Vol. 4, Disorganization and Reorganization in Poland (1920). Boston: Badger; Vol. 5, Organization and Disorganization in America (1920). Boston: Badger.

Part II Basic Topics

5 Action, Interaction, and Groups Kimberly B. Rogers and Lynn Smith‐Lovin

People have a natural tendency to sort the social world into categories (Allport 1954). Schema‐based processing contributes to the fluidity of perception, simplifies interpretations of others’ behavior, and prompts accurate and coordinated action, while minimizing the expenditure of cognitive resources (Barresi and Moore 1996). Recent studies suggest that cognitive responses to the social world are primarily determined by situational factors beyond our awareness rather than the intentional choices we make, as the human capacity for conscious self‐regulation is surprisingly limited (Bargh and Chartrand 1999). Because people respond to self and other as members of social categories and carry category‐based expectations for behavior, identity is a core concept in understanding action, interaction, and group processes. Sociologists use the term identity to refer to the many meanings attached to a person, both by the self and by others. The concept embraces structural features like group affiliations, role occupancy, and category memberships as well as character traits that individuals display or that others attribute to them (Smith‐Lovin 2007). While research on identity was historically isolated from studies of social structure and groups, more recent research has produced cross‐ fertilization between a structural symbolic interaction and group processes. Rather than providing an encyclopedic review of sociological social psychology, this chapter will concentrate on developments in two areas where major advances have come in the past four decades, and where controversies still brew: (i) the control theories of social interaction, which have revolutionized the symbolic interactionist tradition, and (ii) studies of the impact of group structures on the development of meaning, commitment, and group identity. In recent years, new mathematical models of identity and self have developed that represent the uncertainty of meaning that can permeate some interactions. We will end with this exciting new work.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Meaning and Emotion in Social Interaction The symbolic interactionist tradition in sociology has at its root three principles: 1. People act toward things, including each other, on the basis of the meanings that those things hold for them. 2. The primary source of these meanings is social interaction. 3. Meanings are managed and transformed through an interpretative process (McCall 2018; Snow 2001). The fundamental conception of the actor is that of a meaning‐creator, who actively works to interpret what is happening around him or her in terms of meanings accrued from past interactions, and who actively generates new lines of action to maintain a coherent, meaningful view of self and others. Historically a heavily cognitive perspective, symbolic interaction has turned its eye toward affective meaning and emotion in the past 25 years (MacKinnon 1994). There has historically been some tension between two types of symbolic interactionists: those who focus on the creative, actively negotiated process through which people make their identities within social interaction and those who emphasize the extent to which people’s identities are shaped by the social structures in which they live (see McCall 2018; Snow 2001 and Stryker 1980, 2008 for overviews). In recent years, theoretical thinking in the latter camp  –  often called structural symbolic interactionism – has been dominated by a control system model that makes it much more dynamic, creative, and processual. This theoretical advance has generated some convergence in the two symbolic interactionist frameworks. Currently, most research in this domain draws on two closely related models: affect control theory and identity theory.

Affect Control Theory David Heise (1979) initially developed a control system view of social i­ nteraction, borrowing a conceptual model from engineering and measurement technology from psychology. His affect control theory represented a major sociological development by offering insight into the processes by which culturally acquired meanings are maintained over time through social interaction (Heise 1979, 2007; MacKinnon 1994; MacKinnon and Heise 2010; Robinson and Smith‐Lovin 2018; Smith‐Lovin and Heise 1988). In keeping with much structural symbolic interactionist theory (e.g. McCall and Simmons 1966; Stryker 1980), affect ­control theory holds that “the structural features of society are translated into interactional settings through widely shared cultural beliefs and meanings” referred to as fundamental sentiments (Ridgeway and Smith‐Lovin 1994, p. 220). Sentiments about identities and actions remain stable over long periods of time, but are not always confirmed in social interaction – the transient impressions generated within an interaction may or may not align with fundamental ­meanings (Heise 1979, 2007; Rogers 2018). Instead, the two sets of social meanings – stable, culturally held sentiments and transient, situated impressions  –  relate to one another through a cybernetic control process.



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Fundamental sentiments act as a social reference point. People engaged in social interaction compare them to transitory, situational impressions regarding self‐identities, social actions, and the identities of others involved in social events. In affect control theory, fundamental sentiments are compared to transient impressions on the basis of three affective dimensions (e.g. Heise 2007; Osgood 1962; Osgood et al. 1975): evaluation (good‐bad), potency (strong‐weak), and activity (lively‐quiet). For example, a woman who sees herself as a mother interacting with a daughter will do things that maintain the good, powerful, and lively meanings associated with the mother identity, and will expect her daughter to do things that maintain her child’s somewhat less potent but livelier identity. If events do not unfold in ways that support these sentiments, an interactant will experience deflection, conceptualized as a shift on the three dimensions, and will respond emotionally to this deflection in predictable ways (Heise 2007). In other words, deflection is produced when a person’s definition of the situation is not upheld – when culturally acquired sentiments toward the actors, behaviors, and objects in a given interaction are disconfirmed (Smith‐Lovin and Heise 1988). Emotional response provides a visceral signal of the discrepancy and its direction of disconfirmation. People commonly behave to bring fundamental sentiments and transient impressions from a social situation back into line with one another, regardless of whether the emotional consequences of deflection are positive or negative on any of the three dimensions (Heise 1979, 2007; Robinson and Smith‐Lovin 1992, 2006; Rogers et al. 2014). For instance, a mother who has just been appreciated by her daughter would be likely to feel relieved and merely supervise her child in a second interaction, while a mother who has just been ignored might instead feel apprehensive and discipline her child. The earlier interaction would result in a daughter that is relaxed, and the latter a daughter who is tense, but both place her back into a less‐powerful role position. Alternatively, people will avoid situations likely to be deflecting (Robinson and Smith‐ Lovin 1992), or seek to prevent deflection by controlling the definition of the situation through means such as self‐presentation (Goffman 1959; Hochschild 1979; Smith‐ Lovin and Heise 1988). Thus, behavioral control is a mechanism that functions to  maintain congruency between fundamental (“ought”) and transient (“actual”) affective meanings, through the maintenance or restoration of cultural standards. Based on extensive empirical research (e.g. Heise 2007; Rogers 2018; Smith‐Lovin and Heise 1988), affect control theorists have developed structural equations to predict how social interaction will change meanings. These models use simple event descriptions (an Actor Behaves toward an Object Person) as the unit of analysis. They predict three‐number numerical values (representing evaluation, potency, and activity) that describe the transient impressions formed from the event about all three event elements – the Actor, Behavior, and Object (Heise 1991, 2007; Smith‐Lovin and Heise 1982). They also allow mathematical operationalization of the theory’s control assumptions (as the minimization of the squared difference between the fundamental and transient meanings). The theory’s formal, mathematical structure allows use of the program INTERACT (Heise 2007) to simulate social interaction according to the affect control model (Heise 1979, 2007). For instance, in American culture (using sentiments collected in Indiana in 2003–2004), the identity manager has an EPA value of (0.98, 1.57, 1.34), implying that managers are seen as somewhat good (0.98) and quite powerful (1.57) and

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active (1.34). Behaviors seen as fitting to a manager, such as supervising (1.30, 1.30, 1.14) or transacting business (1.56, 1.39, 1.25), share comparable EPA profiles to the identity itself. The identity receptionist (1.00, 0.37, 0.16), on the other hand, is seen as somewhat good (1.00), but fairly neutral in power (0.37) and activity (0.16). Such a person is expected to engage in fairly passive behaviors like requesting something (0.51, −0.08, −0.05) or concurring (1.27, 1.06, 0.34). Given their similarity in evaluation and discrepancy in power and activity, a common interaction between two people carrying the identities manager and receptionist would involve events like manager supervises receptionist or receptionist requests something from manager. Such interactions produce low levels of deflection, and result in structural emotions that have an affective character similar to that of the identity profiles. There are several important ways in which affect control theory represents a major advance over earlier symbolic interactionist formulations. The model focuses explicitly on the relational context of interaction, with events (an actor‐behavior‐ object combination) rather than individuals as the unit of analysis. The use of a standard set of meaning dimensions (evaluation, potency, and activity) allows cultural sentiments for all types of social entities (actors, behaviors, emotions, traits, social settings) to be characterized within the same system. Using an impression formation paradigm from psychology, the theory specifies how the elements of a situation combine to form a situation‐specific meaning. That situated meaning is then compared to fundamental sentiments to ascertain how well events are maintaining meanings. Most importantly, the control view of the relationship between role‐identity and social action represents the extraordinary flexibility of actors’ application of cultural information as they move through varying situations. Role occupants do not follow a simple, static script of role expectations for a particular interaction partner. Their behavior is powerfully shaped by the events that occur and their interpretation of them. A final insight from affect control theory is the sense in which cognition and affect are intertwined inexorably. One can neither process an interpersonal situation cognitively without responding to it affectively, nor is emotion likely to occur in any but the simplest stimulus–response modes without the active work of defining the situation.

Identity Theory Burke (1991) later developed an alternative control model as part of Stryker’s identity theory (see a recent summary in Burke and Stets 2009). Much like affect control theory, Burke’s approach views behavioral choice as a mechanism by which situationally generated meanings (inputs) are kept in line with broader self‐sentiments for a particular identity (the identity standard). A process called the comparator evaluates the discrepancy between input and standard, and (as with affect control theory’s deflection) behavioral responses are selected to reduce the difference. Thus, the control system mechanism at the foundation of identity theory shares many ­ ­commonalities with processes described by affect control theory. However, the two theories can be distinguished on the basis of three key differences: the measurement of meaning, the location of the reference standard, and the predicted valence of ­emotion. Each of these differences will be discussed in turn.



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First, Burke’s theory employs a more intricate, role‐specific method of measuring meaning. Rather than using common dimensions to interpret all identities, behaviors, and settings under study, identity theorists select a set of dimensions that ­predict the majority of variation in meaning within the given institution. These dimensions are derived through discriminant function analysis, which identifies the set of adjectives that most clearly differentiate the groups under study within the sample population (Burke and Tully 1977). For instance, the student identity has been measured on dimensions like academic responsibility, intellectual curiosity, sociability, and personal assertiveness (Reitzes and Burke 1980), while the feminine identity has been measured on dimensions like noncompetitiveness, passivity, and ease of having feelings hurt (Burke and Cast 1997). While this approach can provide greater specificity within a given social context, it limits comparisons of meaning across role domains. Second, identity theory focuses on meaning processes operating at the level of the individual actor. Theorists view the behavioral outputs of a given situation as the direct result of a process that compares situational feedback with self‐meanings, seeking to minimize dissonance and ultimately social stress (Burke 1991; Burke and Stets 2007). However, the maintenance of one’s own identity is of primary significance, and the identities of others are of concern only to the extent that they impact self‐meanings. In contrast, meaning maintenance in affect control theory is thought to operate across all elements of a situation, including the identities of others and the meanings of actions or even behavioral settings. Although affect control theorists also view people as motivated to verify their self‐identities, the control system primarily functions to maintain a stable definition of the situation. As a result, the behavioral choices of each member of a given interaction are part of control system functioning to maintain a stable situation, given that actors come from the same culture and share an institutional definition for the situation. The third difference between the two control models is in their view of emotion (see Robinson and Smith‐Lovin [2006] for a more complete discussion). According to affect control theory, emotions can signal deflections above or below the reference standard. While people are predicted to act in ways that bring situated meanings back into line with reference signals across interactions, people may feel more or less good, potent, or lively if their immediate experiences deflect them upward or downward on one or more of the three affective dimensions. Thus, an employee who receives an unexpectedly good performance evaluation might feel “high as a kite,” whereas an employee receiving an unexpectedly bad one may feel “down in the dumps.” In contrast, failure to confirm meanings in identity theory is always assumed to produce negative emotions or distress, regardless of whether the disconfirmation is positive or negative (Burke and Stets 1999, 2009).

Empirical Tests of the Control Theories Researchers have tested the control theories successfully using a wide array of experimental, survey, and qualitative methods (see reviews in Robinson and Smith‐Lovin 2018 and Burke and Stets [2009]). Experimental research suggests that affect control theory does a good job of predicting the emotions of actors and the recipients of

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actions, as well as the behavioral outcomes of interaction. For instance, predictions about behaviors generated from the sentiments of members of a religious group have demonstrated general congruence with group members’ predicted event likelihoods (Smith‐Lovin and Douglass 1992). Experiments have also confirmed the counterintuitive prediction that self‐verification motives hold up for negative identities; people will choose to interact with others who confirm a negative self‐identity even when the alternative interaction partner evaluates them more positively than they evaluate themselves (Robinson and Smith‐Lovin 1992). Burke and his colleagues have tested their control theory extensively using a three‐year study of newly married couples in Washington state. This research demonstrates that gender identities, personal identities about control, and parental/ spousal identities are quite stable over time and across a variety of situations. This stability is associated with self‐verification processes as well as structural anchors like biological sex (Burke and Cast 1997). For marriages in which the spousal identity is not verified, dysfunction is introduced into partners’ patterns of interaction and the stability of both self‐meanings and the relationship structure is placed at risk (Stets and Burke 2005). Another study confirms that control system processes function to maintain the structural arrangements within which they operate. Spouses with lower status tend to defer to judgments made about them by spouses of higher status, measured by occupational status and years of education (Cast et al. 1999). Cast (2003) demonstrated that power within a relationship affects one’s ability to maintain self‐meanings. With regard to the theories’ discrepant predictions on emotion, research findings generally support the expectations of affect control theory. Positive identity deflection produces higher levels of positive emotion and lower levels of negative emotion than feedback in congruence with the reference standard (Robinson and Smith‐Lovin 1992; Stets 2005, 2006). Only in long‐term marital relationships do we see that lack of identity verification in a positive direction causes stress and mental distress (Burke and Harrod 2005), supporting identity theory’s emotion predictions (but see also Stets and Burke 2014 for an reanalysis of several studies that they argue supports their theory). Clay‐Warner et al. (2016) investigated the emotional and behavioral implications of receiving overly positive feedback in situations where this feedback is positive relative to a cultural reference standard (what “people like you usually get”) or when the feedback directly affects another group member (who will be informed of the feedback and its effects are zero‐sum). They found that positive feedback relative to a cultural expectation resulted in positive emotion, as affect control theory would predict. When an interaction partner was hurt by the positive evaluation, however, emotion was more negative. Perhaps in these situations, the labeling of the situation is dominated by the damage to the interaction partner, rather than the reward itself. In a recent paper, Stets and Burke (2014) analyze several studies (many of which focus on moral identity), and conclude that both direction of meaning deflection and overall discrepancy influence emotion, with the latter predominating. Other new research focuses on the enactment of multiple identities. These studies deal with the salience of identities within a relatively stable self‐structure (Stryker 1980, 2008) and the parallel processing of multiple identities that may be evoked within a single situation (Burke and Stets 2009; Smith‐Lovin 2007). MacKinnon and



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Heise (2010) have incorporated a model of self‐hierarchy into the affect control model, to demonstrate how people integrate multiple identities and yet maintain a fundamental self‐image. We now turn to a discussion of this exciting new work.

Multiple Identities Structural symbolic interactionists tend to conceive of the self as comprising multiple identities that are organized hierarchically according to their prominence or salience among all the identities activated as people move through various social situations (McCall and Simmons 1978; Stryker 1980). Identity salience hierarchies are generally stable over time (Serpe 1987); even when placed into new settings people seek out relationships that preserve the preeminence of highly salient identities (Serpe and Stryker 1987). However, identities carry a strong structural component. A person’s position in the social structure, institutional setting, or life course can all contribute to the identity that is engaged in a social encounter. The simultaneous enactment of multiple identities can have varying consequences. In many situations, the specific identity by which a person is recognized entails other, more generalist identities; for instance, being a neurosurgeon also implies one’s identity as a physician (MacKinnon and Heise 2010). In cases like this, the engagement of multiple identities can be cooperative; roles with shared meanings are likely to be engaged simultaneously, and pose no real threat to identity verification − they may even enhance the likelihood of mutual confirmation (Burke and Stets 2009). Often, such identities are a salient part of the self, meaning they are more readily activated in a diverse array of situations (Deaux 1992). In fact, research suggests that identities routinely activated together are likely to increase in salience (Burke and Stets 2009) and to acquire shared meanings, even for identities with meanings that would otherwise be unrelated (Burke 2003). These mechanisms function to maintain our sense of a uniform self. In other instances, the identities engaged in a particular situation may be at odds, and confirmation of one identity may occur at the expense of another. To understand this phenomenon, theorists have looked at the effects of a changing social structure on the structure of the self. As patterns of affiliation and social engagement become more diversified, selves have generally become more complex and less stable (Smith‐ Lovin 2007). Individuals more frequently find themselves to be bridging ties between otherwise nonoverlapping social groups (McPherson 2000; Pescosolido and Rubin 2000), performing distinct roles in different social contexts (MacKinnon and Heise 2010). Accordingly, the self has come to incorporate a variety of role identities, though the prevalence of complex selves and the situational likelihood of multiple‐ identity enactment are thought to vary considerably across the social structure. For instance, due to an increased likelihood of affiliating with out‐group alters, high‐ status social actors (Lin 2001) and members of social categories that are numerically small (Blau 1977) are more likely to experience a complex, differentiated self than their lower status, majority group counterparts (Smith‐Lovin 2007). Researchers have also begun to consider how the identity verification process might operate when identities with divergent meanings are enacted simultaneously. Identity salience and commitment have been identified as significant factors in

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­ etermining which identities are likely to take precedence (Burke and Stets 2009). d Identity salience refers to the probability that a given identity will be invoked and shape behavior across a wide variety of social situations, while commitment is the degree to which membership in certain networks is contingent on identity performance (Stryker and Burke 2000). Commitment, through its association with our social relationships, influences the salience of an identity and, accordingly, our enactment of certain identities more than others. For example, commitment to relationships based on religion predicts the salience of religious identities, which in turn predicts the amount of time spent in religious identities (Stryker and Serpe 1982). Research suggests that people are likely to engage in behavior that supports identities to which they are highly committed (Burke and Reitzes 1991). Activated simultaneously, meanings for the identity highest in salience and commitment should shift the least, while meanings for identities lower in salience and commitment would be expected to shift more. Burke and Stets (2009) offer an example: A child has her friends over for a visit, and her parents are also present for the interaction. While the daughter identity implies a certain amount of weakness or naiveté, the friend identity entails somewhat more power and sophistication. Since these identities carry distinct meanings, only one can be successfully verified in a given interaction; commitment is one indicator of which identity is most likely to be verified. The association of certain identities with one’s position in the social structure (Stryker 1980) is another key predictor of selective verification, as the disconfirmation of structural identities can lead to distress from role conflict or status inconsistency (Burke and Stets 2009). When salient and distinct identities to which people are highly committed are simultaneously enacted, verification of one identity is likely to result in deflection on others, and to the experience of mixed emotions (Smith‐Lovin 2007). When this occurs routinely, people tend to make one of two behavioral choices. First, re‐identification of the self can allow for an alternative labelling of the situation. If one can apply an alternate label to one of the conflicting identities that reduces the difference in meaning, deflection could be minimized. Second, modifying the social situation offers two potential alternatives to conflicting identity enactments. If actors are able to maintain separate social networks for the conflicting identities, they are likely to avoid the identities’ simultaneous engagement and, thus, conflicts in identity verification. Alternatively, if actors are able to surround themselves with a set of individuals that hold non‐normative but more compatible meanings for the two identity sets, they can sustain modified identity beliefs in which meanings do not conflict. For example, qualitative data from two church congregations demonstrated how gay Christians created new identities and rituals to generate positive emotions and thwart identity conflicts in a religious context; more traditional identity meanings for homosexual and religious identities would have generated negative emotion (Smith‐Lovin and Douglass 1992).

Social Structural Influences on Meaning Another active area of study links affective meaning to the interactional structures in which people are embedded. It is a core tenet of symbolic interactionism that meanings develop through social interaction (Snow 2001; Stryker 2008), but theorists



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have seldom accepted the challenge of identifying the process by which this occurs. Network analysis and other conceptual innovations have only recently given theorists considerable traction on the problem. Noah Friedkin’s network theory of social influence explored how consensus of opinion is reached within networks containing an array of initial opinions and varying amounts of social influence and susceptibility to this influence (Friedkin 2005). Researchers in this tradition propose that norm formation occurs as members of a given network seek to cognitively integrate a set of disparate opinions, using a  weighted average of influential views to reach consensus through the iterative ­revision of attitudes (Friedkin 2001). According to Friedkin (2005), social influence is determined by interpersonal visibility and salience. While the social precondition of visibility is met when one actor has some information about another, numerous conditions are contingent on persons’ salience, including status characteristics and the social power drawn from one’s network position (Friedkin 1993; Friedkin and Johnsen 2003). As demonstrated by research on expectation states, group members who are accorded high status commonly have this status legitimated within interaction (Berger 1988; Berger et al. 1972). High‐status group members are often given greater time and attention by the group and tend to receive deference and support for their ideas (Berger et al. 1980; Gould 2002), rendering them more influential than low‐status members. Thus, over the course of multiple interactions, interpersonal sentiments contribute to the weighting of group members’ opinions, such that group consensus disproportionately represents the initial views of highly influential members (Friedkin and Johnsen 2003). In short, research on social influence networks indicates that flows of interpersonal influence within social networks affect network members’ opinions on a variety of issues (Friedkin and Johnsen 1999). Beyond preexisting group norms, decision rules, and the persuasiveness of group members’ arguments, the perceived salience of a social contact affects the degree to which a person’s opinion contributes to group consensus (Friedkin 1999). Influential actors’ attitudes, preferences, and  behavior all contribute to symbolic interaction within networks, shaping the attitudes and behavior of their less influential contacts (Friedkin 2010). Research by Rogers (2015) combines theories of social influence and affect control to explore the mechanisms through which social influence occurs in interaction. This research examines group consensus following a deliberation task, as well as changes in affective meanings for a set of identities relevant to the discussion issue. People modify not only their opinions but also their identity sentiments on the basis of influential others’ responses to the actors, behaviors, and objects in a given social situation. In another research paradigm, an exploratory study by Thomas and Heise (1995) identified clustering in sentiments toward certain social identities (using the evaluation, potency, and activity dimensions of affect control theory). Post hoc interviews led the researchers to hypothesize that both the extensiveness and stability of a person’s social ties are potential predictors of their identity and emotion meanings. These expectations were tested more systematically by Rogers (2018), who explored whether social position and connectedness predict subcultural clustering in affective meaning. She found that race, social position in networks, and family/romantic ­relationship patterns affected variation in cultural meanings.

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Group Processes and the Development of Meaning Historically, the group processes tradition within sociological social psychology has concentrated on instrumental action within group structures. Research has focused on how status and power develop within groups. Usually, there is a scope condition that group members are trying to maximize their outcomes. In fact, most of group processes theory has its roots in the exchange traditions of Homans and Emerson. Here, rather than attempting a comprehensive review (see Cook et al. [2018] and Correll and Ridgeway [2006] for such a review), we focus on the aspects of group processes that operate to create categorizations, identities, and meaning. It is this work that connects the group processes tradition with the structural symbolic interactionist work already described.

Expectation States Theory as an Identity Theory One major research tradition spawned by the early exchange theorists is expectation states theory. Influenced by Homans’s exchange theory (1961) and by Bales’ (1950) observations of behavior in small task groups, Joseph Berger and his colleagues (Berger et al. 1974) proposed a theory to explain how observable status hierarchies develop within groups. Research in expectation states suggests why a large number of group behaviors like talking, being spoken to, evaluating the ideas of others, and receiving positive evaluations from others all tend to occur together in a power and prestige order. Under certain scope conditions – a collective task orientation where all group members stand to gain from better performance on a group enterprise – i­nequalities in task‐related behaviors develop out of group members’ expectations about the value of their own and others’ contributions to the group task. The exchange process occurs as deference is granted to group members in exchange for the recipient engaging in behaviors that produce rewards for the other group members. Performance expectations are the central concept in the theory. Group members form expectations about others’ relative capabilities to contribute to task completion, then give or take requests for assistance (action opportunities) and opportunities to engage in task‐related behavior (performance outputs) to produce the best group outcome. In spite of the fact that expectations are formed by individuals, the interactional encounter is the unit of analysis in the theory. In expectation states theory, it is the comparison of expectations for two group members that allows the prediction of the behavior that they will engage in vis‐à‐vis one another. Status is a relational concept rather than an individual characteristic. Performance expectations can arise from several sources. In a group of highly similar people, behavioral cues early in the interaction can be crucial (Fişek et al. 1991). People who engage in positive task behaviors and seize early action opportunities generate high performance expectations. In groups of people who are different in some culturally important way, status characteristics valued in society at large are often used to differentiate group members. When people differ on an evaluated characteristic, the characteristic becomes salient in forming performance expectations. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, the group member carrying the more valued status characteristic will be presumed by group members to have higher competence at the group task than someone with a less valued status.



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Berger and his colleagues isolate status processes from other small group dynamics by using a standardized experimental setting, within which a subject interacts with a simulated actor, and both make judgments about an ambiguous stimulus while motivated to be accurate. Individual judgments are then reported back to the subject, who is given a chance to change his or her decision if the two disagree. The proportion of “stay” responses – sticking with one’s own opinion in the face of disagreement from the simulated other – is the key dependent variable. Independent variables typically include characteristics like gender, race, ethnicity, personal attractiveness, or education that are evaluated in our society and are assigned to the simulated actor in order to produce status advantage or disadvantage for the subject. Importantly, status characteristics (e.g., being male as opposed to female) are not seen as directly determining task behavior. Instead, the theory predicts that these characteristics will determine the power and prestige order only when they differentiate group members and are linked to expectations about the task in particular ways. For example, men are generally presumed in our society to be more competent than women, but this has only an indirect link to a nongendered task. If the task is male‐stereotypic, the link could be stronger; if it is female‐stereotypic, the link could be reversed in direction, with women receiving higher performance expectations. Researchers have devoted many studies to exploring how different types of information combine to form performance expectations (see review in Correll and Ridgeway 2006). Expectations states theory has been very successful in applied research as well. A  number of experiments demonstrate how initial status differences, imported from the external societal structure, can be reduced or eliminated by employing interventions that shape group members’ expectations. Elizabeth Cohen (1982), for example, showed how group tasks and strategic interventions can help racial minorities become more active in school settings. Others have demonstrated how gender inequalities can be reduced or reversed (Wagner et  al. 1986). Additional studies have moved from the rigorously controlled standardized experiment to the  analysis of small group interaction. For example, Cathy Johnson (1993) has  explored how being assigned to a managerial or worker role in a simulated work environment influences conversational behaviors like interruption and suggesting ideas. Event history methods have enabled researchers to determine how information  imported from outside status structures combines with information that unfolds as the group interacts to form a cumulating status structure (Skvoretz and Fararo  1996). Recent research has increasingly employed expectation states theory outside of its scope conditions, demonstrating that in some cases cooperative, task‐oriented behavior is not a precondition to the predictive capacities of the theory. For example, Cast and colleagues suggest that higher‐status group members garner more influence even for groups with a long history of interaction across a variety of contexts (e.g., marriage partners), and for expectation judgments about self rather than task alone (Cast et al. 1999). Thus, in modern incarnations, with the exchange foundations of the theory removed, expectation states theory is often treated as a situational i­ dentity theory. In this context, expectation states are the meanings associated with an actor in a group setting, and the status that actor is accorded is a situated identity (Freeland and Hoey 2018; Ridgeway and Smith‐Lovin 1994).

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Status Value Theory An even more direct example of how group processes can create identity meaning is Ridgeway’s (1991) theory of status value. Ridgeway asked the question: How do nominal characteristics (social categories like male/female, young/old, black/white) acquire consensual status value (evaluative connotation or expectations of competence) in society? Using expectation states theory logic, she argued that if a nominal characteristic is correlated initially with some material resource, interactions between people who differ on both resource levels and the nominal characteristic will lead to inferences about performance that will eventually diffuse through the society, thereby creating status value for the nominal categories. Theoretical work by Mark et al. (2009) indicates that, in small societies, a correlation between resources and nominal characteristics is not necessary for the creation of status value. Random differential performance is sufficient to create status value that then can diffuse through the system. This result makes it more difficult to explain why everything does not become a status characteristic than to explain why identifiable characteristics become consensually evaluated in society.

Social Exchange, Affect, and the Creation of Meaning While research on social exchange and identity proceeded without much cross‐­ fertilization for many years, several research streams have recently developed to examine how instrumental exchanges affect emotional outcomes, leading to the formation of commitment and group identity formation. The oldest and most developed stream focuses on how perceptions of justice, equity, or fairness develop from exchange interactions (see review in Lawler 2018). Indeed, this was a central concern of the original exchange theorists – Homans, Blau, and Emerson. Not surprisingly, people feel they have been unjustly treated and express anger when their rewards are lower than their investments. However, past reward experiences, status structures, power structures, and reference groups all serve to complicate this process. People quickly acclimate to any given level of reward (or a stable trajectory, like steadily rising rewards) and experience outcomes that fall below that expected level with a sense of distressing loss (Molm 1997). Moreover, they tend to expect congruence between their status value within a group and the level of rewards they receive. People perceive fairness and are satisfied with their outcomes “when you and I receive what people like us generally get” (Hegtvedt and Markovsky 1995, p. 269). Therefore, the evaluation of fairness and equity is inherently tied to identity processes that determine to whom people compare themselves. More recent research in social exchange deals with the related question of how trust and affective commitment build up in exchange relationships. Edward Lawler and his colleagues have posited a model through which repeated exchanges create positive emotion, cumulating over time to create a positive attitude toward the  exchange partner and behavioral commitment to the exchange relationship  (Lawler 2018; Lawler and Yoon 1998). Perceptions of network cohesion mediate this relationship; affective commitment is highest in exchange structures like  ­ productive exchange, where shared responsibility and perceived cohesion are high (Lawler et al. 2008, 2009).



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Thus, exchange relations can create group ­identity, which fosters repeated exchanges that are somewhat independent of instrumental gain. Other network theorists have concentrated on the link between uncertainty, behavioral commitment, and trust. These researchers show that trust can only develop when an exchange is risky (i.e. the situation allows for untrustworthy behavior) and the trading partner acts in a reliable, trustworthy manner. Kollock (1994), for example, showed that trust and behavioral commitment develop more quickly when the quality of the traded good is difficult to determine, and therefore the opportunity to deceive is present. Molm (2000) showed that trust and affective commitment developed to highest levels in reciprocal exchange (where partners did not negotiate to binding agreements) when the power structure made commitment advantageous for both. Just as exchange researchers have shown how emotions are embedded in exchange structures, expectation states researchers have looked at how identity meanings and emotions can shape status processes. When status hierarchies form in small, task‐­ oriented groups, high‐status group members often experience more positive emotions, since they are encouraged to make contributions and their contributions are marked by positive evaluation. Conversely, lower‐status group members often feel negative emotions about being ignored or having their contributions commented on negatively. Lovaglia and Houser (1996) demonstrated that these emotions tend to mute the status structure; lower‐status group members are resistant to influence because of their negative emotion, while higher‐status members may be unusually accepting because of their positive feelings. Exchange researchers have noted a ­similar dynamic in the interaction of power, influence, and emotion: the negative emotion felt by low‐power group members makes them much less likely to accept influence from high‐power members for whom they would normally hold high expectations (Willer et al. 1997). Group processes researchers also are beginning to explore how identity interacts with status and power processes. Identities that link low‐ and high‐power positions seem to mute power use in exchange networks (Lawler and Yoon 1998). If the subject in an expectation states experiment shares an identity with a simulated actor, that piece of positive identity information seems to combine just like other status information to form performance expectations (Kalkhoff and Barnum 2000).

Future Potential for Linkage The research strategy chosen by the major theoretical programs in sociological social psychology has paid off handsomely. Separating power, status, and identity processes so that they could be studied in isolation led to a dramatic growth of theoretical knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, we have progressed so far that researchers are starting to put the picture back together again. In just the last decade, several studies have appeared that examine how status, power, identity, and emotion interact in more complex situations. Our growing understanding of these interactions has also increased the interplay between experimental, survey, and ethnographic research. As experimentalists, who primarily test theories, develop more complex views of how basic processes interact, their theories become more useful to survey and ethnographic researchers who necessarily deal with a more complex social situation.

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It is, of course, more difficult to say where we are going than to say where we have been. One expects, of course, the current trend toward studying the interactions between status, power, identity, and emotion to continue. But advances will certainly come within the faces of social psychology as well. In social exchange, people are beginning to think about how exchange networks change. Studies of network dynamics – how networks evolve – are effectively studies of identity change. Since our conception of identity is that of a social position, defined by its relationship to other positions, any change in the network involves the creation or decay of identities over time. Social positions acquire meanings by virtue of their position in the social structure. Then people learn and act on those meanings and have emotional responses to them, structuring new interactions. In extensions of Noah Friedkin’s work, we will need to see if structures reach equilibrium and, if so, whether they create consensual culture or stable, conflicting views of reality. The study of identity and emotion must focus to some degree on exploring the differences between the Heise and Burke models that now dominate the field. There also may be a return to the more network‐ecological view of the self that characterized the structural symbolic interactionists’ early efforts (Stryker 1980). New work by MacKinnon and Heise (2010) incorporates self‐sentiments into the affect control model, arguing that social interactions that deflect a person’s identity away from a self‐sentiment will lead that person to seek out other identities (usually in other institutional frameworks), the maintenance of which will resolve the initial deflection. Some exciting new work formalizes the uncertain, negotiated nature of social interaction. A new Bayesian version of affect control theory (called BayesACT) recognizes that we are not always certain what identities and identity meanings are relevant in a social situation (Schroder et  al. 2017). In BayesACT, situations are not defined in fixed, concrete terms, as labels that have a single meaning in the three‐ dimensional affective space. Instead, they are modeled as a distribution of possible meanings, in recognition that actors know that there are variations in individual experience and cultural background. Such a probability distribution conceptualization of meaning also allows for the fact that people may not be completely sure of a definition of the situation (how to label self and others), or indeed may not have any definition at all in the beginning of an encounter. This new work offers additional possibilities for linking the symbolic interactionist and group processes traditions within sociological social psychology. Group process researchers have worked to model how status characteristics that people bring into groups combine with actual interactions within the group to create power and prestige structures (Fisek et al. 1991; Skvoretz and Fararo 1996). The new Bayesian formulation offers a new way to model how labels with variable meanings combine with actions to form more concrete expectations. Similarly, the network research on how repeated exchanges can create group identity and positive affective meanings dovetails nicely with the Bayesian work that shows that social structure can grow out of even initially undefined situations. Even sociologists with interests in more macro structures could find the work useful. A recent paper uses the BayesACT model to develop a new “deference score” to measure occupational status, by predicting which occupational identities are expected to defer to others (Freeland and Hoey 2018). Clearly, this new work offers a useful way forward to understand the uncertain but structured realm of social interaction.



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Deaux, K. (1992). Personalizing identity and socializing self. In: Social Psychology of Identity and the Self‐Concept (ed. G.M. Blackwell), 9–33. London: Surry University Press. Fişek, M.H., Berger, J., and Norman, R.Z. (1991). Participation in heterogeneous and ­homogeneous groups: a theoretical integration. American Journal of Sociology 97: 114–142. Freeland, R.E. and Hoey, J. (2018). The structure of deference: modelling occupational status using affect control theory. American Sociological Review. Friedkin, N. (2010). The attitude‐behavior linkage in behavioral cascades. Social Psychology Quarterly 1–18. Friedkin, N.E. and Johnsen, E.C. (1999). Social influence networks and opinion change. Advances in Group Processes 16: 1–29. Friedkin, N.E. and Johnsen, E.C. (2003). Attitude change, affect control, and expectation states in the formation of influence networks. Advances in Group Processes 20: 1–29. Friedkin, N.E. (1993). Structural bases of interpersonal influence in groups. American Sociological Review 58: 861–872. Friedkin, N.E. (1999). Choice shift and group polarization. American Sociological Review 64: 856–875. Friedkin, N.E. (2001). Norm formation in social influence networks. Social Networks 23: 167–189. Friedkin, N.E. (2005). A Structural Theory of Social Influence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Overlook Press. Gould, R.V. (2002). The origins of status hierarchies: A formal theory and empirical test. The American Journal of Sociology 107: 1143–1178. Hegtvedt, K.A. and Markovsky, B. (1995). Justice and injustice. In: Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology (ed. K.S. Cook, G.A. Fine and J.S. House). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Heise, D.R. (1979). Understanding Events. New York: Cambridge University Press. Heise, D.R. 1991. “OLS equation estimations for Program Interact.” Available at: http://www. indiana.edu/~socpsy/papers/EQ_Estimations.pdf. Heise, D.R. (2007). Expressive Order: Confirming Sentiments in Social Actions. New York: Springer. Hochschild, A.R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules and social structure. American Journal of Sociology 85: 551–575. Homans, G.C. (1961). Social Behavior: It’s Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Johnson, C. (1993). Gender and formal authority. Social Psychology Quarterly 56: 193–210. Kalkhoff, W. and Barnum, C. (2000). The effects of status‐organizing and social identity processes on patterns of social influence. Social Psychology Quarterly 63: 95–115. Kollock, P. (1994). The emergence of exchange structures: an experiemntal study of uncertainty, commitment and trust. American Journal of Sociology 100: 313–345. Lawler, E.J. (2018). The affect theory of social exchange. In: Contemporary Social Psychological Theories, 2e (ed. P. Burke), 225–248. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Lawler, E.J., Thye, S.R., and Yoon, J. (2008). Social exchange and micro social order. American Sociological Review 73: 519–542. Lawler, E.J., Thye, S.R., and Yoon, J. (2009). Social Commitments in a Depersonalized World. New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 2018. Lawler, E.J. and Yoon, J. (1998). Network structure and emotion in exchange relations. American Sociological Review 63: 871–894.



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6 Social Network Analysis Nick Crossley

Introduction It has become something of a cliché to claim that “everything is connected,” but the importance of connection is fundamental in sociology. A society is not an aggregate of social actors, even if our definition of “actor” extends to such corporate entities as governments and economic firms. Actors interact, forming relations that concatenate as networks, and it is these networks, both as emergent properties and with the further emergent properties to which they give rise (e.g. “social capital” as defined in the work of Coleman (1990) and Putnam (2000)), which lead us to speak of “­societies.” Societies are more than the sum of the individual actors who comprise their parts because those “parts” (i.e. actors) interact, forming relations and networks, and because these relations and networks make a difference. Indeed, human organisms only become actors, in any fully fledged sense, after an extended period of nurture within social relations, during which time they are entirely dependent on others (usually their parents) for their biological survival. There would be no actors if there were no relations between actors (Crossley 2011). Societies have or rather are (social) “structures” and their structure is precisely a structure of relations: a ­network structure. It is perhaps something of a surprise, therefore, that much sociological research tends to gather data on individual actors and their attributes, and that our primary methods of data analysis, where they do not systematically preclude any consideration of social relations, are ill‐equipped to handle them. Conventional statistical models focus upon relations between variables, for example, often pushing actors out of the picture (Abbott 1997) but even when actors can be glimpsed in among the variables relations are systematically precluded by the assumption of independence. Tests of

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Josh

Shell Frank Kirk Bill

Bob

Jill

Jake

Grace

Figure 6.1  A hypothetical network.

statistical significance assume (among other things) that respondents are entirely independent of one another (i.e., unconnected) and the demands of this assumption drive research design. Sampling strategies explicitly seek to select individuals who are not connected to one another. The inherently and by‐definition networked character of social life is deliberately designed out of sociological research. Qualitative data analysis generally makes no equivalent commitment to independence and clearly can shed light on relations (how often it does is another matter and a focus on individual perspectives, treated as attributes of the individual rather than outcomes of interaction, is common) but it is difficult to capture c­ omplex relational patterns in the discursive manner of qualitative research. A  network of only 10 actors involves a possible 90 directed or 45 undirected relations. Accounting for those one by one, in a verbal description, would be quite a tall order, and even if we do, then so what? What could we do with such descriptions? Imagine, for example, trying to describe or analyze the pattern of relations mapped in Figure 6.1 discursively. Social network analysis (SNA) is a methodology and toolbox of methods, born of a marriage between social science and the branch of mathematics known as graph theory, specifically intended for the analysis of such networks, their structure, and those of their properties that have been shown to be potentially sociologically significant. The graphs about which graph theory theorizes comprise two basic sets: a set of nodes or vertices and a set (or sets) of edges or ties connecting various pairs of these nodes. A graph, in effect, is a network and the formative insight which gave rise to SNA was to perceive it as such and, more specifically, to conceive of it as a way of mapping and measuring patterns of social relations. Graph theory explores such graphs in a way both more formal and abstract than sociological discourse, and in its purest form does so without recourse to any obvious application. SNA seeks to harness the insights and techniques of graph theory for social scientific purposes, however, identifying those graph‐theoretic properties and



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measures that appear to have a potential sociological relevance and that can be shown, by means of empirical research, to make a difference in the social world. As SNA has developed, in recent years in particular, the contribution of graph theory has been bolstered by innovations within other mathematical specialisms, most notably but not exclusively statistics (see Lazega and Snijders 2016; Lusher  et  al. 2013; Snijders et  al. 2010). Significant early developments in the approach were rooted in ethnographic field studies, however (e.g. Mitchell 1969). Ethnographers looked to graph theory to help them to make sense of the complex webs of interconnection they encountered in the field, knowing that such webs were important and were making a difference but finding themselves unable to obtain a purchase upon them by way of their standard, descriptive‐linguistic methods. It is important to remain mindful of this root in SNA’s genealogy, in my view, recognizing that the approach has a necessary qualitative aspect and that qualitative rigor and sophistication are no less important that their quantitative counterpart. The mathematics, whether graph‐theoretic, statistical, etc., only make sociological sense and only have sociological value insofar as the data are informed by a qualitative grasp of who (or what) the nodes in a network are, the content of ties being modeled, and the wider context of the network (see also Bellotti 2014; Crossley 2010; Dominguez and Hollstein 2014; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; McLean 2017; Mische 2003). This is a sociological imperative but also stems in some part from the nature of the data. Even at its most statistical, the “whole network” approach focused on in this chapter is a case study approach. The nodes and their ties have both content and a context, and that content and context must be understood if the patterns of ties constituting the network and the sociological significance of that pattern are to be properly understood. Anything might count as a node for purposes of SNA, as long as it is capable of forging the type of tie under investigation with any of the other nodes in the network. Nodes are often human actors, but they might be corporate actors (e.g. firms, NGOs or governments), cities, or other geographical units, events − whatever makes sense in relation to a specific project. Similarly, anything might count as a tie as long as all nodes are capable of entering into it and, again, it makes sense to treat it in that way. SNA has been used to look at friendship, patterns of economic exchange, sexual contact, intergovernmental treatises, and also such “negative ties” as relations of ­bullying and patterns of conflict and violence. Having said this, node and tie selection must be meaningful in terms of the project for which they are selected, permitting the research to address and answer their research questions persuasively. The mathematics of SNA is formal and therefore largely indifferent to the content of nodes and ties but the specificity of this content is crucial in relation to sociological use of the approach. The most relevant and meaningful nodes and ties are not always the easiest to capture empirically, but poor decisions regarding the selection of nodes and ties render analysis pointless. Ties can be directed or undirected. Directed ties are potentially asymmetric. They “point” from one node to another, and though they may be reciprocated, they are not necessarily reciprocated. Liking is a directed tie, for example: John may “like” Jane without Jane necessarily “liking” John. This can be represented on a graph by arrowheads on edges, indicting the direction(s) of a tie. Undirected ties, by contrast,

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do not “point” and are mutual by definition. “Living with” is undirected, for example: if John lives with Jane, then she necessarily lives with him. They live together. Focusing on directed ties doubles the potential number of ties in a network (each pair of nodes is potentially linked by two ties, A–B and B–A) and potentially complicates many of SNA’s key concepts and measures. What can flow where through a network depends not only on the existence of ties but also the direction in which they point and therefore the point at the network in which they begin their journey. Ties may be defined in a binary manner, such that they are deemed either to exist or not. Alternatively, they may be valued. Values can be ordinal. A questionnaire item might ask respondents to indicate how much they like each of the others listed on a roster, on a scale of one‐to‐five, for example. Alternatively, values can be continuous. A researcher might count how many times two nodes interact, for example, or for how long. Graphs such as Figure  6.1 are often a useful means of visualizing networks. However, the same information can be stored in an adjacency matrix, such as Table 6.1, and the various computations involved in SNA derive from manipulation of these matrices. In an adjacency matrix, we list the members of our node set both in the first column and across the top row (keeping them in the same order), indicating the existence of a tie between any two nodes by placing a value in the cell where the row of one intersects with the column of the other. Where ties are binary the values in each cell will be either 1, indicating that a tie exists, or 0, indicating that no tie exists. Other values would be used for a valued network, however, to reflect the ordinal or continuous weightings referred to above. Direction is captured in adjacency matrices because each node has both a row and a column and each pair of nodes therefore has two row‐column intersections. In the matrix in Table 6.1, for example, we have a cell where Jake’s row intersects Kirk’s column and a cell where Kirk’s row intersects Jake’s column. For undirected data the same information would be duplicated in these cells but for directed networks we can use the existence of the two cells to indicate direction. The cell in which Jake’s row intersects Kirk’s column would be used to record whether Jake sends a tie to Kirk, for example, with the cell in which Kirk’s row intersects with Jake’s row indicating whether Kirk sends a tie to Jake. The diagonal running from the top left to the bottom right in an adjacency matrix records “reflexive ties”; that is, each node’s tie to itself. In many cases, reflexive ties Table 6.1  A hypothetical adjacency matrix (presenting the same information as Figure 6.1).

Bill Jill Jake Frank Bob Grace Shell Sal Kirk Josh

Bill

Jill

Jake

Frank

Bob

Grace

Shell

Sal

Kirk

Josh

0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0

0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0

1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1

1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0

0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0

0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0

1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0

1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0

0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0



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are meaningless and the default position on such software packages as the Ucinet package that is used in this chapter is to ignore reflexive ties for purposes of most analytic routines (on Ucinet see Borgatti et  al. 2002, 2013). In relation to some ­routines and some data, however, reflexive ties can be meaningful and they can be included in analysis where it makes sense to do so.

Whole Networks, Ego‐Nets, and Two‐Mode Networks This chapter introduces some of the properties and measures fundamental to SNA, limiting explanation and examples to the case of undirected binary ties, for sake of simplicity, and focusing on “whole networks.” First, however, it is necessary to ­distinguish between whole networks and two other types: ego‐nets and two‐mode networks.

Whole Networks When gathering whole network data, we identify a bounded population of nodes, specify a type or types of tie of interest to us, and observe, for every possible pairing of nodes within the population, whether or not they enjoy the type(s) of tie in question. We conduct a census survey of nodes and ties within our population. This might be achieved by way of a questionnaire or interview protocol which presents respondents (i.e. “nodes”) with a roster listing the whole node population and asking them to indicate which other nodes on the roster they are tied to in each of the ­various ways of interest to us. It might be achieved, as in the case of punk and post‐punk “music worlds,” by trawling archives (e.g. biographies, band histories, websites, magazines) in search of key players and (in this case) evidence of musical collaboration between them (Crossley 2015). In the case of research on online interaction and connections or involving electronic archives, it might be gathered in an automated fashion, by way of a web crawler or some such thing. Alternatively, it might be gathered by way of direct observation, as in many ethological studies of animal interaction and some social scientific ethnographies (e.g. Kapferer 1969). It is vital to gather whole network data if we believe that the structure of a ­network or certain properties of that structure are of importance in relation to the questions and issues driving our research, or if we believe that indirect ties are important; that is, if we believe nodes are affected not only by others with whom they enjoy direct contact (their “alters”) but also by their alters’ alters and perhaps their alters’ alters’ alters, etc. Our vulnerability to viral infections is not only a function of who we enjoy direct contact with, for example, but also of who they enjoy contact with, and so on. Only whole network data capture such paths. It is often very difficult to gather whole network data on networks with a large number of nodes, however, unless, as in much web‐based research, automated methods are available. Few respondents are willing to wade through a questionnaire roster of several hundred names, for example, and certainly not all of those named on the roster, as required for a whole network census. And it is clearly impossible to directly observe interaction within a population comprising many hundreds of ­members. In such circumstances, another approach is required.

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In addition, whole network research tends to focus on ties within a particular domain, failing to capture the “intersecting circles” which, as Simmel (1955) famously notes, social actors typically move between. Punk and post‐punk networks record ties between key participants in particular “music worlds,” for example, but say nothing about those participants’ ties to others outside of that world: that is, ties to family, neighbors, or friends not involved in their punk activities. In this particular case, such omissions are unimportant, but in other cases they may not be. Where they are important, again, another approach will often be required.

Ego‐Nets If we want to capture actors’ connections across a range of social circles or we are researching a big or less well‐defined network/population and we are less concerned with the structure of the whole network and/or indirect ties, then ego‐net analysis might be more appropriate (Crossley et al. 2015). We gather ego‐net data by asking individuals, usually in interview or by questionnaire (although again other methods, including archival analysis, are possible [see Edwards and Crossley 2009]), to nominate key alters, potentially from across all of the social circles in which they mix. Often, we also ask them to describe certain attributes of these alters (e.g. gender, age etc.) and ideally we ask them to indicate which of the alters they have nominated are tied to one another in a way or ways relevant to our research. In exceptional cases, we might be interested in a single ego‐net (Edwards and Crossley 2009). Ordinarily, however, we gather a sample of ego‐nets, using one of the standard sampling techniques of social science. Because it permits sampling, ego‐net analysis allows us to analyze patterns of ­connection within larger populations. Moreover, if the sampling strategy used complies with the assumptions of standard statistical models and methods then ego‐net measures can be analyzed using these methods (whole network and two‐mode data violate the independence assumption, necessitating a more specialized approach to statistical analysis [see below]). For these reasons the ego‐net approach allows researchers to more easily bolt a network element on to a more conventional project. The cost, however, to reiterate, is a loss of information regarding many aspects of structure and indirect ties.

Two‐Mode Networks Our third type of network data, two‐mode data, involves two different types of node and a tie that (only) crosses those types; for example, a set of events and a set of social actors who are tied to certain of those events by having participated in one or more of them (a tie of “participating in”). There are various ways of analyzing two‐mode networks, but it is common to decompose them into two single‐mode networks: e.g.  (i) a network of participants linked where they have participated in one or more of the same events, and (ii) a network of events linked where they share one or more of the participants. For this reason two‐mode networks are sometimes used as indirect means of generating single‐mode (whole network) data. This can be very effective. However, researchers should seek to integrate both modes within their analysis if important information is not to be lost (Everett and Borgatti 2013). In addition, deriving a single‐mode network from a two‐mode network can skew certain of the properties of the single‐mode network(s), and analysis needs to take account of this.



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Single‐mode projections derived from two‐mode data tend to be highly clustered, for example, as every participant in an event is deemed to be tied to every other participant in that event. Where events involve a high number of participants, moreover, it is often implausible to assume that co‐participation in such events can serve as a proxy for a meaningful tie; not that analysts necessarily would have to make this assumption. There are other reasons why one might want to derive a single‐ from a two‐mode network. Routine archiving of membership lists in organizations, of minutes of meetings (with lists of attendees), of court proceedings, and other such standard bureaucratic procedures means that two‐mode data is often publicly available, at least after a period of time. Work on “interlocking directorates” uses this approach (e.g. Scott 1990). Public lists of the directors of powerful companies allow researchers to explore the connections between such companies forged by way of the directors whom they share, and equally the patterns of contact between these very influential directors achieved by way of their co‐participation on boards. Moreover, like ego‐net analysis, two‐mode analysis can be a useful way of accessing networks that cannot be captured in a standard whole network format; for example, because their node population is too big to make the abovementioned roster method feasible or that population is not known in advance, again precluding a roster approach. For example, I and a number of colleagues analyzed patterns of connection involving populations of participants in the music world who were unknown individually and by name, and who we believed to number in the several hundreds. The size and unknown nature of these populations precluded a method of data elicitation involving a roster of participants. We could not send participants a list of their fellow participants, asking them to indicate who on the list they knew. However, we were able to compile comprehensive lists of events (e.g. gigs and festivals) that we expected our participants (qua participants) to have attended and participated in, which were short enough to be included on a questionnaire roster. In turn, we were able to distribute this questionnaire via websites and social media to members of the populations of interest (Emms and Crossley 2018; Hield and Crossley 2014). Although we could not deduce “who knows whom” from the two‐mode networks that these surveys allowed us to construct, both the two‐mode network and the two single‐mode networks (i.e. (i) participants linked by events and (ii) events linked by participants) that we were able to construct proved invaluable for exploring patterns of connection in these music worlds (Crossley and Emms 2016; Emms and Crossley 2018; Hield and Crossley 2014).

Network Properties and Measures Networks are structures that have variable properties, which can, in turn, have sociologically relevant effects and which we therefore seek to identify, define, and measure. In a whole network we can identify these properties at different levels: • The Whole. The network taken as a whole has certain structural properties. • Subgroups. One of the properties of the whole, in some cases, is its division into (different types of) identifiable subgroups, whose properties might vary and can be compared.

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• Nodal level. Nodes also take on relational properties in virtue of their pattern of connections within the network and differ from one another in virtue of these properties. The many types of network data that SNA allows us to gather inevitably preclude a “one size fits all” description of network properties and measures, and an account that attempted to cover all bases would go well beyond the remit, not to mention the word length, of this chapter. In what follows, therefore, a small selection of some of the key properties will be described, at each of the three levels identified, which might be measured for a whole network, assuming that ties are undirected and binary. A whole network has been chosen because that allows the most encompassing and comprehensive account. The focus is on undirected and binary ties because that allows for descriptions that are both brief and uncomplicated. Several good accounts exist for readers keen to explore further options and their complications (Borgatti et al. 2013; Crossley et al. 2015; Scott 2000; Wasserman and Faust 1994). None of the properties described have determinate effects. Their impact will vary in accordance with the type of process we are observing within the network (e.g. diffusion, collective action, pursuit of individual gain) and also according to the type of tie involved and a host of contextual factors. Furthermore, in many cases the effect of the network will depend on the agency of nodes: their goals, the means they employ, and their awareness (or not) of the opportunities/constraints affected by their position in the network. For this reason, as stressed throughout this chapter, a satisfactory network analysis must include a broader focus than narrowly defined network measures, incorporating an understanding of content and context, gleaned by other means of sociological investigation, both qualitative and quantitative. To aid clarity and ease understanding the measures have been grouped thematically and will be italicized the first time they are used.

Cohesion Networks can be more or less cohesive. The most straightforward measure of cohesion is network density. Density is defined as the number of ties in a network, expressed as a proportion of the total number of ties possible, given the number of nodes in the network. For a network of 10 nodes, for example, there are a potential (10 × 9)/2 = 45 undirected ties, assuming that reflexive ties are not meaningful and we are excluding them. If we observe 20 ties between our nodes, therefore, the density of the network is 20/45 = 0.44. Density always varies between 0 (no ties observed) and 1 (every potential tie observed) for a binary network. Various claims have been made for the sociological significance of density. This is not the placed to review them in any depth. It must suffice to say, bearing in mind that network effects are always mediated by content (of ties), context, and the agency of nodes, that higher density has been linked to, among other things: • Higher levels of social capital, in the form of norms of trust, cooperation and mutual support, group solidarity etc. (Coleman 1990); • Faster and more effective diffusion of whatever goods (and “bads,” such as viruses) might be flowing through a network (Valente 1995);



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• Preservation or generation of statistically deviant cultural patterns (Bott 1968; Coleman 1988; Milroy 1991). Density is used in many of SNA’s analytic routines and is very useful. However, it typically varies according to both the type of tie being measured and the number of nodes in the network (the order of the network). People tend to have more friends than sexual partners, for example, such that friendship networks tend to be denser than networks of sexual contact. Furthermore, maintaining ties of any kind often requires an investment of resources, including time and effort, such that nodes are often restricted in the number of ties they can maintain, with the effect that density tends to fall as network size increases. In a network of 20 nodes it is possible for every node to enjoy regular meaningful contact with every other node, for example, but in a network of one million nodes that is not possible, and we would expect density to be tiny (at least if we are dealing with a network of meaningful contact between human beings). This makes it difficult to compare density scores across ­networks or establish a standard against which the magnitude of scores might be gauged. There is little that we can do to circumvent the problem of varying tie types. However, there are at least two good alternatives to measuring the density of a network as a whole, which allow us to capture something similar to what is captured by this measure whilst circumventing the problem of network size. The first centers on average degree. Degree is a node level measure. Each node has their own degree. A node’s degree is the number of ties it has within the network. If one has five ties within a network, then one has a degree of five. Average degree is simply the mean value for degree for all nodes in the network (or some subset of them). Average degree is mathematically related to density and clearly tells us something about how cohesive (how connected) a network is but has the advantage that it is not affected by network size (except perhaps in very small networks that restrict the number of ties nodes can have). This allows for comparison across networks of varying sizes. Although it would make little sense to compare the density of friendship ties in a network of 50 nodes with that of a network of 500 nodes, for example, it might be perfectly meaningful, other things being equal, to compare average degree across the two networks. Although average degree can be a useful alternative to density, which allows us to circumvent some of the problems of that measure, it provides no information on closure; that is, whether nodes’ alters are typically connected to one another. This information can be important. Coleman’s (1990) version of “social capital” and the explanation that he offers for its effects hinges upon closure, for example (see also Burt 2005). To capture this information, while simultaneously avoiding the abovementioned problems of density, we can measure the clustering coefficient of the network. The clustering coefficient for a network is the mean density of each node’s ego‐net (sometimes weighted by degree). Above whole networks and ego‐nets are distinguished, but each node in a whole network has its own personal network of contacts within that network, and these ego‐nets each have a density, defined as the number of ties observed within them divided by the total number that are possible given the node’s degree. If one has 5 friends in a network, for example, there are a possible 10

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(undirected) friendship ties between them; if only 6 ties are observed, then one’s ego‐net has a density of 6/10 = 0.6. If we average the density scores for every node in the network (in some versions weighting the contribution of some by their degree), we have the network’s ­clustering coefficient and, by way of it, a measure of density at the local level of the network. The reason for doing this is that nodes might be clustered as dense clumps within a network, and might therefore benefit from the advantages of density identified by Coleman (1990) and others, while the density of the network as a whole is low. Measuring the density of the network as whole might be misleading for some purposes, in other words, and theories regarding the effects of density might be better served by the clustering coefficient. Returning briefly to degree, there are two further manipulations of this score that can yield useful information about structural properties of or within a network. First, by exploring the dispersion of degree scores across all nodes in the network, we can measure the degree centralization of the network. Does it center on a few central hubs, or is it decentralized, with ties being evenly distributed across nodes? Social movement scholars have suggested that centralization is often an advantage because it allows for quicker, more effective and more efficient coordination of collective action (Oliver and Marwell 1993). Furthermore, some scholars interested in covert action, following Simmel (1906), have suggested that centralization facilitates the tight control of a network necessary to the maintenance of secrecy. Others, by contrast, suggest that degree centralization makes a network vulnerable to attack from without because hubs are visible (most other nodes are connected to them and might therefore give them away, whether intentionally or not) and their targeted removal causes major and potentially fatal damage to channels of communication and organization (Crossley et al. 2012). Second, at the nodal level, degree is one among a number of different measures that SNA uses to compare the centrality of different nodes within a network, identifying the most and perhaps also the least central nodes. Each node has a degree and some have a higher degree than others; that is, some are more degree central, they have a higher degree centrality, than others. Having a high number of connections within a network can be a disadvantage: maintaining ties is costly; a high degree may increase the risk of infection when viruses are passing through a network; and for those involved in covert activities it has the disadvantage of making one more visible and/or vulnerable to betrayal (Crossley et al. 2012). It can clearly be an advantage too, however, at least where ties to others afford access to whatever resources those others own and control (an effect that Lin (1991) seeks to capture in his version of the social capital concept). In either case, however, whether for better or worse (or both), a node’s degree or degree centrality can make a difference. Like degree, the benefits of cohesion more generally are not necessarily evenly distributed across a network. Many networks, for example, are found to have a core‐periphery structure. In a core‐periphery structure the analyst is able to identify a subset of nodes (the core) characterized by the relatively high density of connection between their members. In the classic case, all other nodes form a periphery whose members are only sparsely connected to members of the core and even more sparsely connected to one another. The core forms a cohesive subgroup within the network but the periphery do not. The periphery are defined by their weak attachment and



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marginality relative to the core. Although this configuration, like all network structures and properties, can take on a variety of meanings, depending on circumstances and specificities, it is often indicative of hierarchy and inequality; not least because members of the core, in virtue of their relatively high density, are usually in a position to act collectively in pursuit of their own interests. A core‐periphery structure is one of several examples of subgroup formation and differentiation sometimes detected within a network and which SNA allows us to identify and measure (the UCInet software package has two routines for identifying and exploring core‐ periphery structures [Borgatti et al. 2002]).

Structural Holes High density, particularly at the local level, is perceived as an advantage by many social network analysts because, to reiterate, it is deemed to cultivate social capital, in the form of trust, cooperation, mutual support, etc. (Coleman 1990). Although they do not necessarily disagree with this, other scholars have pointed to certain disadvantages of high density and to the advantages of lower density, at least within one’s ego‐net. Burt (1992, 2005), for example, points to the high level of redundancy in a dense ego‐net, particularly in relation to accessing information: each of ego’s contacts is in contact with each of the others, which means that each has access to and gives ego access to the same information. If ego maintained contact with just one of them, she would have access to the same information, without incurring the costs involved in maintaining ties with all of them. Granovetter’s (1973, 1982) celebrated work on The Strength of Weak Ties, a study focused on getting and moving jobs, is a key point of reference for this claim. Friendship ties are typically transitive, Granovetter observes: We are friends with our friends’ friends. We often enjoy a small number of intransitive ties, too, however − friends or acquaintances with whom we share few, if any, mutual acquaintances. It is these “weak ties” (i.e. intransitive ties), Granovetter’s work suggests, that are typically most useful for actors looking for work. Transitive ties add little extra information or leverage to that which the individual already has, but intransitive ties provide a link to different information pools and opportunities. Burt (1992) develops this idea by reference to what he calls structural holes. Structural holes are gaps in a network (an ego‐net in the case of Burt’s work) that ego bridges, potentially playing a brokerage role between the other parties involved. Others have looked to some of the potential disadvantages of brokerage (Crossley 2008; see also Krackhardt 1999), not least the stress arising from fielding competing and conflicting demands from the parties brokered, but Burt focuses on the positives. At the nodal level, he argues, brokers can benefit from acting as a gatekeeper. They are rewarded for passing on goods, for example, and might in some cases take credit for ideas and innovations that they are only passing on. The parties whom they connect benefit too, moreover, because the broker is their link to pools of resources that they would not otherwise have access to, helping them to stave off the stagnancy that can result from too much closure. Burt (1992) suggests a number of ego‐net measures that facilitate the identification of structural holes. The basic idea is also captured in the more general measure of  betweenness centrality, however, another node centrality measure that has the

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advantage over Burt’s measures of taking account of indirect ties within a whole network context. Betweenness is a measure of the extent to which a node connects other pairs of nodes in a network such that any communication or exchange between them must pass through or be mediated by the node. As with degree centrality, we often use this measure to rank nodes, identifying the most and least (betweenness) central of them, and again we can measure the dispersion of scores to determine the overall centralization of the network. A further centrality measure that also speaks to Burt’s concerns (again facilitating ranking and a measure of centralization) is eigenvector centrality. Burt questions the value of a high degree, at least where it coincides with high levels of transitivity, because of the costs incurred in maintaining ties relative to the additional advantage they confer when transitive. His ego‐net measures take account of this by offsetting degree against transitivity. Another way of looking at this same issue, however, which takes account of indirect ties, is to look at the degree of a node’s alters. If one’s “friends” all have a high number of “friends” in a network, then one should be able to benefit (indirectly) from this, at no extra “cost” to myself. Eigenvector centrality seeks to parse out this effect.

Paths, Geodesics, Components, and Closeness In addition to cohesion, networks vary in terms of their compactness. A useful starting point for reflecting upon this is the concept of a path. A path exists between any two nodes if they are at least indirectly connected, via the mediation of others, such that, for example, information or other goods might pass between them. Paths have a length measured in edges or, confusingly, degrees. Two nodes that are directly connected are said to be at a distance of one degree from one another. If they are only indirectly connected, by way of an intermediary, they are at a distance of two degrees. If two intermediaries are involved they are at a distance of three degrees, and so on. This idea is represented in popular culture by the “six degrees of separation” idea, which derives from the work of Milgram (1967). Conceptualizing social structure in terms of networks and seeking, among other things, to measure average path lengths (or geodesics, described next) within the social structure of US society, Milgram devised a chain letter experiment in which starter individuals were given a package and the name and address of a target individual, generally a resident in another state, to whom the package was to be sent. The starter could only pass the package to someone who they knew to speak to on first‐name terms, however, who would then be asked to do the same, and so on until the package reached its destination. On average, Milgram found, the package was passed on six times, leading him to conclude that any two individuals picked at random from the US population are (again “on average”) at six degrees of separation. This popular social scientific idea has excited considerable excitement among complexity theorists working in mathematics and physics, not least because they find it, on first blush, counter‐intuitive: how can a network involving many millions of nodes have an average path length so short? This has led them both to seek to replicate the finding for other large systems, both social and natural, which they have  succeeded in doing many times over, and to explain how this surprising



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empirical finding is (mathematically) possible (Barabási 2003; Watts 1999, 2004). Two ­explanatory models have been posited, each supported in a variety of ways and each of which applies to a number of exemplar systems (Barabási 2003; Watts 1999, 2004). The reason that complexity theorists have been interested in this “small‐world effect” is that it helps to make sense of coordination in large systems. If path lengths in large systems were long, then we would expect information both to take a long time to pass through the system and to degrade as it did so, resulting in a lack of coordination within systems contrary to that which the physicists have observed and are seeking to explain. If path lengths are short, however, then it is entirely plausible to imagine that coordination is achieved by way of inter‐nodal transmission of information. Path lengths are of interest in social science for much the same reason. They allow us to gauge the speed at which goods and bads will pass through a network and also the likelihood and extent of any degradation caused by their repeated transmission. Path lengths affect diffusion processes (Valente 1995) and the likelihood on coordination in collective action (Oliver and Marwell 1993). Where a set of nodes are each linked to one another by a path, they comprise a component; every member of a component is linked to every other by a path. When networks are discussed in lay contexts, they are often envisaged as single components. In SNA, however, where specific and strict criteria of connection are used, it is common to find networks with several components. Components are a further example of the various types of subgroup that are sometimes observed in a network, and they are important because separate components are, by definition, not connected to one another, which means that nothing can pass between them and any collective action on behalf of one is independent of any collective action in any of the others. We expect them (and their members) to behave differently. In many cases, it is not paths, as such, that are of interest, however, but rather, geodesic distances. Any two nodes may be linked by many different paths of different lengths. The concept of geodesic distance refers to the shortest of these paths. These distances may be reported in terms of averages, as in the Milgram experiments, or by reference to the longest geodesic in the network; that is, the diameter of the network. Geodesic distances provide the basis for yet another measure of node centrality (the last one to be discussed here but by no means the final one in SNA’s extensive toolbox): closeness centrality. Closeness is measured by summing the geodesic distances between a given node and each of the other nodes in the network (this is only possible where all nodes are linked by a path; that is, within a component). This generates a measure in which a high score indicates that a node is at a relatively long distance from others in the network: farness. Closeness is derived by inverting and normalizing farness, such that a high score indicates that a node is linked to every node in the network by a relatively short path. High closeness may be a disadvantage where viruses are at large in the network because, all things being equal, those viruses have a shorter distance to travel before reaching the node. Where a node is seeking either to distribute information to, or gather information from, others in the network, however, high centrality is an advantage for exactly the same reason.

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Exogenous Subgroups SNA affords various ways of identifying subgroups in a network. Two were introduced above: components and core‐periphery structures. These are endogenous subgroupings: defined by their pattern of ties within the network. Sometimes, however, we are interested in subgroups defined by factors external to the network: exogenous groups. For example, we might be interested in the impact of gender or ethnicity on a network or network position. Are women typically more (or less) central in a particular network? Are members of a particular ethnic group overrepresented in the core of a network’s core‐periphery structure? Are nodes more (or less) likely to form connections with others with whom they share a particular attribute, such as gender or ethnicity? This latter question bears on the widely observed phenomenon of homophily; i.e., the increased probability, in some networks, for nodes to link to others with whom they share a particular attribute or to whom they are closer on scale of some sort (e.g., age) (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1964; McPherson et  al. 2001). This may be a matter of status: e.g., women preferring to form ties with other women. Or it may be matter of values and tastes; jazz fans disproportionately linking to other jazz fans. In the case of status, we can often be confident that the observed similarity between nodes precedes connection, such that the former must explain the latter and our analysis will seek to identify the mechanisms behind this. Individuals cannot change their age, for example, so if we observe age homophily in a network we can be certain that it is similarity in age which is increasing the likelihood of connection and we can seek to explain why that might be. When we are dealing with similarity in attitudes, tastes, or values, by contrast, it is often equally plausible to suppose that similarity is explained by connection. We may have similar views to our friends because our similarity has drawn us together in some way – a selection effect − but it may equally be the case that we have become similar as a consequence of contact and interaction – an influence effect − and of course in many cases both effects may be in play simultaneously. SNA affords a variety of techniques for exploring, measuring, and parsing out these effects.

Statistical and Mixed Method Approaches Exploring the relation between factors endogenous and exogenous to a network often requires statistical procedures. As already noted, whole network analysis violates the assumptions of standard statistical models (the same is true of two‐mode networks but not ego‐nets, as long as appropriate sampling techniques are used). Nodes form a complete set of members of the network, for example. They are not a sample from a wider population, such that techniques permitting inference back from sample to population are redundant. Likewise, as nodes, connected to one another in a network, they violate the assumption of independence of cases. The sticking point here is the manner in which statistical significance is gauged and interpreted, and in many cases this can be circumvented by using permutation tests, which, by randomly permuting rows and columns of the adjacency matrix, allow the researcher to determine the likelihood that any correlation they have observed could



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have arisen by chance. Thus, software packages, such as UCInet, include a suite of standard statistical procedures (t‐tests, ANOVA, correlation, r­ egression) adapted for whole network analysis by inclusion of a permutation test. These tests facilitate exploration of node level variables (e.g. does age and/or e­ thnicity affect degree centrality?) but also, where a node set is the same, exploration across networks. By correlating and regressing different snapshots of a network, for example, we can determine whether one type of tie explains another or whether the structure of the network at one point in time influences its structure at a later point in time. In recent years, moreover, there has been a huge growth of specialized statistical techniques for the analysis of networks, including exponential random graph models (ERGMs), which allow the researcher to identify micro‐structures within a network, which, they might hypothesize, help to explain its global structure; multilevel models; and also various approaches to the modeling of network dynamics and evolution, which, for example, allow researchers to capture both selection and influence effects (Lazega and Snijders 2016; Lusher et al. 2013; Snijders et al. 2010). Alongside the growth of these statistical approaches, however, some network analysts have called for more attention to be given to qualitative factors − the content and context of social relations. And there is a growing body of research on “mixed methods” considering the best ways of integrating SNA with other methods of analysis, both quantitative but also and more especially qualitative (Bellotti 2014; Crossley 2010; Dominguez and Hollstein 2014; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; McLean 2017; Mische 2003). This is the best way forward if the ever‐increasing mathematical and statistical power of SNA is to be channeled to genuine sociological use and benefit.

References Abbott, A. (1997). Of time and space. Social Forces 75 (4): 1149–1182. Barabási, A.‐L. (2003). Linked. New York: Plume. Bellotti, E. (2008). What are friends for? Elective communities of single people. Social Networks 30: 318–329. Bellotti, E. (2014). Qualitative Networks: Mixing Methods in Social Research. London: Routledge. Borgatti, S., Everett, M., and Freeman, L. (2002). Ucinet 6 for Windows: Software for Social Network Analysis. Harvard, MA: Analytic Technologies. Borgatti, S.P., Everett, M.G., and Johnson, J. (2013). Analysing Social Networks. London: Sage. Bott, E. (1968). Family and Social Networks. London: Associated Book Publishers. Burt, R. (1992). Structural Holes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Burt, R. (2005). Brokerage and Closure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coleman, J. (1988). Free riders and zealots: the role of social networks. Sociological Theory 6 (1): 52–57. Coleman, J. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Belknap: Harvard. Crossley, N. (2008). Networking out. British Journal of Sociology 59 (3): 475–500. Crossley, N. (2010). The Social World of the Network: qualitative aspects of network analysis. Sociologica 2010 (1): 1–33. http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/main. Crossley, N. (2011). Towards Relational Sociology. London: Routledge.

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Crossley, N. (2015). Networks of Sounds, Style and Subversion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crossley, N. and Emms, R. (2016). Mapping the musical universe: A blockmodel of UK music festivals 2011–13. Methodological Innovations 1 (1): 1–14. Crossley, N., Edwards, G., Harries, E. et al. (2012). Covert social movement networks and the secrecy‐efficiency trade off: the case of the UK Suffragettes (1906–1914). Social Networks 34 (4): 634–644. Crossley, N., Bellotti, E., Edwards, G. et al. (2015). Social Network Analysis for Ego‐Nets. London: Sage. Dominguez, S. and Hollstein, B. (eds.) (2014). Mixed Methods Social Networks Research. Cambridge University Press. Edwards, G. and Crossley, N. (2009). Measures and meanings: exploring the ego‐net of Helen Kirkpatrick Watts, militant Suffragette. Methodological Innovations Online 4: 37–61. Emirbayer, M. and Goodwin, J. (1994). Network analysis, culture and the problem of agency. American Journal of Sociology 99: 1411–1454. Emms, R. and Crossley, N. (2018). Trans‐locality, network structure and music worlds: underground metal in the UK. Canadian Review of Sociology 55 (1): 111–135. Everett, M. and Borgatti, S. (2013). The dual‐projection approach for two mode networks. Social Networks 34 (2): 204–210. Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360–1380. Granovetter, M. (1982). The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited. In: Social Structure and Analysis (ed. P. Marsden and N. Lin). Beverley Hills: Sage. Hield, F. and Crossley, N. (2014). Tastes, ties and social space: exploring Sheffield’s folk singing world. In: Social Networks and Music Worlds (ed. N. Crossley, S. McAndrew and P. Widdop). London: Routledge. Kapferer, B. (1969). Norms and manipulation of relationships in a work context. In: Social Networks in Urban Situations (ed. J.C. Mitchell). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Krackhardt, D. (1999). The ties that torture. Research in the Sociology of Organisations 15: 183–210. Lazarsfeld, P. and Merton, R. (1964). Friendship as social process. In: Freedom and Control in Modern Society (ed. M. Berger, T. Abel and C. Page), 18–66. New York: Octagon Books. Lazega, E. and Snijders, T. (2016). Multilevel Network Analysis for the Social Sciences. Springer. Lin, N. (1991). Social Capital. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lusher, D., Koskinen, J., and Robins, G. (2013). Exponential Random Graph Models for Social Networks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLean, P. (2017). Culture in Networks. Cambridge: Polity. McPherson, M., Smith‐Lovin, L., and Cook, J. (2001). Birds of feather: homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology 27: 415–444. Milgram, S. (1967). The small world problem. In: Empirical Approaches to Sociology (ed. G. Carter), 111–118. Boston: Pearson. Milroy, L. (1991). Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Mische, A. (2003). Cross‐talk in movements. In: Social Movements and Networks (ed. M. Diani and D. McAdam). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, C. (ed.) (1969). Social Networks in Urban Situations. Manchester University Press. Oliver, P. and Marwell, G. (1993). The Critical Mass in Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone. New York: Touchstone. Scott, J. (1990). The Sociology of Elites V3: Interlocking Directorates and Corporate Networks. University of Michigan Press. Scott, J. (2000). Social Network Analysis: A Handbook. London: Sage. Simmel, G. (1906). The sociology of secrecy and secret societies. American Journal of Sociology 11: 441–498. Simmel, G. (1955). Conflict and The Web of Group Affiliations. New York: Free Press. Snijders, T.A.B., van de Bunt, G.G., and Steglich, C.E.G. (2010). Introduction to stochastic actor‐based models for network dynamics. Social Networks 32 (1): 44–60. Valente, T. (1995). Network Models of the Diffusion of Innovations. New Jersey: Hampton. Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994). Social Network Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, D. (1999). Small Worlds. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Watts, D. (2004). Six Degrees. London: Vintage.

7 Culturalizing Sociology Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo

Overview Charting the role and place of “culture” in sociology is related to but not ­synonymous with charting the emergence of cultural sociology as a distinct subfield. Although this chapter will do both, it is not our goal to rehash debates over the meaning of culture or dwell on the history of cultural sociology; rather, we aim to provide a ­historicized account of key developments within the field and advocate for a “­culturalized” sociology. Just as Elizabeth Clemens (2007) argued that all subfields of sociology need to be historicized, we suggest that all subfields of sociology need to be culturalized. Because culture inevitably shapes social processes – even those that, on the surface, do not appear particularly cultural – the study of social life is a sense‐making endeavor in which cultural analysis can, and should, play a role. We  also call for greater attention to how power operates in and through culture. How are domination and resistance are exercised and experienced culturally? How has our own disciplinary canon been forged through relations of inequality, ­particularly between the global north and global south? Culturalizing knowledge‐production requires comparison and reflexivity, a listening from elsewhere; it is critical not just for understanding sociology but for making sense of the socio‐political crises of our times.

A Brief History Within the social sciences, perhaps the best known definition of culture today is the one provided by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, inspired by Weber: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973, p. 3). Also in circulation is Raymond Williams’ less poetic definition of culture as “the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored” (1982, p. 13, emphasis in the original). What unites both definitions is the centrality accorded meaning – its generation, circulation, and interpretation – and the insistence that culture is fundamental to the organization of the social and how the social unfolds. To borrow a term from Jacobs and Spillman (2005), culture is trans‐ individual. Whereas Williams was interested in relations, patterns, and structures, including the “structure of feeling” said to animate the culture of a specific historical era or period (Williams 2001[1961]), Geertz insisted that the cultural analyst could never hope to grasp the logic and import of what people were up to without painstaking attention to the textures and nuances of their behavior, what they do. “Behavior must be attended to, with some exactness,” he wrote, “for it is through the  flow of behavior  –  or, more precisely, social action  –  that cultural forms find articulation” (1973, p. 17). As Patterson (2014) reminds us, differences over the meaning of meaning shape theoretical approaches to the study of culture. Of course, this was true long before the rise of cultural sociology as a recognizable subfield. Concerns with culture date back to the discipline’s classical foundations insofar as these foundations have been canonized by sociologists in the global north. Consider Durkheim, who wrote about religion, morality, and anomie as well as the transition from organic to mechanical solidarity; Marx, who posited a cultural “superstructure” arising from a material (economic) base; and Weber, who argued that a “Protestant ethic” spurred the rise of capitalism, that bureaucracy was an “iron cage,” that authority could be charismatic, and, most important, that sociology should embrace verstehen (interpretive understanding). All three theorists advanced forms of cultural analysis, even if, with the arguable exception of Weber, culture was never accorded a causal role and was largely considered epiphenomenal to other social forces. Less commonly discussed as “founders” but arguably more influential in the future development of cultural ­sociology are Antonio Gramsci, Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. du Bois, Karl Mannheim, members of the Chicago School – including George Herbert Mead and Jane Addams – and, later, a broad array of voices including the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, Howard Becker, and Talcott Parsons. To elaborate briefly, Mannheim and Simmel both staged important early challenges to positivist approaches to sociological analysis, Mannheim as the founder of the sociology of knowledge (a key influence on Mills) and Simmel as a forerunner of symbolic interactionism (later taken up most notably by Goffman). Gramsci “culturalized” Marx in his theory of hegemony, arguing that the dominant classes exercise power primarily by winning broad‐based consent to their interests rather than by coercive force. Veblen, Addams, and du Bois were all leading intellectuals of the Progressive Era focused on deep inequalities wrought by the rise of capitalism in the United States. While Veblen wrote about wealth and consumption, Addams was concerned with the status and rights of women and children and du Bois devoted his considerable energies to racial injustice (and, later, empire). Du Bois developed the

106 Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo important concepts of “the veil” and “double‐consciousness,” advancing an ­essentially cultural explanation of the psycho‐social effects of systemic racism in the United States.1 A generation later, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer placed culture center‐stage in their polemical neo‐Marxist critique of the culture industries as the prime vehicle for lulling the masses into complicity with capital; Parsons, seemingly less concerned about complicity with power of any sort, is best‐known for his theory of social action in which cultural norms and values activate social structures in more or less harmonious ways, enabling society to function largely on the basis of consensus rather than conflict. Howard Becker, part of the second‐generation Chicago School along with Goffman, emerged as a key figure in the “production of culture” approach that later came to dominate what would initially be called the “sociology of culture.” Much more could be said; the point of this cursory overview is to point out the deep and varied roots of cultural analysis in the Western sociological cannon despite the relatively scant attention paid to culture as an explicit theoretical concern or founding concept, and despite the relatively recent visibility of cultural sociology per se. Indeed, the professionalization of sociology in the United States following World War II arguably witnessed a backsliding in matters of culture, as the discipline embraced positivism and divided into discrete subfields largely organized around research techniques, research problems, and theoretical languages reflecting the cannon (Connell 1997). Notwithstanding the outposts occupied by social constructionists, symbolic interactionists, and ethnographers, culture was largely the purview of anthropologists (Hall et al. 2010; Grindstaff et al. 2019). The oft‐discussed “cultural turn” in the social sciences and humanities during the 1970s and 1980s challenged the taken‐for‐granted assumptions of both positivism and Parsonian functionalism, paving the way for a meaning‐centered cultural sociology to emerge (see Jacobs and Spillman 2005; Binder et al. 2008; Hall et al. 2010; Alexander et al. 2012; Patterson 2014; Jacobs and Hanrahan 2016; Grindstaff et al. 2019). As an intellectual transformation, the cultural turn was shaped by and a response to both political‐economic and social forces. On the one hand was the shift from industrialism to post‐industrialism; as economies globalized and labor grew more “flexible,” precarious, and (especially in the global north) service‐­oriented, communication technologies and information networks multiplied and grew more complex. In wealthy societies across the globe, leisure gained prominence relative to work, with cultural choices, pursuits, and practices becoming more central to self‐ expression and increasingly shaped by advertising and popular culture (sports, media, music, fashion, etc.). Across sociology as an empirical discipline, these shifts inspired increased attention to culture as an object of analysis. On the other hand, was the maturation of broad social and countercultural movements that challenged existing inequalities and exclusions, including the exclusion of women and people of color as knowledge‐producers from politics, the culture industries, and the academy. The founding of gender‐ and ethnic‐studies departments in universities was one consequence; another was the incorporation of new voices and ideas into the more traditional social science and humanities disciplines, albeit partially and incompletely. Increasingly, questions of power, language, and representation assumed center stage and found extensive theoretical and empirical elaboration in critical Marxist, feminist, and post‐colonial scholarship, as well as the developing



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fields of cultural studies and queer theory  –  approaches which were (and remain) highly interdisciplinary. The intellectual influence on cultural sociology of these wide‐ranging political‐economic and social transformations encompass but are not limited to hermeneutics (Clifford Geertz, Paul Ricoeur), semiotics and structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi‐Strauss, Roland Barthes), phenomenology and social constructionism (Peter Berger and Dorothy Smith by way of Alfred Schutz, as well as, in a different vein, Bruno Latour), poststructuralism (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault), critical Marxism (Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, Raymond Williams), feminist and queer theory (Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks), and postcolonial theory (W. E. B. du Bois, Franz Fanon, Edward Said). None of these categories well‐describes the approach of Pierre Bourdieu, arguably one of the most important influences (some might say the most important influence) on the field. The cultural turn helped produce a diverse and intellectually rich subfield – institutionalized in 1988 with the debut of the “Sociology of Culture” section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), now the second‐largest of the association’s sections – in which culture is less likely to be theorized as an overarching force (positive or negative) or a generalized system of beliefs and more likely to prioritize the empirical investigation of specific meaning‐making processes and practices. Initially, a significant core of the section adhered to the Becker‐inspired “production of culture” paradigm today associated with Richard Peterson and his cohort, which uses the tools of analysis developed in the study of organizations, occupations, and networks to explore how cultural phenomena  –  from art, literature, music, and museums to news, television, fashion, and food – are shaped by the systems that create, distribute, evaluate, and preserve them (see Peterson and Anand 2004 for an overview). As Alexander and his colleagues (2012) note, this paradigm was easily accepted by mainstream sociology because it more or less subordinated issues of meaning and aesthetics to the analytic concerns of organizational and economic sociology, already well‐established (see also Mukerji and Schudson 1986). Although such studies may emphasize how power relations get institutionalized implicitly through the organizational activities of the production process, the reproduction of inequality was not a major focus of the paradigm. Increasing interdisciplinarity and greater attention to power in the context of meaning‐making marked the shift from “sociology of culture” to “cultural ­sociology.” The term “cultural sociology,” which came into use in the 1990s and was more or less institutionalized by the 2000s (see Alexander 1996), signals the centrality of culture in sociological analysis beyond the realm of the culture‐producing industries to encompass every domain of social life. Cultural sociology is the study of society through a cultural lens. This means that culture is not a variable thrown into the mix or an add‐on to existing analyses, but rather, is understood to be constitutive of all social relations. Cultural sociology is ecumenical; to quote Binder et al. (2008, p. 10) “culture is to be found to be instrumental in small‐group interactions as well as in the reproduction of persistent social institutions such  as  schools, state bureaucracies, the legal system, and the market economy.” Methodologically, the study of culture can prioritize participant observation and interviewing, the semiotics of media texts or other forms of textual discourse, archival and comparative‐historical analysis, formal modeling and statistical

108 Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo methods, and wide‐ranging theoretical treatises on the cultural patterns and frameworks that make local practices intelligible. The sweep of cultural sociology ranges from the barrios of Boston (Small 2004) to the gardens of Versailles (Mukerji 1997), from the novel in Nigeria (Griswold 2002) to the opera in Argentina (Benzecry 2012), from the glamorization of misery (Illouz 2003) to the aestheticization of civility (Ikegami 2005), from Oxford University (Soares 1999) to the Malawi countryside (Swidler and Watkins 2017), and from the art of surrender (Wagner‐Pacifici 2005) to patterns of empire (Go 2008). In the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, both the first (Hall et al. 2010) and second (Grindstaff et al. 2019) editions, the editors call this ecumenical approach the “Broad Program.” To paraphrase, the Broad Program embraces intellectual diversity of topic and method and is important precisely for its breadth; it constitutes the subfield in a way that encourages controversy, debate, and research, and that speaks to scholars engaged in cultural analysis more widely, both within and beyond sociology. This approach does not seek to draw boundaries around what does and doesn’t count as culture, but it does take the sociological study of culture to be the study of society because the cultural and the social inevitably intersect (see also Binder et al. 2008). The Broad Program points to the ways in which cultural concerns have seeped into other sociological subfields, and it also calls for a more globalized cultural sociology, one that must come to terms with its Eurocentric biases. We take up these issues in more detail below.

From Cultural Sociology to Culturalized Sociology In our view, the most enduring legacy of the cultural turn has been the emergence of what we’re calling here a culturalized sociology. Virtually every essay and volume to take stock of cultural sociology (and/or the sociology of culture) has noted that not only has it become a thriving subfield institutionalized in its own right, but that cultural issues have been permeating virtually every subfield of the discipline – even those, or perhaps especially those, that, on the surface, don’t appear particularly amenable or hospitable to cultural analysis. In other words, we are witnessing the “culturalization” of sociology writ large. This does not mean every working ­sociologist actually prioritizes culture – many do not – but that cultural analysis is possible, and increasingly visible, throughout the entirety of the discipline. In this section, we highlight some specific examples of how culturalized inquiry can advance sociological knowledge. Our first example is science and technology studies (STS), a relatively young subfield whose explicit agenda is to unpack the nature and practice of science as a social institution. For STS scholars, scientific findings are not objective representations of the world but the product of particular groups of people working on particular problems, trained in particular ways, and guided by particular norms, assumptions, and values. Yet within science itself, the claim to objectivity still prevails. In the words of Francesca Bray, to study science from an STS perspective is to study “the culture of no culture – the politics of the apolitical, the contingencies and limitations of the universal, the embodiment or rhetoric of abstract reasoning” (Bray 2019; see also Franklin 1995; Epstein 2008). Empirical research reveals the divergent cultural



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assumptions and hierarchical social relations that underpin the production of knowledge in specific scientific disciplines. Moreover, in late modernity, the broad public culture that used to support or at least accept science’s claims to universal objectivity is changing. In large part due to the lived experience of repeated nuclear and other disasters whose occurrence was once unthinkable because their prevention was guaranteed by scientific “experts,” lay experts, stakeholders, and other social groups increasingly demand representation in discussions about how to manage the risks manufactured by science and technology (Beck 1992; Beamish 2015). A related example is Steven Epstein’s research on the collective struggle of ordinary people living with AIDS to be recognized as “experts” and not just “disease constituents,” a shift which had significant consequences both for treatment/care of individuals and for the resources accorded AIDS‐related research and advocacy in the United States (Epstein 1996). STS scholars have also documented the “decentering” of scientific authority transnationally, as they analyze how scientists in the global south criticize and resist, even as they partially participate in, the social networks and institutional practices that both prioritize and universalize the scientific agendas of the global north (Connell et al. 2017). Economic sociology has similarly recognized the “embeddedness” of economic concepts and practices in social life. Many researchers draw on and expand Karl Polanyi’s (2001[1944]) insights that the “self‐regulating” free market never actually existed. Instead, the market relies on rules and regulations that presuppose ongoing state action; meanwhile, the market cannot be relied upon to ensure the public’s access to essential public goods, such as education and health care (Block and Somers 2014). As such, this body of research uncovers how the notion of the “free market” – a self‐regulating market that transcends politics and ideology – is itself very much a cultural construction that has become naturalized and moralized, all the while posing grave threats to human flourishing. Other economic sociologists examine the flip side of the coin, uncovering how cultural values and social relationships are increasingly embedded in market mechanisms. Sometimes referred to as the “moralized markets” school (Reich 2014), this research highlights how social actors creatively draw on available cultural values to define the moral boundaries of their economic transactions and, in the process, further institutionalize these values (Spillman 2012). For example, the sanctity of death is both invoked and simultaneously promoted by the growing life insurance industry (Zelizer 1978). Similarly, the moral criticism of medical overtreatment helps shape decisions about the nature and extent of end‐of‐ life care in hospice settings, and in the process, the discourse against overtreatment gains greater currency (Livne 2014). These inquiries illustrate that the mutual embeddedness of the cultural and the economic – complex and at times fraught with contradictions (Reich 2014) – is at the core of how “the market” works. Another “culturalized” subfield is the sociology of education, which from the beginning has had a strong cultural interest in status reproduction and inequality (for an overview, see Stevens 2008). Here the influence of Pierre Bourdieu is key, particularly his theory of culture as a weapon in the war of class distinction, developed through a broad‐ranging investigation of the ways in which explicit and implicit linkages between status cultures and dominant institutions contribute to social stratification in France (Bourdieu 1984). As Lizardo (2010) observes, Bourdieu combined Weber’s theory of status as a driver of class, Marx’s analysis of class domination, and

110 Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo Durkheim’s focus on shared systems of classification, to argue that status‐based advantages produced within the family and in class‐based occupational fields become inscribed in the very classificatory frameworks used by institutions to legitimate the differential allocation of rewards. Annette Lareau and Mitchell Stevens, among others, fruitfully applied this argument to the US context, demonstrating how American educational institutions are not culture‐neutral, but rather privilege the culture of the upper‐middle classes, making it comparatively easier for those classes to successfully navigate and benefit from them (Lareau 2000[1989]; Stevens 2009; see also Lareau 2003, 2011). In other words, it isn’t just that rich parents provide more resources to help their kids succeed at school; they also cultivate in their children a range of class‐specific cultural competencies (related to language, diction, deportment, styles of dress, aesthetic preferences, etc.  –  what Bourdieu termed “cultural capital”) that manifest as “natural talent.” These insights extend beyond the realm of education and have helped re‐center questions of power within cultural sociology. In any number of social institutions, the embodiment of legitimate culture cues institutional gatekeepers  –  whether ­parents, teachers, doctors, social workers, or other professional stakeholders – as to who deserves to be heard, granted a second chance, or generally given favorable treatment in everyday institutional negotiations (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Anspach 1993; Lareau 2003; Carter 2005; Lareau 2011; Warikoo 2011; Lo 2015). Prudence Carter (2005) and Natasha Warikoo (2011) in different ways use and qualify Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital in their focus on poor, minority youth in the United States (Carter) and immigrant minority youth in the United States and the United Kingdom (Warikoo), respectively. They demonstrate that what counts as cultural capital is context‐dependent; it is one thing among peers/community and something else in dominant (white) institutions, and youth are often adept at alternating (code‐switching) between the two. At the same time, the two realms are not equal in terms of facilitating social mobility because of the considerable power wielded by institutional gatekeepers in creating or foreclosing education and occupational opportunities, making code‐ switching critical to the success of youth in navigating the broader society. Straubhaar (2007) has applied the cultural capital framework to the study of “local” versus “global” symbolic goods in Brazil. He found that, consistent with research linking class advantage with cultural “omnivorousness” (Peterson and Kern 1996) and “­cosmopolitanism” (Calhoun 2008; Igarahi and Saito 2014), upper‐class individuals, deemed high in cultural capital, gravitate toward global fare, whereas lower‐ class individuals, deemed low in cultural capital, prefer local fare. Consider, too, Michele Lamont’s extensive body of work on symbolic boundaries. In a critique as much as an application of Bourdieu, Lamont argues that what Bourdieu defined as cultural capital is a significant but not only basis on which people construct a sense of class belonging as well as a sense of difference (and potential hierarchy) between themselves and others; alternatively, she points to the importance of moral and economic criteria in drawing such boundaries, as well as the role of national context in shaping which criteria matter and in what ways (Lamont 1992, 2000). These examples illustrate the broad relevance of a culturalized sociology. Scientific knowledge, rational procedures, and merit‐ and rule‐based institutions are not only,



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in various ways, embedded in cultural frameworks that privilege certain groups; these frameworks, in turn, naturalize, universalize, and moralize group‐specific assumptions, values, and worldviews. In so doing, they impose a certain level of symbolic violence on marginalized populations (Bourdieu 1977, 1986, 1998). Broadly speaking, culturalized sociology seeks to lay bare and analyze the social relations that promote and sustain “the way things are,” including power relations that reproduce inequality. An area of increasing importance to a culturalized sociology, but one that has so far been largely neglected by the discipline, relates to new media technologies and the affordances they enable and preclude. As Manovich (2001, p. 19) argued nearly two decades ago, “we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all culture to computer‐mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication.” Hyperbole aside, the rise of an increasingly networked “digital culture” is reshaping social life, and it is odd that a discipline that supposedly emerged out of the desire to make sense of rapid social change has so little to say about it, generally speaking. Membership in the Communication, Information, Technology, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the ASA is growing but still relatively small; more significantly, sociology departments very rarely hire in this area. An imprecise term that admittedly conflates as many issues as it raises, digital culture encompasses a broad range of practices enabled by media, web, and internet‐based technologies and platforms, including the networked communities formed by, and ways of interacting on, these platforms. Deuze (2006) argues that it is redrawing basic social categories: public and private, local and global, individual and collective, human and machine. The digital turn could significantly revive (and globalize) the “production of culture” approach to cultural sociology that helped jump‐start the field in the early days of its formation. As Grindstaff and Turow (2006) note with respect to the diversification of what used be to be called “television,” especially needed are close studies of new media industry processes. Much of the existing literature addresses broad theoretical concerns, issues of representation, or large‐scale patterns of ownership and control; relatively little research examines how people actually carry out their work in new media industries. Of process‐oriented studies that do exist, most focus on news rather than advertising or entertainment (for exceptions, see Gamson 1998, Grindstaff 2002) and most tend to prioritize the process of creating content, leaving unexamined the dynamics of distribution and exhibition (for an exception, see Bielby and Harrington 2008). In an era of user‐generated content, digital delivery systems, multiplatform distribution, market fragmentation, product integration, branding, and overall media convergence, many questions remain unanswered, including what “the media” are actually mediating. Digital culture also has implications for what constitutes “the public sphere” (Habermas 1989) and who participates in it. Concerned with communicative action as both place (the town hall, the salon) and process (the rational exchange of views), Habermas conceived of the public sphere as a realm in which critical issues of the day can be raised and debated unconstrained by state intervention or market ­relations. Media scholars suggest that new media and communications technologies have effectively deterritorialized public life such that we can no longer speak of a public sphere but multiple public spheres  –  Cunningham (2004) uses the term

112 Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo “sphericules” – encompassing such diverse phenomena as indigenous satellite broadcasting, multi‐user online gaming, webcasting, e‐sports, social media, and YouTube channels – some of which increasingly rely on rather than bracket state and market influences. DeLuca and Peeples (2001) prefer the term “public screen” over “public sphere,” while Ratto and Boler (2014) describe the public sphere in terms of “DIY citizenship.” Optimistically, the digital turn enhances participatory democracy through the ­proliferation of new ideas, voices, and modes of civic engagement. Social media and open‐source information gathering have enabled individuals and communities, networked together, to not only communicate and connect but also to challenge injustices, expose corruption, shift national agendas, and even help topple regimes. Oft‐cited examples of the latter include the widespread Facebook‐organized protests following the 2009 presidential election in Iran, and the so‐called “twitter revolutions” of 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt (Ratto and Boler 2014). Less obviously political are the scores of hackers, designers, artists, and engineers who either appropriate corporately produced content for their own purposes or create their own content to distribute and share outside ­official channels (Jenkins et al. 2013; Ratto and Boler 2014). At the same time, new media and communication technologies have enabled new forms of surveillance and social control; they have also generated powerful, multinational corporate behemoths such as Apple, Google, and Amazon. Indeed, the familiar sociological concern with the tensions and interplay between structure and agency, domination and resistance, are especially salient in the digital age. In a thoughtful commentary, Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, asks whether the myriad expressions of DIY citizenship are enough to reign in growing state and corporate power in cyberspace (Deibert 2014). His research shows that while activists and citizens use new media technologies to advance democracy, repressive forces are quietly and effectively using the same tools to undermine it. Social media is coming under increasing scrutiny globally not only for mishandling user data but also for amplifying political manipulation. As this very essay is being written, executives from Facebook and Twitter are testifying before the US Senate Intelligence Committee about their efforts (or lack thereof) to limit misinformation and hate speech. The New York Times reports that in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and India, incendiary lies posted online have led to real‐life violence against ethnic minorities, while in Libya military groups trade weapons online, users post the coordinates of enemy targets, and even detention centers have their own Facebook pages (Walsh and Zway 2018). Meanwhile, in the favelas of Brazil, where drug lords control public space, young people post selfies to signal to friends and family whether they are safe, as well as to participate in a peer culture that has little public space of its own (Nemer and Freeman 2015). Even in the relatively secure sites inhabited by middle‐class American teenagers, a “space of their own” motivates much social media use, as parents, increasingly fearful of “dangers” beyond the home, restrict teens’ geographic mobility (Boyd 2014). That the voices of sociologists are muted in these important conversations (compared to scholars in related disciplines such as Communications) is regrettable. Understanding the digital revolution – with its potentially for radically democratizing meaning‐making on the one hand and radically expanding the scope of state surveillance and corporate greed on the other – is arguably as important for sociologists of



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our generation as the Industrial Revolution was for some of our forebears. With its emphasis on understanding changing patterns of meaning‐making grounded in power relations, culturalized sociology is a highly flexible intellectual tool for dissecting this major social, political, and economic transformation.

Culturalizing Sociological Theory The previous discussion is by no means exhaustive, nor is it our goal to provide an accounting of whether or to what degree all subfields of sociology have been culturalized. Rather, our aim is to stress the relationship between meaning‐making and power/inequality and the value of cultural analysis to this project. We now turn our culturalizing gaze inward, illuminating how the meaning‐making processes at the core of our discipline’s canon was itself shaped by power relations. Despite many excellent exceptions, sociology as a discipline currently remains largely dominated by the concerns, theories, and scholars of the global north, with consequences for not only who gets heard but also what topics are pursued and what intellectual traditions are prioritized. Cultural sociology has a mixed record on this front. Consider the two most recent (at the time of this writing) recipients of the Mary Douglas Book Prize, awarded by the Sociology of Culture Section of the ASA: Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Childress 2017), and The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and the Politics of Compassion (Xu 2017). Under the Cover follows in the classic lineage of the production of culture school, investigating the role of agents, editors, and publishers in shaping the novel’s industrial trajectory, while also admirably attending to dimensions of meaning‐making among readers as well. It employs multiple methods, combining survey research with ethnography conducted in the United States and Canada. The Politics of Compassion is about the response to the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China. Drawing on interviews, observation, and textual materials, Xu argues that the civilian response the quake took on the contours it did because “civic engagement,” widely taken to be a democratic process, was unfolding in an authoritarian political context: compassion for suffering was allowed, but questioning the root causes of this suffering (e.g. political corruption, neglected infrastructure) required careful negotiation. The two books are excellent, meaning‐ centered examples of cultural sociology, one of them not focused on the West. Nevertheless, 34 out of the 36 winners of the culture section book prize since 1990– 1994  –  hail from US universities, with the majority of the books centered on the United States (present company included). Moving toward a more fully culturalized sociology will necessitate more than creating a seat at the table for non‐Western scholars and “their” concerns. We suggest that one route to thinking through – and moving beyond – this situation is to understand how and why the very social theory so influential in developing cultural sociology was canonized in the first place. It is not a new story, but seemingly is not well‐known, perhaps because it requires us to reexamine the frameworks of our founding fathers, whose insights may have inspired this very volume in the first place. R. W. Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory is the go‐to source here, the foundations of which were laid 10 years earlier (Connell 1997). Offering nothing short of shock

114 Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo therapy to those of us who loved our theory seminars in graduate school, she shows, with rich historical detail, that sociology as a discipline did not emerge primarily to make sense of the transition to European modernity, that Marx, Weber, and Durkheim were not considered particularly influential by early generations of sociologists, and that the discipline did not always suffer its current collective amnesia regarding the global south. In contrast, she documents that our forefathers were centrally curious about making sense of the colonial world order, that many early‐generation sociologists struggled to reconcile the contradiction between the liberalism increasingly embraced at home and the imperialism expansively imposed on the rest of the world, and that, in those days, much of sociology, exceptions notwithstanding, offered “rational” answers to these questions in utterly racist terms that foregrounded a narrative of evolutionary “progress” and legitimated the imperial enterprise. Connell traces the invention of our discipline’s current origin story  –  one that most of us take for granted and consider simply factual today – to how American sociologists in the aftermath of World War I, most notably Talcott Parsons and his associates, purged from this story the discipline’s earlier focus on the interconnections among (and alleged racialized differences between) the periphery and the metropole. The United States, itself undergoing rapid change, was the one place where sociology flourished after WWI, and the ensuing decades witnessed a flurry of research on life in the American city, made possible by new sources of corporate and government funding (Connell 1997, 2007). But as research expertise grew, the conception of the discipline narrowed: the new object of knowledge was “society,” especially issues of social difference and social (dis)order within the metropole rather than between the metropole and the periphery (Connell 1997, 2007). As Connell summarizes it, this new sociology “bore the same name but had a different object of knowledge, a new set of methods and applications, a revised definition of the discipline, a new audience, and – eventually – a new view of its history” (1997, p. 1535). The retroactive formation of a “classical” canon did not occur overnight, of course, nor did it have a single architect. According to Connell (1997, p. 1537), the process lasted generations, required many hands, and involved two interrelated developments: the adoption of a “canonical point of view” and the selection of particular founding fathers, both promoted through the broad dissemination of “classical” texts. It is beyond the scope of this paper to detail precisely why Marx, Weber, and Durkheim were anointed as founders among the many options as the discipline shifted focus from empire to metropole, but its effect extended well beyond the United States, thanks to emerging systems of mass higher education globally and the rise of the new culture industries in the West. Durkheim and Weber survived the canon‐making efforts of Parson’s generation in part because they proved ideological useful to sociologists during the Cold War period, and Marx was grafted on a generation later (by C. W. Mills, among others) largely because of the dramatic expansion of sociology in the 1960s and the radicalization of US college students (see Connell 1997, pp. 1538–1544). The overall outcome is a theoretical heritage, now canonized, informed by the lived experiences of a small minority of the world’s population yet assuming universal applicability. Failing to understand the biases and power dynamics shaping this origin story means that even the sharpest minds of our discipline  –  Connell cites James Coleman, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu as



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examples  –  risk misunderstanding important social experiences such as slavery, modernity in the global south, and social relations among the colonized. But culturalized sociology is not primarily a deconstructionist enterprise. It must confront the omissions – and the power structures both inside and outside academia that enabled, and are further strengthened by, these omissions – in order to advance the ongoing push to pluralize. Not surprisingly, scholars located in and/or studying the global south have been at the forefront of taking up the challenge. Connell (2007) was inspired to develop Southern Theory after being routinely confronted with the discrepancy between a wealth of theory developed primarily in the global north and a variety of local experiences in Australia. Southern Theory offers not only critiques but also alternatives – specifically, possibilities for a more historicized, inclusive, and democratic social and cultural theories. In parallel fashion, Connell and coauthors (2017) have also examined the lived experiences of “southern knowledge laborers” outside of sociology, such as teachers and doctors, who, not unlike Connell in writing Southern Theory, seek to produce an alternative to either unquestioningly following European models or replacing them wholesale with southern‐centric perspectives. Consider, for example, the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. In dealing with the epidemic, local doctors found that international NGOs were often culturally insensitive and therefore fatally ineffective, but that nationalistic activists could cause even more deaths by categorically refusing to engage “Western medicine.” Eventually, some doctors found a “third alternative” by agreeing to enroll patients in clinical trials run by international NGOs, thereby establishing themselves as stakeholders, and then leveraging their position to negotiate better (long‐term, more culturally appropriate) treatment for patients (Connell et al. 2017). As such, studies of “third alternatives” reveal that theoretical or political correctness can be ineffective at best; resistance is rarely pure and modernity always “unfolds through a history of hybridization,” in both the “West” and the “non‐West” (Lo 2002, p. 199). The meanings at play and the power relations at stake in hybridized spaces await further sociological analyses. Do sociologists in the global north need to care about the local perspectives concerning AIDS workers in South Africa, Taiwanese doctors during colonialism, or indigenous resistance in Australia? Put differently, does “inclusion” imply a commitment to understand and engage with different perspectives, including how those perspectives might influence the thinking of scholars in the United States focused on the United States? Most sociologists would no doubt say yes, yet our actions to date fall short. Connell confronted the colonial origins of European sociology two decades ago (Connell 1997), but the curriculum on classical theory in the US remains largely the same. Similarly, scholars have long insisted that we “consider how the social histories and experiences of the formerly excluded serve to denaturalize our familiar concepts” (Lo 2002, p. 200; See also Clemens et al. 2005). But while “our familiar concepts” – race, gender, class, culture, work – have been refined and retooled by many brilliant minds over the years, rarely have their theoretical underpinnings been grounded in southern experiences. As a discipline, sociology still prioritizes theoretical tools largely forged by the experience of living in North America and Western Europe to analyze empirical processes and problems worldwide. Beyond perpetuating a form of symbolic violence on scholars of the global south, this trend also forecloses opportunities for richer conversations about issues directly concerning the global north.

116 Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo Comparative frameworks are essential, especially when they include voices from “below.” Lee et al. (2012) analyze the growing sociological literature on job precariousness and by drawing on the experiences of people in Western Europe and the global south, they identify three dimensions of precarity that a singular focus on the United States obscures: first, work precarity creates a crisis not just of job quality but also of social reproduction, requiring attention to the work–citizenship nexus and the connection of labor politics to state politics; second, the shift from “secure” to “flexible” work is often a core part of the state’s development strategy to maintain a competitive export niche in the global economy rather than a “natural” corporate response to global market competition; and third, popular insurgency movements anchored in the lived experiences of those most affected by precarious employment offer alternative imaginations of work, rights, and life that should play a role in shaping policy decisions (Lee et al. 2012, pp. 388–389). All three points are muted or absent in US‐focused research, in part because they lack the comparative lens that southern scholars must often adopt simply to be heard. It’s not that US‐centric analyses are wrong; it’s that their conclusions should not be considered universal. Listening elsewhere compels us “to retrieve from out peripheral vision “other” people’s experiences to understand our own, through analysis of contrast, commonality, or connection” (Lee et  al. 2012, p. 389). It’s less about “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000)  –  although that remains a provocative concept  –  and more about naming how power operates in our own discipline. None of this is to suggest that all sociologists must explicitly globalize their research or find another day job. Many important questions can be local in scope and contribute richly to culturalized sociological knowledge. The task is to u ­ nderstand the parameters of the local and to recognize that one’s own standpoint is a standpoint, that it’s not the only standpoint, and that not all relevant standpoints are equally valued and represented in “the literature.” This, too, requires a comparison of sorts, a listening from elsewhere. A feminist analysis of work in the United States, for instance, might ask why some job experiences have been labeled precarious while others have not, and why precariousness is recognized as a serious problem only when connected to global macrostructural changes affecting previously secure populations of workers (read white men). If low wages, erosion of autonomy, forced flexibility, lack of security, and lack of benefits contribute to precarity, why were not mainstream economic sociologists or sociologists of work in the United States characterizing the labor of women and people color as precarious from the get‐go? A final example: Consider how a focus on marginalized voices can serve to contextualize and “locate” Habermas’ theory of the public sphere, mentioned earlier. At its most democratic, the public sphere approximates an “ideal speech community” in which ordinary citizens come together and negotiate consensus over issues through a free and rational exchange of views. As Fraser (1990) and others have pointed out, this ideal neglected the development of plebeian public spheres and excluded whole categories of people on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, lack of property, and social status. As such, it remains useful for thinking through how and where public discourse falls short in nation‐states with democratic institutions, but does little to illuminate how most colonial and postcolonial subjects have articulated their identities, interests, and desires (see Grindstaff et al. 2019). What happens when what



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can be said in public is closely policed, regardless of its “merit”? Who determines what counts as rational? More important, what would it mean to make room for “them” in “our” public sphere? “Inclusion” would require subaltern communities whose own narratives have been forged almost entirely underground, through what Scott (1990) calls “hidden transcripts,” to abandon their familiar cultural l­anguage. Either this, or place their trust in public institutions established by their oppressors and do the work of “translating” their interests into the foreign language of rational argumentation as defined by those oppressors (Grindstaff et al. 2019; see also Lo and Fan 2010). Listening from elsewhere can take many forms, and even as it provides a basis for a more pluralized, culturalized sociology, it also challenges us to confront and clarify the epistemological basis for rejecting cultural relativism in the face of competing “truths”  –  an especially urgent matter under current socio‐political conditions. Large‐scale shifts are underway in tandem with the digital turn mentioned earlier, as witnessed by the recent upsurge in nationalist/populist movements, not only in the United States and Europe but also in the Philippines, India, Turkey, and Russia. These developments bely notions of linear “progress” and affirm the uneven, refractory ways in which macro‐structural forces touch down and find expression in local contexts. A key challenge facing a culturalized sociology is how to make sense of the increasing contestation over meaning that comes with the dispersal and recalibration of power – in regressive as well as progressive directions. This contestation over meaning involves academics and not just the ordinary folks fueling ethno‐ nationalist leanings. It is no small irony, and certainly no coincidence, that simultaneous with the gradual diversification of social, intellectual, and political life in the global north is increasing push‐back and retrenchment against those very developments. There was much handwringing among sociologists over the election of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016 because of what his presidency signaled more broadly about the very issues American sociologists study: race, gender, class, poverty, immigration, education, the media, globalization, and democracy itself. Although Trump lost the popular vote, there is no denying the depth and reach of his appeal to “make American great again” – primarily by building walls, scapegoating immigrants, legislating travel bans, and withdrawing from international accords. The election came only months after British citizens voted to leave the European Union (“Brexit”); neither event was widely predicted, and both have been characterized as a rejection of globalization “in the name of what appeared to be deeply emotional ties to culture and country” (Croucher 2018, p. 3). As Croucher (2018) notes, explanations for Trump’s victory tended to be either economic (the revolt of the left‐behinds) or cultural (fear of cultural displacement, racist reassertions of white superiority), but the opposition is misleading because the material and the cultural are mutually implicated, just as are the forces of globalization (integration) and anti‐globalization (retribalization), albeit not always equally. Trump clearly courted the white working class during his campaign (see Lamont et al. 2017), yet the majority of Trump supporters  –  like the “Leavers” of the Brexit referendum  –  were middle‐class whites (Bhambra 2017; emphasis ours). Bhambra rightly points out that racial and ethnic minorities experience the greatest precarity under globalization, relatively speaking, and that support for Trump‐like agendas are deeply cultural (specifically racial) in

118 Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo character. Bonkowski (2017) argues this support stems from a sense of collective “status threat” among ethnocultural majorities – which, in turn, can be an effective mobilizing force in the formation of white identity politics. Legitimating these politics requires the enlistment of, and participation in, media and other forms of public discourse to make claims about the status of meaning – what is truth and fact versus lies and fiction. Part of challenging “the establishment,” which both Trump and Brexit claimed to do, is challenging scientific knowledge and professional expertise produced within legacy institutions, including academia. This has put cultural sociologists and other critical scholars who embrace social constructionism in the ironic position of defending “truth” and “facts” along with something akin to “objectivity.” It also raises the question of whether, to the degree that at least some Trump and Brexit supporters are marginalized on the basis of class and education, the call for greater inclusivity and representation of marginalized voices includes listening to people “like them.” These are related issues. When political conservatives (both ordinary people and politicians alike) argue that climate‐change science, for instance, is “socially constructed” (clearly our term, not theirs), and therefore bogus, they aren’t wrong about it being socially constructed. The counterargument, however, is not to insist on the pure objectivity of science but to justify the epistemological basis of the science and why we should heed it. Cultural sociologists and other qualitative social scientists are typically quite practiced at such counterarguments, many of us having had to defend the “legitimacy” of our research to scientists themselves. Both truth and lies are socially constructed, but this does not mean they are equivalent, nor does it mean they represent “both sides” of an issue or conflict. Consider the outbreak of violence between anti‐racist protestors and white nationalists at a white supremacist rally. As we have argued elsewhere, insisting that there are two equivalent sides in such an instance, even if one is deemed morally right and the other morally wrong, obscures the fact that the claims of the former are grounded in documented patterns of lived oppression whereas the claims of the latter lack comparable standards of evidence (Grindstaff et al. 2019). Similarly, although it’s important to understand the worldview of the modal Trump or Brexit supporter, à la Hochschild (2018[2016]), their sense of precarity should not suck up all the air nor should we forget that they are allied with an ultra‐wealthy conservative business elite bent on making their precarity even greater. So much we already know; the more difficult challenge for a culturalized sociology is figuring out how to respond and move forward when conventional standards of evidence don’t matter to how people think, feel, and vote. Cultural sociology has always aimed to understand meaning rather than adjudicate facts; in our current post‐fact context this is more important than ever before.

Conclusions In his essay “Making Sense of Culture,” Orlando Patterson (2014) uses the parable of the blind men and the elephant to metaphorize the way in which, historically, ­different sociological studies of culture have assumed that the part of the elephant (culture) they’re touching constitutes the entirety. The consequence, Patterson says,



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is a lack of consensus and rigor in defining culture. We agree it’s a problem to take the part for the whole, but to our way of thinking going forward, consensus and coherence around definitions is less important than dialog among each other, especially across national boundaries, as well as reaching outward to other cultural analysts in related fields. Even if there is one elephant to be discerned, it may take many hands. More to the point, there may and very likely is more than one elephant. How, then, do we go about utilizing our many hands to enhance our u ­ nderstanding of multiple elephants? First, we advocate against the search for “the best” approach to studying culture. To cite Patterson, “the frustrating part of all this [i.e. taking the part for the whole] is that an abundance of first‐rate work on among sociologists resides in the particular sections of the elephant they embrace … This is especially true of the agenda setters, once they get down to the empirics of their craft” (2014, p. 3). To be clear, we continue to endorse, as we are ourselves continue benefitting from, scholarly discussions about different approaches and programs for understanding the complex workings of culture. At the same time, we believe cultural sociologists should avoid the sometimes zero‐sum competition for knowing/­ discovering “the best” agenda. As such, our vision for cultural sociology is incomplete and pluralist. Incomplete, because each “hand” (approach) necessarily captures only a section of one “­elephant” (culture); pluralist, because each approach to studying culture must dialog with other approaches for a reflexive self‐positioning. Informed by this broad, flexible vision, we have proposed in this essay a move from cultural ­sociology to culturalized sociology, namely a recognition that analyzing meaning‐ making grounded in power relations should be an important dimension of all subfields of sociology. As our examples show, whether subfields are, on the surface, seemingly uncultural (e.g. economic sociology) or are already culturally inclined (e.g. STS), analyses are increasingly “culturalized” when scholars grapple with how power relations shape processes of meaning‐making. Indeed, these concerns helped transform the sociology of culture – with its emphasis on the organizational and institutional processes of the culture‐producing industries – into cultural sociology. We have also turned culturalized inquiry inward, discussing the lacunae and exclusions enacted by the making our discipline’s theoretical canon. Last, we insist that culturalized sociology is constructive rather than deconstructive; that through becoming more comparative in our intellectual projects and better at listening from elsewhere even if we stay local, we can move beyond the false if popular dichotomy of denying versus obsessing with our blind spots. More urgently than ever in this “post‐truth” era, culturalized s­ ociology might help us reimagine and rearrange those webs of significance that we ourselves spin.

Note 1 Initially explicated in The Souls of Black Folks (du Bois 1903), the veil metaphorizes the inability of whites to see blacks as “real” Americans as well as the inability of blacks to see themselves outside of white interpretations of who they are; relatedly, double‐consciousness theorizes the persistent awareness of the “two‐ness” of being black in a white society – ­having to know and navigate both the dominant culture and one’s subordinate culture simultaneously, from a position of “difference” and marginality.

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8 Deviance A Sociology of Unconventionalities Nachman Ben‐Yehuda

I am that part of the power that eternally wants bad and eternally does only good. Goethe’s Faust

What Is Deviance? The word deviance conjures up many associations. Imagine, for example, a road. People travel along that road but it is not difficult to observe that quite frequently, travelers deviate from the road. Having this imagery in mind yields some intriguing questions, such as: who made this road? Where is it coming from? Where is it leading? Do travelers who deviate from the road do it alone? Journey with others? How do travelers on the road react to the deviance? Do these deviating travelers pave a new road? To understand better the nature of deviance, we need to take what may appear as a simple concept and examine it as a potentially problematic concept, which indeed it is. In the 1930s, some sociologists posed an intriguing question. Prostitution, they pondered, was a behavior that did not require a great investment to learn. Most sexual behavior is straightforward and women who want, or are forced, to become prostitutes are not required to spend a great deal of time in acquiring complex skills. Economically, they argued, becoming a prostitute seems to have a potentially high income. Why, then, they continued to ask, do most women not become prostitutes? Their answer was that this dilemma reflects a clash between two social systems – morality and economy. Economically speaking, prostitution may yield a high income with a low investment. Morally, becoming a prostitute meant acquiring a stigma,

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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damaging one’s self‐esteem, and basically being involved in an immoral behavior. The clash between these two social systems ends with morality gaining the upper hand, and thus, most women do not become prostitutes (e.g., Kingsely Davis). This old interpretation not only forces to the surface important elements in understanding deviance but also illustrates how forming questions and issues in the study of deviance have changed. The economic issue involved in prostitution has become a side issue as compared to issues of trafficking in women. Moreover, many researchers cast doubt on whether a choice to become a prostitute reflects a genuine freewill option. This old interpretation brings forth two essential elements in deviance: Morality is first. Simply put, morality is a social system that we acquire in various processes of socialization, and that instructs us what is right and what is wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is allowed and what not. Moral guidelines are not simple, and social systems may have several such guidelines, some even incommensurable one with another. Moreover, as we pass through such various stages in our life as professional training, jobs, and aging, we may experience various – sometimes contradictory – moral guidelines. Nevertheless, the first element to defining deviance is morality. It is not too difficult to realize that because morality is not a simple entity, we already have in‐built into deviance an unstable (and sometimes vague) element of uncertainty and ambiguity. In fact, the illustration of prostitution also demonstrates that the kinds of questions one may ask in deviance research are also affected by moral codes. It is very doubtful whether contemporary researchers of women in prostitution would form the questions that were asked in the 1930s. Morality, in and by itself, is insufficient to turn any behavior into deviance. On  many issues, some people think that a particular behavior is deviant while others disagree. There is a second element missing here. This is the element of power. That is, the ability to force a specific definition of behavior as deviant, even against opposition. Alas, social and political power can be just as ambiguous and shaky as morality – perhaps even more so. It is thus the combination of these two elements – morality and power – that will determine what, when, and who will be defined as deviant. Consequently, we need to keep in mind that the very definition of what deviance is depends on two variables that can in essence be ambiguous and uncertain. Indeed, Downes and Rock (2007) emphasize that deviance eludes definitions and that much of it has to do with the difficulties involved in predicting and controlling the implications of moral rules. Looking from this perspective, deviance seems to be characterized by its relative nature and changing character. One of the instructive illustrations for this is Robert R. Bell’s (1971) textbook on deviance. Following an introductory conceptual section, the second part of the book presents – in different chapters – various cases of deviance. Obviously, it should not be too difficult to view these chapters as presenting what the field of deviance views as deviance. Moreover, one can infer that the order of the presentation of the cases may have something to do with the importance of the topics. How, then, did Bell in 1971 present the empirical bread and butter of the field? The first empirical chapter that presents a case of deviance, 24 pages long, is devoted to and focused on – you better believe this – “premarital sex.” The last three chapters of the book are on “militant women,” “militant students,” and “the Hippie movement,” respectively.

126 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda Furthermore, if one looks at the development of one of the long‐lasting and established textbooks on deviant behavior, that of Erich Goode (now in its eleventh edition), one can see similar cultural changes. Its second edition (1984; the first 1978 edition was packaged in a symbolic interactionism perspective), highlighted such cases of deviance as drug usage, homosexuality, violent behavior (including homicide and rape), property crimes, and mental disorders (as did the various editions of another established textbook – by Alex Thio, published by different publishers). However, in its fifth edition (1997), but much more forcefully in its sixth (2001) and seventh editions (2005), the focus changed. A chapter on ideological, ethical, and moral implications of studying deviance was added, and the sixth and seventh editions also include chapters on cognitive deviance (focusing on religious deviance, parapsychology, UFOlogy, and urban legends  –  a category that, by the way, had appeared in Jack D. Douglas and Frances C. Waksler’s textbook in 1982) and physical aberrations, as a result of which, previous subjects were condensed and presented in a much more concise manner. The seventh edition even had a chapter on the “death” of the sociology of deviance. Moreover, such deviancies as shoplifting and massage parlors, which appeared quite saliently in the 1978 edition, disappeared completely in the 2005 edition. Perhaps one of the more exciting developments in recent years is the publication of different handbooks on deviance, including a two‐volume encyclopedia of deviancies. While these publications did not suggest new theories, they did place within the field of deviance a large number of new cases. For example: atheism, fundamentalism, the new religious movements, poverty, migrants, dog, and cockfights, music, careers, hackers, terror, visual and qualitative perspectives, deviance and movies  –  these are only a few illustrations of categories in which deviant behavior might be witnessed (e.g. see Forsyth and Copes 2014; Goode 2015; Brown and Sefiha 2017). To go beyond the different cases, let me illustrate a few with more details. We consider incest as a most serious offense. However, Cleopatra’s first marriage was to her younger brother. She herself was the result of her mother’s marriage to her brother. In fact, we have historical accounts that reveal that sexual relations and marriages between siblings were, in some ancient cultures, a privilege of upper, nobility, and royalty classes. In certain situations of war, rape is a practice not prosecuted by combatants. Sometimes it is even encouraged. Killing people is not always forbidden, and there are situations when killing people becomes mandatory. Sometimes it is even rewarded. When examining acts that we consider deviant, it is thus always a good idea to separate the act and the cultural interpretation of the act (e.g., what we call it), and to look for similar acts and cultural interpretations in both history and other cultures. Deviance is therefore a relative phenomenon, among cultures and over time within cultures. Researchers of deviance have known, discussed, and written about this for dozens of years.

Some Contemporary Debates In recent years, the sociology of deviance has become a focus for four different debates. The first has probably to do with the fact that since the late 1960s–1970s, no major theoretical or paradigmatic shifts have been introduced. The last analytical

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upheaval was the introduction of labeling theory, and since then nothing of that magnitude or caliber has taken place. One of the results is that some works have been published about the “death” of deviance (Sumner 1994a, b; Bendle 1999; Miller et al. 2001; Best 2004, 2005; for counter‐arguments see Goode 2002, 2004a, b). One needs to be aware that declarations of “death” have become rather popular: the death of history, the novel, sociology, the city, the suburbs, crime, love, sex, religion, God, the nation‐state, friendship, and more. These proclamations have become a fashionable, provocative, and headline‐grabbing popular activity. Deviance, obviously, is not dead. Behavior that violates moral codes and is reacted to by powerful enforcers is not, and will not be, dead. The question of whether to refer to these behaviors as “deviance” remains open. This brings us to the next debate, and that is whether there is something we can refer to as “positive deviance.” Some sociologists who have studied and written about deviance, for example Erich Goode, feel very strongly that the very essence that defines deviance is that it elicits negative responses. Such gatekeepers would not allow any expansion or re‐interpretation of the concept of deviance in nonnegative terms (see Ben‐Yehuda 1990a). Nevertheless, more researchers in sociology and other disciplines have increasingly used the concept. Moreover, this debate about the nature of the concept naturally directs us to two other related and relevant debates, this time from two supposedly opposing political views. The ascendance of postmodern and politically correct criticisms and influences has made hurling stones at the study of deviance a common practice for some. This practice challenges the very definition of some behaviors as “deviance” and accuses sociologists who study deviance of being part of helping to oppress cultural variance and support hegemonic repressive powers to suppress and delegitimize suffering minorities. The claim is made that the study of deviance itself reifies cultural power relationships and moral perceptions that, in turn, define deviance (typically a claim from the radical left side of the political spectrum). In no other current behaviors is this claim clearer than in discussions about homosexuality. In fact, the attack is so severe that we should not be surprised to see the category of “homosexuality” being phased out from textbooks on deviant behavior. Moreover, Dombrink and Hillyard (2007) point out that as moralities changed in the United States, gambling went through a process of normalization. They suggest that more normalization processes will probably occur in relation to abortion, assisted suicide, and stem cell research. Legalizing the usage of psychoactive substances seems to be on the horizon as well. The other challenging attack on the study of deviance comes from the opposite side of the political map. This conservative criticism maintains that the way we define and study deviance somehow degrades American society by challenging the validity of its moral claims and relativizing morality to a point where morality itself may disappear. A good illustration for this position can be found in Hendershott’s (2002) book, which argues that deviance is an absolute term and represents an essential phenomenon. This claim, which comes from the right side of the map – if taken seriously – requires that we shrink the variance with which we conceptualize deviance and abandon the idea and empirical findings that deviance is a relative phenomenon. It demands that we conceptualize deviance according to strict black‐and‐white boundaries, like in a good old western movie a la John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Sergio Leone, or Clint Eastwood.

128 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda This morality, undoubtedly informed by religious standards, stands a good chance of throwing us back to deviant behavior perspectives of the 1950s when – supposedly – it was very clear what was and what was not deviance. As an antidote to the politically correct postmodernists, this is a powerful potion. However, because it is so radical, and constructs complex realities in such simplified terms, it shrinks the variance of social phenomena and creates an unnecessary, and empirically wrong, extremism. And yet, a danger lurks here. The danger is that with the ascendance of religious fundamentalism, moral majorities, and conservatism in general, this radical view may find strong political (ergo, budgetary as well) and academic support. In fact, the recent ascendance of what can be easily termed as a global anti‐liberalism revolt gives this view strong support. Given that deviance is a relative, sometimes ambiguous, phenomenon, how is it best to conceptualize it? I believe that it is best approached if we take the formulations of Emile Durkheim as our starting point.

Enter Durkheim Emile Durkheim first set out to establish that deviance is an inevitable aspect of all societies: “Crime … is … an integral part of all healthy societies … Crime is … necessary; it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life, and … is useful” (1938, pp. 67, 70). Next, Durkheim attempted to specify exactly why this is so. His answer consists of two interconnected foci. In The Rules of Sociological Method, he argues that: “Crime is normal because a society exempt from it is utterly impossible … Crime implies not only that the way remains open to necessary changes, but that in certain cases it directly prepares these changes. Where crime exists, collective sentiments are sufficiently flexible to take on a new form, and crime sometimes helps to determine the form they will take” (1938, pp. 65–73). This formulation implies that crime is a necessary and vital part of social systems because it can create and sustain the flexibility necessary for the social system to adapt itself to varying conditions. Crime and deviance are thus viewed as mechanisms for social change. Durkheim offers as evidence the example of a renowned criminal, Socrates. “According to Athenian law Socrates was a criminal, and his condemnation was no more than just. However, his crime, namely the independence of his thought … served to prepare a new morality and faith” (1938, p. 73). However, in The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim adds: The only common characteristic of all crimes is that they consist … in acts universally disapproved of by members of each society … An act is criminal when it offends strong and defined states of the collective conscience … Crime is everywhere essentially the same, since it everywhere calls forth the same effect … Its primary and principal function is to create respect for … beliefs, traditions, and collective practices … Crime damages … unanimity [and] since it is the common conscience which is attacked, it must be that which resists, and accordingly the resistance must be collective. [Punishment’s] true function is to maintain social cohesion intact. (1964 [1933], pp. 70–110)

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Even more specifically, Durkheim notes: Crime brings together upright consciences and concentrates them. We have only to notice what happens, particularly in a small town, when some moral scandal has just been committed. They stop each other on the street, they visit each other, they seek to come together to talk of the event and wax indignant in common. From all the similar impressions which are exchanged, for all the temper that gets itself expressed, there emerges a unique temper – which is everybody’s without being anybody’s in particular. That is the public temper. (1964 [1933], p. 102)

What Durkheim implies in these passages is that crime threatens the moral core of society. Crime’s main role is therefore to invoke punishment, which, in turn, facilitates cohesion and maintains societal boundaries. That is, crime helps to maintain stability. Quite a few sociologists echoed the idea that deviance helps to solidify symbolic‐moral boundaries.

Implications of Durkheim’s Ideas Durkheimian formulations give us some interesting insights into the nature of deviance, reactions to it, and its complex cultural role. The first insight is that to understand the way cultures and societies work, we need to understand the symbolic order of these societies. At the core of these symbolic orders lies morality. Acts that challenge this core stand a good chance of being defined as crime or deviance. However, such challenges are far from being simple on at least two accounts: 1. They open the way for two contradictory paths. One, the challenge may succeed and the result could be social change. Two, the challenge may fail and the result could be a stronger ossification of the culture. 2. Although Durkheim’s formulations about morality are basic and important, our understanding of morality has developed much further (see, e.g., Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Lowe 2006). The idea that societies are structured from different, often competing, symbolic‐ moral universes takes us away from Durkheim’s concept of coherency in societal moral systems, which are – supposedly – internalized in more or less uniform processes of socialization. Durkheim did not give too much weight to the role of power, either. But, certainly, power plays a major role in deciding which one of the two paths will be chosen. This is not to say that deviants are always agents for social change, romantic, or rebellious (Kooistra 1989). On the contrary. However, the idea that deviance is connected to morality and power gives us an interesting clue as to possible ways to interpret deviance within a broader context – that of change and stability. Let us examine these two routes.

130 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda Deviance and Social Control Negative responses to nonconformity and deviance tend to neutralize the challenge in such behaviors and reaffirm boundaries of symbolic‐moral universes. Such responses can be conceptualized under the heading of social control. Social control theoreticians tend to assume that, given a chance and an opportunity, humans will deviate. Contrary to the main question asked by many scholars working on deviance – “Why does deviance occur?” – scholars working in social control reverse the question. Their main question is “Why does deviance not occur more, lots more?” Their answer is that the reason most people do not deviate is because they are influenced by mechanisms of social control. Typically, researchers tend to detail two types of such mechanisms. First are inner mechanisms – in such forms as conscience or internalization and absorption of values and norms acquired during various socialization processes. Second are external mechanisms such as parents, teachers, police officers, courts. The various combinations of internal and external mechanisms have provided a basis to quite a few theories and concepts on how we can conceptualize control. A contemporary influential theory is that of Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), who argue that an ineffective socialization process breeds low self‐control, which in turn allows the pursuit of immediate and simple gratifications. Involvement in deviance and committing crimes is not far behind. Influenced by Foucault’s ideas, a new approach to control – sometimes referred to as controlology  –  was developed by Stanley Cohen, Jason Ditton, and others. It views societies as control organs that apply coercive and repressive measures in a systematic and continuous fashion to keep citizens docile and conformist. The other possibility is that challenges to the status quo will produce cultural and social change. Examining this possibility will take us to the next section of this chapter.

Moral Entrepreneurship In relatively noncomplex cultures, there is a fairly good chance that similar moral perceptions characterize the entire culture and are accepted by most if not all of its members. Processes of differentiation and the creation of morally and culturally fragmented cultures  –  or multiculturalism  –  gave rise to societies where morality itself is chronically contested and negotiated, thus enabling room for, and empowering, the activities of multiple moral entrepreneurs. Moral crusades, as a form of moral enterprise (Becker 1963), mean that some social agents, feeling committed and dedicated to a specific morality, typically present such motivational accounting systems as a “cause” or “justice.” These crusaders begin to be socially and culturally active and rally support in order to generate social power and use it to try to steer a culture in a direction they feel is right. These activities are typically characterized as a moral crusade. Such crusades, for example, were easy to discern in the attempt on the part of the feminist movement to try to make pornography illegal (e.g. Goode and Ben‐Yehuda 2009, Chapter 13), and in the moral crusades in the early part of the twentieth century that brought about the criminalization of the use of various consciousness‐altering substances (including – for a short period – alcohol).

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Moral Panics Perhaps the most dramatic of all moral enterprises and crusades is the moral panic (Young 1971; Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben‐Yehuda 2009). Based mainly on symbolic interaction and labeling theory, but having its eyes on some other areas such as collective behavior, social problems, and social movements, the concept and theory of moral panics present us with a large base of analytical power and flexibility, allowing us to examine a sizable variety of cultural happenings with a theoretically integrated apparatus. In essence, moral panics refer to the creation of a situation where exaggerated fear is manufactured about topics that are moral in essence and nature. Moral panics have to create, focus on, and sustain powerfully persuasive images of folk devils that can serve as the heart of moral fears. Such imaginary and highly overstated fears characteristically focus on gang activities, youth, illicit psychoactive drug usage, pornography, prostitution, witchcraft, and satanic kidnapping of children, but not only on these. Researchers interested in moral panics tend to examine people’s cognitive maps (how they construct their worldviews and behavior), and how and where the symbolic nature of cultures materialize. The role that moral panics play lies in their ability to help draw the moral boundaries among the different symbolic‐moral universes that make up complex cultures and societies. Moral panics have always been the occasion for bearers of different moralities to clash, negotiate, and end the panic, either with a continued process of social change or by reaffirming existing moral boundaries. The volatile nature of moral panics need not mislead us. Like the routinization of charisma, moral panics may leave in their wake a trail of new institutional arrangements and bureaucratic structures. Once such social arrangements come into being, their vested interest will continue to influence actions. One of the best historical illustrations of this process is the criminalization of the use of a variety of consciousness‐altering chemicals. Moreover, even if a specific moral panic does not seem to leave immediate routinization traces, its very occurrence tends to leave memories and cognitive sediments that may make the next moral panic more successful in achieving longer‐lasting effects. Moral panics are therefore not marginal or trivial events. They represent central challenging processes of change and stability in the symbolic realm of cultures. While not exclusively so, it is through these moral panics that we are made to understand and construct the social and cultural ambience in which we choose – or are made – to live. As Stanley Cohen (1972) compellingly pointed out, moral panics are about representations: which sector of the society has the power to represent itself and its interests to others as legitimate and valid. In this sense, moral panics touch some most central and profound social processes. The popularity and widespread usage of the concept is thus easily understood. What happens to moral panics in multicultural societies where morality itself is constantly contested and negotiated? Consensus about morality in such societies is not a simple or taken‐for‐granted issue and, therefore, the entire issue of launching moral panics within more general processes of moral entrepreneurship, legislation, policing, and regulation has had to be reconceptualized. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that the number of moral panics in multicultural societies will increase. Such societies are likely to experience many small‐scale moral panics, launched by

132 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda various moral entrepreneurs, some of whom may even compete for the moral hearts and minds of different cultural groups. Moral panics, after all, are intended to help specific moral perceptions dominate. When different moral ideas and concepts compete for attention and domination in a social and cultural landscape that allows and tolerates such rivalry, indeed more moral panics can be expected to occur. Thus, in a recent augmentation of moral panic theory, modern theories of risk have prompted some researchers to try to conceptualize moral panics within theorizations of moral risk. Furthermore, researchers interested in the media as creator and spreader of fear (following the newsroom slogan, “If it bleeds, it leads”) have also focused on moral panics as an important mechanism for creating and sustaining cultures of fear. It is thus not too difficult to realize that moral entrepreneurs are engaged in moral crusades that sometimes develop into moral panics, the goal of which is to change the moral landscape of a culture. These attempts are not always successful because in multicultural societies these moral entrepreneurships may encounter resistance, and the result may be no change in the moral landscape. Moral entrepreneurships typically involve constructions and manipulations of social memories. These activities ultimately aim to alter the social identity of persons and cultures.

Deviance, Change, and Stability1 Examining deviance from a revised Durkheimian perspective implies that we can look at deviance as part of processes of cultural change and stability. This perspective leads us to a conceptual model. As many researchers of deviance have pointed out, deviance is not a rare occurrence. When acts of deviance occur, the next question is: How do people react to them? A successful harsh squelching response will annul the challenge to the status quo and maintain moral and symbolic stability. This, I suspect, is the more frequent scenario. However, a different scenario may take place. Some moral entrepreneurs may unleash a moral crusade, accompanied by moral panics, and manage to achieve significant cultural changes. Douglas’s (1977) analysis suggests the term creative deviance and argues that “deviance is the mutation that is generally destructive of society, but it is also the only major source of creative adaptations of rules to new life situations” (1977, p. 60). Consequently, he suggests that entire cultures and societies can change through deviance. To have a better understanding of how this can happen, some discussion of deviance and power is necessary.

Politics and Deviance Who defines what (and who) as deviance? Who has the power to enforce such a definition? Two main possibilities exist here. The first consists of types of deviance where the issues of power and morality are explicitly at the forefront as the challenge (and potential threat) to the status quo. The second consists of deviancies where this

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challenge is implicit. Many deviant acts that are referred to as “political” are in the first category. Roebuck and Weeber (1978) suggested three categories in this area: 1. Crimes against the state. These include assassination, political bombing, bribery, tax and/or tax evasion, conscientious objection, spying, and terrorist acts. 2. Crimes against society. False advertisements, medical fraud, environmental pollution, occupational hazards, and unsafe machine are examples. 3. Crimes committed by the government. These acts include police corruption and/or violence, violation of human rights, genocide, and discrimination. Ross (2002) focuses on such topics as sabotage, treason, terror, state crimes (torture, genocide), corruption, illegal surveillance, and human rights violation. My previous work on betrayal and treason (Ben‐Yehuda 2001) indicated that invocation of the term betrayal or treason always involved violations of the moral codes associated with loyalty and trust. Such violations, however, were not enough. Invoking treason or betrayal and enforcing its acceptance required the use of power. Moreover, in cases of terror and the media, morality and especially power play a major role (Ben‐Yehuda 2005). Politics and deviance can be classified into three basic types of deviance that come from: (i) the periphery and are aimed at the center; (ii) the center and are aimed at the periphery; (iii) either the center or the periphery and are aimed at the same level (center to center, periphery to periphery). These forms of deviance are always connected to issues of political justice, political trials, criminals as heroes, and political criminals.

Political Deviance versus Political Justice Strong feelings of injustice could motivate people into actions aimed to rectify what they feel is unjust. Criteria for these feelings and actions are not, and cannot be, objective or absolute. Many deviant acts classified as “terror” may use the language of justice/injustice in justifying or condoning these acts. And, indeed, rhetoric capitalizing on “victim accounts (or narratives)” have become quite popular in justifying some nasty and problematic behaviors. Such behaviors may challenge (or threaten) the foundations of a social order. A closely related issue is that of using processes of deviantization (sometimes by the criminal justice system itself) for political purposes  –  e.g., police involvement in riot control, capture, and trials of terrorists, enforcement of immigration laws, or treating political opponents as criminals. My previous work on political assassinations (Ben‐Yehuda 1993) documented how assassinations can be conceptualized as an alternative system of justice. A sharp decrease in assassinations could be observed when formal mechanisms of justice were introduced.

Political Trials and Judging Deviants Characterizing political trials is not a simple undertaking because their nature is not entirely clear. In essence, such trials tend to involve those who are accused, directly and explicitly, of threatening and/or challenging the legitimacy of a regime: treason,

134 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda sedition, mutiny, civil unrest. Political trials may produce political prisoners, which, in turn, may lead to another interesting process – politicization of prisons. Political deviance always entails some form of conflict that is presented as a conflict between two, or more, symbolic‐moral universes: that of the challengers (real or imaginary) and that of those being challenged. Therefore, the history of political deviance is also, in an inverse fashion, the history of morality and the distribution of power. However, in the popular and older professional literature, political deviance was usually taken to mean challenges against the power and legitimacy of the rulers, and not vice versa. In the culture where Socrates lived, his persecutors had more legitimized power, so that when the two symbolic‐moral universes and opposing systems of vocabularies of motives collided, Socrates lost. In today’s liberal democratic societies, freedom of thought and speech are hailed as primary virtues. In other regimes, individuals who exercise freedom of thought, or challenge the “order,” are liable to find themselves imprisoned or committed to an insane asylum. Obviously, the rise of social network news, faked, and alternative news presents an interesting challenge. Science is no exception. Giordano Bruno died for challenging the Ptolemaic worldview and the morality that supported it; Galileo as well suffered because of this worldview. Judging, one needs to note, need not be done only in courts. Freud’s theory, which revolutionized psychology and psychiatry and enriched other disciplines, was originally criticized heavily on moral grounds. Likewise, the first innovators in radio astronomy and the developers of some of the most central concepts in astronomy (e.g. black holes, the Big Bang theory, or background microwave radiation) were isolated and kept away from the main halls of science. It is not too difficult to find cases of innovations, some quite significant, in the sciences and the arts, that were reacted to as deviance, and the innovators treated as deviants – deviantized, ostracized, stigmatized, and ridiculed. Discovery of the role of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori in the development of peptic ulcers is a good and recent illustration. While laughed at and ridiculed initially, this discovery ended up with a Nobel Prize in 2005. The question of who interprets and judges whose behavior, why, where, and when, is crucial because it gives us strong clues as to who will be judged by whom. Pat Lauderdale’s insightful observation is very relevant here: “Is, for example, the leader of loose‐knit bands of hit‐and‐run killers of British soldiers a ‘homicidal maniac,’ a ‘crazed cult killer,’ or a ‘bandit’? Or is George Washington a revolutionary hero? Is Nat Turner, who executed Virginia slave owners and their families in 1830, in the same category? Is the Jewish terrorist in Palestine in 1948 distinguishable from the Palestinian terrorist in Israel in 1978?” (2003, p. 5).

Criminals as Heroes and Political Criminals History teaches us that on many occasions deviants and criminals were treated as heroes. The famous Robin Hood syndrome received a strong validation in Kooistra’s (1989) work where he examined a large variety of such cases. However, the existence of this category also raises the reverse possibility – of politicians as criminals. Suffice it to point out that some of the vilest and most despicable mass murderers of the

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twentieth century (and perhaps in history) were politicians  –  for example, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin.

Power and Morality in Regular Deviance The second possibility consists of regular forms of deviance, which, prima facie, do not seem to present any explicit challenge to the status quo. Finding out the implicit power/morality challenge in these forms of behavior requires some digging. Doing this may mean following different, yet complementary, routes – for example, examining the ways in which criminal laws are created, passed, and enforced. The very act of defining a particular behavioral pattern as deviant is inherently political – it uses power to impose the view of a specific symbolic‐moral universe on other universes. This process, referred to by Schur (1980) as “deviantization” and consisting of stigma contests, typically begins when some moral entrepreneurs try to change public attitudes and law. Processes of deviantization play key roles in the social stratification order because they intervene in processes of resource allocation. A process of deviantization may involve shaming (Braithwaite 1989), vilification, degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel 1950), and stigmatization (Goffman 1963). Since power and morality are the basis of these deviantization processes, reversal can be achieved by using the same resources (Ben‐Yehuda 1990b, pp. 221–250). Thus, actors in societal centers who negotiate power and morality, attempting to define (or keep) particular patterns of behavior as deviant (or nondeviant), are necessarily engaged in constructing the boundaries of symbolic‐moral universes and affecting processes of change or stability. These moral entrepreneurs, or agents of moral claims, seek constantly to manipulate political, as well as moral, symbols in order to mobilize support, generate power, set agendas, and control or influence public opinion. Some interesting insights may be gained here by examining how specified behaviors once considered “deviant” or “criminal” become legitimized at other times, and vice versa. Let me use a few short and focused good examples of this. For instance, Gusfield’s (1963) work on the Temperance Movement’s anti‐liquor struggle illustrates this: “What prohibition symbolized was the superior power and prestige of the old middle class in American society. The threat of decline in that position had made explicit actions of government necessary to defend it. Legislation did this in two ways. It demonstrated the power of the old middle classes by showing that they could mobilize sufficient political strength to bring it about, and it gave dominance to the character and style of old middle‐class life in contrast to that of the urban lower and middle classes. The power of the Protestant, rural, native American was greater than that of the Eastern upper classes, the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and the urbanized middle class” (Gusfield 1963, pp. 122–123). What Gusfield’s work implies is that a contemporary “problem,” perceived as excessive use of alcohol, was socially constructed. Zurcher et al. (1971) showed that in two cases of anti‐pornography campaigns, the moral crusaders emphasized a general lifestyle and set of values instead of the specific steps they demanded in order to abolish pornography. Kuzmarov’s (2009) meticulous historical research indicates that the claim that American soldiers in Vietnam used drugs (“the addicted army”) and that this practice was one of the causes of losing the war there is a myth.

136 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda His work shows that this claim has no basis in reality and that it was used by the American war hawks to justify the failure of that war. This myth altered perceptions about that war and the soldiers, and it was based on falsehoods. Parties to a potential moral‐political conflict, and therefore to negotiations, are typically engaged in efforts to create or maintain a collective identity by defining the moral boundaries of the symbolic‐moral universe of that collective. Hence, collective definitions of deviance always result in stigma contests and in deviantization processes. The creation of rules and punishments implies that the lifestyle, values, and morality of specific social groups have gained ascendancy over those of other groups, often at the other groups’ expense (Gusfield 1963). Two added examples will suffice. First, until the first two decades of the twentieth century, many psychoactive drugs were freely available in commercial and medical markets. Then, during these first two decades an effective campaign of various moral entrepreneurs made us all experience an interesting exercise in criminalization, as slowly but surely most psychoactive substances were defined as dangerous and their use as criminal. Only toward the end of the century did some loud voices begin to be heard, demanding a reevaluation of this criminalization and its results, and that a “harm reduction” policy be introduced instead and that decriminalization, and even full legalization, be considered. In the early twenty‐first century widespread usage of medical marijuana opened the door to a limited legalization of marijuana and its related products. Second, rape, which for so many decades was considered as a sexual deviance, was reinterpreted as a crime with sexual tones, but that is primarily a crime of violence reflecting an unequal distribution of power between the sexes.

Two Illustrations for Understanding Deviance Within Processes of Change and Stability During the European witch craze of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries (Ben‐Yehuda 1980, 1985), hundreds of thousands of innocent victims, the vast majority of whom were women, were defined as “witches” who conspired with Satan in order to have Satanic rule over the earth. Using torture, hearsay, dubious confessions, and kangaroo courts, tormented victims were convicted on phony charges and sentenced to a horrendous death: burning alive on the stake. Prior to this fateful time, witchcraft was perceived as a complex phenomenon. There were supposed to be good and bad witches, and a cosmic conspiracy by Satan and women to corrupt the world was not part of the phenomenon. Thus, a new form of crime had to be invented – witchcraft. This new crime was invented, developed, and defined by Dominican friars, and – using political power and influence – they managed to get it accepted. It is instructive to remember that the development of this new form of crime took place while European culture and society were undergoing a significant change – from the medieval social order to the Renaissance and beyond. This transition led to momentous changes in the status of women, the economy, the beginnings of the separation of the state from religion, different forms of religion coming to prominence, and more. The old, medieval culture and social order was crumbling, and a new social order and culture was emerging. New modes of thinking and behavior, as well as new identities, were slowly replacing the old.

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Facing these changes, old elites were trying to reestablish the previous cultural hegemony, using their moral beliefs as well as considerable power, and they introduced a new and invented form of crime. The essence of this new crime, witchcraft, was that it explained the social, cognitive, and political upheavals in terms of a cosmic struggle between Satan and the Almighty. Moreover, Satan recruited humans in this struggle and those humans who were aware of this struggle must identify Satan’s servants and eliminate them before it was too late. As the cultural and social changes continued, eventually the steam that drove the machinery that persecuted witches evaporated, and the persecutions and executions ended. A new cultural and social order came into being and the ferocious attempt to reinstate older symbolic moral boundaries failed – at the terrible price of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims who were tortured to a horrific death. The second illustration is focused on deviance within contemporary ongoing processes of social change and stability (Ben‐Yehuda 2010a). Cultural conflicts can take place between and within societies. One of the arenas where such conflicts are played out is the media. Examining more than 50 years of media‐reported unconventional and deviant behavior by the fundamentalist ultra‐orthodox – Haredi – counter‐ cultural community in Israel yields some surprising results. To begin with, relying on Haredi culture’s insistence on a policy of the “right of the people not to know,” its media underreports infractions and comparisons between Haredi and secular media tend to rely more on secular media. Haredi infractions reveal a pattern. They have increased over the years, and the most salient feature of them is violence. This violence is not random or precipitated by some situational emotional rage. It is planned and aims to achieve political goals. Using verbal and nonverbal violence in the form of curses, intimidations, threats, setting fires, throwing stones, beatings, staging mass violations, and more, Haredi (and other theocratic) activists try to drive Israel to present more of a theocratic ambience. Most of the struggle is focused on feuds around the state‐religion status quo and the public arena. Driven by a theological notion that stipulates that all Jews are mutually responsible and accountable to the Almighty, these activists believe that the sins of the few are paid by the many. Making Israel a theocracy will, they believe, reduce the risk of transcendental penalties – an interesting idea indeed for criminal justice theorists. Like other democracies in the global village, Israel has had to face both theocratic and secular pressures on a significant level of intensity. The political structure that accommodates these contradicting pressures is the theocratic democracy. This structure is characterized by chronic negotiations, tensions, and accommodations, and is based on dexterity of politicians. While by nature it is an unstable structure, it allows citizens with different worldviews to live under the umbrella of a nation‐state without tearing the social fabric apart.

Cultural Criminology Works like those of Kooistra (1989), Black (1984), or Heckert (1989) give deviants a role as potential shapers and manipulators of social realities. A new cultural criminology (Ferrell et al. 2008) suggests examining deviants as rebels and searching for moments and incidences where deviants were effective in promoting cultural

138 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda alternatives. Moreover, cultural criminologists tend to analyze such topics as deviance and the media (e.g. Greer 2010), deviance in the public sphere, and deviance in literature and movies (e.g. Rafter 2006).

Conclusions Deviance can be an elusive entity. Its essence is based on morality and power, two concepts that are themselves problematic. That there is a significant ambiguous layer in deviance need not surprise us. Thus, instead of exhausting ourselves on definitional and characterization issues, it may be more effective and productive to try to understand the cultural and social role of deviance. Doing that leads us to classical formulations by Emile Durkheim and to examine deviance within the context of social change and stability. Complex societies are composed of a number of symbolic‐moral universes that compete and clash in terms of attractiveness for inhabitants. Each of these universes has moral codes and power structures. Moral activists in these universes may launch moral crusades and/or moral panics and use power so that their moral codes become hegemonic. This conceptualization has a few implications. One is that deviance and reactions to it can become important symbolic tools in processes that preserve symbolic stability or that cause change. In most cases, it is stability that is achieved by exposing and reacting to deviants. There have been many cases, though, where deviance and reactions to it led to changes. Understanding this analytical framing inevitably directs us to examine the area of politics and deviance. The analytical perspective presented here also provides a clue to another question – are there challenges, and, if so, what is the direction of the challenges? Societies and cultures are constantly faced with challenges to the status quo that emerge from individualistic ideas in a large number of spheres: the arts, sciences, religion, politics, family life, the nature of work, gender, wealth, etc. Many of these challenges are formulated within the context of moral reactions and enterprises. Some of these ideas will be accepted and will promote significant changes in the boundaries of societal symbolic‐moral universes. Others will be pushed away; no change in boundaries will take place and in fact the older boundaries will be reaffirmed. Because we know how and from where challenges come, we can analyze these challenges, one by one, and examine their impact. What we cannot do, given our present state of knowledge in social science, is to predict which challenges will be accepted and what will be the direction(s) of change, if any. That is, we can tell where challenges come from and how, but we cannot tell where they are going. If this formulation sounds like Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, it is because it does indeed resemble it. However, the significant differences between the two make the comparison and analogy valid only on a superficial, imagery, level. Evolution assumes the emergence of various genetic mutations, some or one of which will give a mutated species a survival advantage in a given environment in terms of offspring’s adaptability to a changing environment. The conceptualization presented here focuses on nonbiologically transmitted ideas and behaviors, and the fact that some of these ideas have the capacity to actually change (not adapt to given) social and physical ecologies. These are very significant differences as compared to evolutionary theory.

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Note 1 This section is based on Ben‐Yehuda (1990b, 2006, 2010b).

References Becker, H.S. (1963). Outsiders. New York: Free Press. Bell, R.R. (1971). Social Deviance: A Substantive Analysis. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press. Bendle, M. (1999). The death of the sociology of deviance? Journal of Sociology 35 (1): 42–59. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (1980). The European Witchcraze of the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries: a sociologist’s perspective. American Journal of Sociology 86 (1): 1–31. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (1985). Deviance and Moral Boundaries: Witchcraft, the Occult, Science Fiction, Deviant Sciences and Scientists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (1990a). Positive deviance: more fuel for a controversy. Deviant Behavior 11 (3): 221–243. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (1990b). The Politics and Morality of Deviance. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (1993). Political Assassinations by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (2001). Betrayals and Treason: Violations of Trust and Loyalty. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (2005). Terror, media and moral boundaries. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 46 (1–2): 33–53. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (2006). Contextualizing deviance within social change and stability, morality and power. Sociological Spectrum 26 (6): 559–580. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (2010a). Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism. New York: Oxford University Press. Ben‐Yehuda, N. (2010b). Social change and deviance. In: Handbook on Deviant Behavior (ed. C.D. Bryant). London: Sage. Best, J. (2004). Deviance: Career of a Concept. Belmont, CA: Thompson/Wadsworth. Best, Joel (2005). “Greatly Exaggerated? The Reports of Deviance’s Death.” Paper delivered at the 100th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, August 16. Black, D. (ed.) (1984). Toward a General Theory of Social Control. New York: Academic Press. Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. (2006). On Justification: The Economies of Worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, Shame, and Reintegration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brown, S.E. and Sefiha, O. (eds.) (2017). Handbook on Deviance. New York and London: Routledge. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Dombrink, J. and Hillyard, D. (2007). Sin No More: From Abortion to Stem Cells, Understanding Crime, Law, and Morality in America. New York: New York University Press. Douglas, J. (1977). Shame and deceit in creative deviance. In: Deviance and Social Change (ed. E. Sagarin), 59–86. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

140 Nachman Ben‐Yehuda Downes, D. and Rock, P.E. (2007). Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule‐Breaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, E. (1938). The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1964[1933]). The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., and Young, J. (2008). Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. London: Sage. Forsyth, C.J. and Copes, H. (eds.) (2014). Encyclopedia of Social Deviance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Garfinkel, H. (1950). Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology 61: 420–424. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Goode, E. (2002). Does the death of the sociology of deviance claim make sense? American Sociologist 33 (3): 107–118. Goode, E. (2004a). Is the sociology of deviance still relevant? American Sociologist 35 (4): 46–57. Goode, E. (2004b). The ‘death’ MacGuffin Redux: comments on best. Deviant Behavior 25 (5): 493–509. Goode, E. (ed.) (2015). The Handbook of Deviance. Chichester: Wiley‐Blackwell. Goode, E. and Ben‐Yehuda, N. (2009). Moral Panics. The Social Construction of Deviance. Chichester: Wiley‐Blackwell. Gottfredson, M.M. and Hirschi, T. (1990). A General Theory of Crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Greer, C. (ed.) (2010). Crime and Media. London: Routledge. Gusfield, J.R. (1963). Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Heckert, M.D. (1989). The relativity of positive deviance: the case of the French impressionists. Deviant Behavior 10 (2): 131–144. Hendershott, A. (2002). The Politics of Deviance. San Francisco: Encounter Books. Kooistra, P. (1989). Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power and Identity. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Kuzmarov, J. (2009). The Myth of the Addicted Army. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lauderdale, P. (ed.) (2003). A Political Analysis of Deviance. Toronto: De Sitter Publications. Lowe, B.M. (2006). Emerging Moral Vocabularies: The Creation and Establishment of New Forms of Moral and Ethical Meanings. Oxford: Lexington Books. Miller, J.M., Wright, R.A., and Dannels, D. (2001). Is deviance dead? The decline of a sociological research specialization. American Sociologist 32 (2): 43–59. Rafter, N. (2006). Shots in the Mirror. Crime Films and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Roebuck, J. and Weeber, S.C. (1978). Political Crime in the United States. New York: Praeger. Ross, J.I. (2002). Dynamics of Political Crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schur, E.M. (1980). The Politics of Deviance. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Sumner, C. (1994a). The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1994b). The social nature of crime and deviance. In: Understanding Social Deviance: From the Near Side to the Outer Limits (ed. J. Curra), 3–31. New York: HarperCollins. Young, J. (1971). The Drugtakers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Zurcher, L.A.J., Kirkpatrick, G.R., Cushing, R.G., and Bowman, C.K. (1971). The anti‐ pornography campaign: a symbolic crusade. Social Problems 19 (2): 217–238.

9 Criminology Charles F. Wellford

Introduction Ask a student majoring in sociology the name of the founder of their major and undoubtedly they will respond Auguste Comte. Every sociology textbook identifies Comte as the founder of sociology because of the central role that he played in laying the foundation for that discipline. Ask a student majoring in criminology to name the founder of that discipline and you are likely to get first a pause and then the name Beccaria and then Lombroso. This reflects the fact that criminology ­actually has two beginnings, one in the late 1700s and one in the late 1800s. These two ­beginnings mean that criminology has two sometimes‐divergent intellectual traditions: a focus on the criminal justice system and a focus on the causes of crime. Far too frequently, these two dimensions of the field are treated not only as separate intellectual traditions but as antagonistic ones. In this chapter I trace the development of these two traditions in criminology and describe their current status, with particular emphasis on the increasing convergence between the two (for a fuller discussion of this history see Triplett 2017). The classic definition of criminology offered by Sutherland (1924) is that criminology is the scientific study of the ­making of law, the breaking of law, and society’s reaction to law breaking. This definition describes the foundations of criminology, with Beccaria primarily addressing the making of law and how society should react to law breaking, and Lombroso primarily focusing on the causes of crime. While other social sciences have contributed greatly to each of these areas during the last 50 years, it has been the emergence of a separate discipline of criminology that has resulted in the greatest contributions to our understanding.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The Making of Law Cesare Beccaria was a little known Italian lawyer whose work, Essays on Crime and Punishment, published in 1764, made him famous and fundamentally changed how scholars and governments approached legal reform. This work offered a theory of the origins of law, a structure of government derived from that theory, and a criminal justice system that was to be grounded in science. Beccaria’s (1963 [1764], pp. 10–13) theory of law contains five fundamental propositions: 1. “No man ever freely sacrificed a portion of his personal liberty merely in behalf of the common good.” 2. “Laws are the conditions under which independent and isolated men united to form a society.” 3. Punishments are necessary to prevent the “despotic spirit, which is in every man” from seeking to maximize his pleasure at the expense of fundamental liberties of others. 4. Therefore, men give up some of their liberty to the state so that society can function. 5. Excessive punishments are in themselves unjust – they must be severe enough to prevent law violations and no more. Obviously influenced by Montesquieu, this theory of the origins of law became the intellectual foundation for the American Revolution and Constitution and the reform of legal systems throughout Europe. For Beccaria, governments founded with this understanding of the source of law must: have a publicly known and understandable system of laws that prescribe specific punishments; be characterized by a separation of powers between the ­executive, legislative, and judicial branches; and with “geometric precision” (scientifically established) demonstrate that punishments are certain, quick, and minimally severe. Numerous leaders (including Blackstone, Adams, and Jefferson) noted the importance of these ideas to their efforts to create a new system of laws and new governments. However, note that for Beccaria the explanation of law did not require great scholarship. The only laws that should exist are those that are necessary for the protection of individual liberties. Murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, and theft were illegal because if these behaviors were not controlled society could not function to protect the liberty interests of its citizens. These behaviors would be universally proscribed. The only issue for science was how to set the punishment for each and how to increase the certainty that those who violated these laws were fairly apprehended, tried, and punished. So although criminology includes the science of law making as a central issue, the question of why these behaviors are defined as crimes everywhere and at all times (see Linton 1954) is not central to the discipline. Rather, the central questions are about fair, effective, and just police, court, and correctional systems and the setting of penalties that are consistent with Beccaria’s theory of law.1 For many years the position of criminology was that the discipline had little to offer to the question of the effectiveness of the criminal justice system. For example, David Bailey, as recently as 1994, observed: “Repeated analysis has consistently failed

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to find any connection between the number of police officers and crime rates … [and] the primary strategies adopted by modern police have been shown to have little or no effect on crime” (1994, p. 3). This statement by a leading police scholar reflects well the notion that criminology had little to offer to our understanding of how police reduce crime. More recently, this position has changed, beginning with the pioneering work in 1999 on homicide investigations (Wellford and Cronin 1999). This work for the first time demonstrated that certain steps taken by the police during homicide investigations could significantly improve the ability of police to make correct arrests in these cases. In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences’ report on policing concluded that criminological research on police deployment had clearly demonstrated that deploying police in areas of high crime and utilizing a research‐based approach to police activities were highly effective in reducing crime in those areas without ­displacement to other portions of cities or jurisdictions. Approaches developed by criminologists labeled “hotspots policing” (e.g. Sherman et al. 1989) and “evidence‐ based policing,” along with crime mapping, are now standard activities for police agencies. These developments from criminology are widely thought to have contributed to the substantial decline in crime since the early 1990s (National Academy of Sciences 2004). These approaches have also led to research that has identified best police ­practices for reducing a wide range of criminal activities. Today, the conclusions drawn by Bailey nearly 20 years ago are no longer supported and are called into question by a body of research that demonstrates how well criminologists have been able to improve the operations of police agencies. The question of the fairness of the justice system continues to be a central focus for criminology. Early research demonstrated a strong racial bias in the operation of the criminal justice system (Green 1970). However, as research methodologies improved and our understanding of criminal justice procedures advanced, the strength of the association between race and criminal justice outcomes diminished (Zatz 1987). While the estimates of racial impacts on criminal justice operations were reduced, the fact that any impact remained, even in sophisticated research models, increased concern about fairness in the criminal justice system. Criminologists sought to address this residual but not inconsequential flaw in the justice system by trying to identify ways in which the methods of criminology could be used to further reduce the impact of race on criminal justice outcomes. While research on the death penalty, which demonstrated a clear impact of race on the imposition of the most serious punishment (Paternoster 2001), was not accepted by the courts (McKleskey v. Georgia), the development of sentencing guidelines systems has profoundly changed sentencing in the United States. It has long been known that the race of the defendant, particularly in crimes of violence when combined with the race of the victim, is correlated with the sentences given in criminal courts. As criminologists demonstrated this fact in a continuing body of research, judges and others began to call for changes in sentencing that would address this issue. In some jurisdictions, this was accomplished through the passage of laws that mandated specific sentences for specific types of offenses and offenders (determinate sentencing). These approaches proved relatively unworkable because they resulted in such an absence of discretion in the judicial process that outcomes were felt to be unfair and unsustainable. Another approach to reducing racial disparity in sentencing was the development of sentencing guidelines systems

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(Frankel 1974). Today, 23 states operate with sentencing guidelines systems that involve substantial involvement of criminologists. Guidelines systems, although ­differing in important ways, all involve the conduct of research to describe past sentencing in terms of the offense for which one is convicted and the criminal history characteristics of the offender (the two most agreed‐upon legal sentencing criteria). These historical descriptions are then adjusted to achieve appropriate symmetry in the establishment of sentencing guidelines that specify ranges of punishments for specific offenses and offenders. These guidelines can be presumptive or voluntary, but in all cases they have been found to be used by judges extensively. While judges have been upset by guidelines systems because they limit their discretion, and the Supreme Court has recently called into question the constitutionality of requiring that judges use guidelines (United States v. Booker 2005), voluntary systems that allow judges to benefit from a better understanding of past sentencing have proven to be quite successful in further reducing the impact of race on judicial outcomes and allowing jurisdictions that wish to do so to make greater use of alternatives to incarceration and maintain or reduce their prison populations (Baumer 2010). Similarly, in the area of arrest decisions by police, research has demonstrated a continuing racial effect in these decisions (Walker 2010). This research has prompted the police and the courts to be much more concerned about racial components of police actions. This has become most prominent in the area of racial profiling for motor vehicle violations (sometimes referred to as the offense of “driving while black”). Racial profiling and the role of race in decisions to issue citations, to search cars and persons, and to effectuate arrest as a result of traffic stops have been studied in great detail. This research has resulted in numerous administrative actions and court decisions that have sought to reduce this form of racial discrimination in our justice system. While it is too early to tell if these have substantially reduced the role of race in all police actions, it is clear that the impact on traffic law enforcement has been substantial. Finally, in studies of the correctional system and parole release decisions, criminologists have sought to document the extent of racial disproportionality in decisions about the allocation of correctional resources. Since Beccaria called for a criminal justice system that was effective and just, criminologists have sought to use their research approaches to document the role of race in criminal justice decision‐­making. Where the best research has demonstrated a continuing indication of race effects, criminologists have sought to develop research‐based strategies to address these concerns. In summary, over the last 250 years criminology has advanced Beccaria’s notion of the need for a fair system by using social science research strategies to first document the problems of racial and other disparity in criminal justice processing and then develop techniques for reducing this impact. Finally, criminologists have been at the forefront of identifying effective police deployment and investigative strategies to improve the fairness and efficiency of police operations and investigations in reducing crime. The goal of effective and just systems of criminal justice that was  central to Beccaria and the emerging democracies he influenced continues to motivate and direct criminology today. In recent years, the issue of the “justness” of the criminal justice system has gained considerable attention in criminology and in the nation’s politics. The shooting by

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police of what many consider innocent suspects and the growing concern over the collateral effects of high rates of incarceration have prompted this renewed concern with justice. This refocus was called for by Wellford (1997) in his American Society of Criminology address when he called for criminology to consider the achievement of justice as it developed more effective means to control crime. While criminology was slow to follow this advice, the events of the last 10 years have forced the ­discipline to do so. Each of the reforms prompted by criminological research have been called into question for their failure to consider the implications of the reforms for justice. A recent National Academy of Sciences (2017) report considered the ways in which policing reforms may have resulted in substantial constitutional violations. While they noted more research was needed to establish the causal link between hot spots policing, zero tolerance policing and the practice of stop/questioning/and frisking, they did conclude that “even when proactive strategies do not violate or encourage constitutional violations, they may undermine legal values such as privacy, equality, and accountability.” Clearly we have not paid enough attention to these collateral consequences of policing. This becomes even truer when we consider the laws and administrative regulations that govern the use of force by police. For that reason, an effort to advance de‐escalation strategies for police response to real or potential danger and being given substantial attention (PERF 2016). Similar concerns have been expressed about the use of sentencing and bail release guidelines  –  tools that may enhance differential treatment by the justice system if they are not constructed in a way that introduces race and income inequality into judicial decisions. Finally, the collateral consequences of incarceration for the offender, their families and communities has been a central concern of recent criminological research (Clear and Frost 2015). That along with research on the minimal crime control effects of incarcerating non‐violent offenders is prompting calls for “justice reform” – that is reductions in the numbers incarcerated. The influence of Beccaria can also be seen in the continuing focus of criminology on the issue of deterrence – that is, establishing penalties that are just severe enough to offset the benefits of engaging in crime. Beccaria called on criminology to identify with “geometric precision” the appropriate punishment for each offense and offender. While some early criminology contended that criminals were “born” criminal and thus could not be deterred, the reality of punishment in the justice system prompted criminologists to continue to focus on this issue. No matter what theories of crime might say, the justice system assigns punishments. Beccaria postulated that the deterrence capacity of a punishment was determined by its certainty, celerity, and severity – in that order. While punishments should not be too severe, they must be certain and quickly applied. Two hundred years of experience and 100 years of research have demonstrated that the American system of justice is low in certainty, slow in application, and more severe than that of any other Western democracy. As a result, the deterrent effect of the American system is called into question by critics and some research. It is very clear that the American criminal justice system is low in certainty. The probability of being arrested if you commit homicide is approximately 60%; for burglary it is less than 15%; and for drug offenses below 1%. The mean time from arrest to imposition of sentence for those found guilty of committing serious crimes is 14 months. Thus, combining certainty

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and celerity characteristics, you would predict low levels of deterrence. On the other hand, American retention of the death penalty, levels of use of imprisonment, and length of sentences result in the United States being the most punitive society among Western democracies. But punishments can deter those who have not committed a crime (general deterrence) or those who are being punished (special deterrence). Those punished may be deterred but may also learn new crime skills during their punishment or be further disaffected from society, resulting in even more crime than they would have committed if not punished. Those punishments that remove offenders from their communities may also result in collateral consequences for their children, spouses or partners, and communities (Rose and Clear 1998). So estimating the deterrent effect of punishment requires measures of the impact of the punishment on the person punished; those not punished but who might commit the crime; and those not punished who are connected to the offender. This is much more complicated than Beccaria anticipated. It is this more complex notion of deterrence that underlies contemporary criminological research. In a recent review of the full body of research, Durlauf and Nagin (2011) conclude that current punishments have a deterrent effect but that we could achieve the same levels of crime control with less punishment and more certainty. As summarized by Paternoster: “Although there may be some dispute as to how large an effect formal sanctions may have on crime, there is little dispute that formal punishments … do seem to lower crime” (2009, p. 240). In summary, criminology has had profound impacts on the nature of our criminal justice system by focusing on two issues of importance to Beccaria: creating a fair system of justice, and maximizing the deterrent effect of punishments while not violating the principle that the pains of punishment should just exceed the benefits of committing the crime. The next steps are to focus on increasing certainty and celerity of punishment consistent with our notions of individual rights and the rule of law.

The Breaking of Law In 1876 another Italian, this time a physician, published a book that was to transform how we think about criminals. Cesare Lombroso wrote The Criminal Man in which he reported on his observations of criminals while working as a doctor at a local prison. In the first edition of this work (only 252 pages in length) he observed that criminals had physical characteristics that more closely resembled animals lower in the evolutionary chain than humans. Writing just 17 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), which introduced the notion of ­evolution into scientific and popular thinking, Lombroso explained crime as the behavior of humans who were “throwbacks” to earlier developmental forms. Their physical appearance signaled their inferior intellectual and moral development. Crime was a product of this inferior development. For 30 years, the biological causes of crime heavily influenced thinking about crime causation.2 The most forceful rejection of this particular approach to crime causation came with the publication of a large‐scale empirical test of Lombroso’s theory, The  English Convict (1913). The author, Charles Goring, using the emerging statistical techniques that now form the basis of social science empirical research,

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tested convicts and nonconvicts and demonstrated that the physical differences that Lombroso described did not differentiate between these groups. In fact, by the time this work was published, Lombroso had published the fifth edition of his book, each edition getting longer and noting other possible explanations of crime (the fifth edition had grown to 1903 pages and listed hundreds of causes of crime).

Single‐Factor Reductionism In his initial formulation, Lombroso argued that all crime could be explained by one factor – a failure of evolution. No other variable or dimension needed to be considered to understand the range of crimes and/or the types of criminals. The theory was parsimonious to the extreme; this single factor could explain crime. Soon, others began to identify other single‐factor explanations for crime; mental illness (or as it was called then, “feeblemindedness” [Dugdale 1877]), bad families, the loss of faith or religion, and other explanations were offered, not as parts of a comprehensive explanation but as the explanation of crime  –  all influences reduced to this one factor. This approach quickly collapsed as the study of those who committed crime began to identify a wide range of characteristics that appeared to distinguish criminals from noncriminals.3 This led to the next two approaches to developing theories of criminal behavior: systemic reductionism and multidisciplinary approaches. While they occurred simultaneously, systemic reductionism had the greater influence, for reasons I now discuss.

Systemic Reductionism As noted earlier, there was a period of over 50 years between the time when criminology emerged as a field of study and when it was institutionalized in universities and with its own professional organizations. During this period, in the United States,4 criminology was contained in almost all instances in sociology departments. As such, during this period the explanation of crime causation was constrained by the sociological system of knowledge. Systemic reductionism expanded beyond sociology but it was the sociological perspective that dominated criminological theory for many years, and even today it is the dominant theoretical perspective. The importance of systemic reductionism can be seen in many criminological textbooks where the discussion of crime causation is organized in a series of sections – sociological explanations, psychological explanations, and biological explanations  –  each presented as  if these systems of knowledge were unrelated to each other and they provided ­competing ways of explaining crime. Why did the study of crime, which all the early thinkers recognized as having a multitude of explanations, become the exclusive domain of sociology? Most likely because of the way sociology developed at the University of Chicago – the birthplace of American sociology. Here, sociology (the Chicago School) was the study of urban development and the problems associated with such development. It made perfect sense to locate the study of crime in such a field of study, and once located

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there it is not surprising that the theories that came to dominate criminology were sociological in nature. The biology and psychology of crime were greatly minimized and instead crime was seen as a function of community, family, school, and the other socializing institutions. The explanation of crime became the explanation of crime rate differences within the city, across class levels, and between recent immigrants and less recent immigrants. Criminals were disproportionately found in poverty and in homes and friendships that saw criminal behavior as a reasonable response to their social location. As Dennis Wrong (1961) would observe near the end of this period of theory in criminology, sociological systemic reductionism presented an “oversocialized conception” of human behavior, largely ignoring ­personality and biology. This is not to suggest that this period made no contributions to understanding crime. The focus on variation in crime rates introduced theories of critical i­ mportance to understanding crime. Examples include the following, with brief descriptions of their emphasis: • Differential association. This offered a social learning explanation (Sutherland 1924). • Anomie. Cultural conditions are thought to explain crime concentrations in the lower classes (Merton 1938). • Culture conflict. Crime is clustered in groups going through a transition from one culture to another (Sellin 1938). • Social disorganization. Crime in poor areas is a result of the relative absence of family and community controls on behavior (Shaw and McKay 1942). • Labeling. This theory argued for the criminogenic effect of designating people as criminals (Lemert 1972; Schur 1971). These theories have proven to be valuable in the development of more comprehensive theories of crime and theory‐based crime interventions. All of these approaches persist today in only slightly modified form or as part of more complex explanations. The essential element in sociological systemic reductionism is that crime is clustered in the lower class and therefore there is something about this social situation that accounts for the higher rates of crime. The individual offender is a reflection of his or her social situation.

Multidisciplinary Approaches Of course, sociologists were not the only ones interested in the causes of crime. While sociology was dominating the study of crime in universities, psychologists, biologists, and others were considering how their disciplines or theoretical perspectives would explain such behavior. Furthermore, it became clear that these other perspectives offered reasonable approaches and research that demonstrated that the approaches had some level of empirical support. Gradually, a model of crime explanation emerged that is still with us today, especially in standard criminological texts – the multidisciplinary explanation of criminal behavior. This approach argues that there is a set of explanations for the causes of criminality, drawn from all of

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the  social and behavioral sciences, including biology, psychology, anthropology, ­economics, and sociology. Only by using all of these perspectives can one understand criminal behavior. This can be seen in contemporary criminological texts, which have separate chapters on each of these approaches to explaining crime. Of course, multidisciplinary approaches are not theories at all but, rather, the search for the set of causal variables that explain the greatest amount of variation in the occurrence of criminal behavior. The most prominent practitioners of multidisciplinary criminology were Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (Glueck and Glueck 1968). In a series of longitudinal studies, they sought to find the factors that “unraveled” juvenile delinquency and adult criminal behavior. Sheldon Glueck was a lawyer with little advanced education in the social and behavioral sciences. While Eleanor had that education, it was Sheldon who formulated their approach to research and theory. Working in a law school setting they pursued an empirically based way to predict and explain criminal law violations of juveniles and adults. In a particularly clear statement of their position and their rejection of systemic reductionism, the Gluecks observed: It is common knowledge that the great majority of children growing up in urban slums do not become delinquents despite the deprivations of a vicious environment, despite the fact that they and their parents have not had access to fruitful economic opportunities, despite the fact that they are swimming around in the same antisocial subculture in which delinquents and gang members are said to thrive. Why? (Glueck and Glueck 1968)

Their position was that the then‐dominant sociological approach could not explain the empirical reality that most of those who grow up in high crime areas are not criminals. Their focus was on explaining why a few in those areas became, and in some cases remained for many years, offenders while others did not. To answer this question they sought to find out what distinguished the law violator from the non−law violator when both came from the same deprived social conditions. To do this, they studied similarly socially situated individuals, looking for shared characteristics that distinguished them. Drawing on what they considered the best possible sources of explanation, they considered biological factors (e.g. body type), psychological differences, family structure, parent behavior differences, and school factors, in an effort to predict and understand the occurrence of delinquent and criminal behaviors. In all of their works the Gluecks sought to identify the specific set of factors that accounted for the fact that individuals faced with the same ­difficult social conditions would behave differently. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck sought to move the study of criminal behavior out of the sole domain of sociology and make it at least multidisciplinary. They did this by showing the empirical relationship between criminal behavior and a number of factors drawn from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. However, their work did not produce a coherent theory of crime that went beyond their empirical results – it did produce a scale that was widely used (for a time) to predict delinquency and focus prevention and intervention efforts and it did force criminologists to begin to recognize that disciplines other than sociology would be needed to develop a comprehensive explanation of the criminal behavior of individuals.

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Interdisciplinary Explanations Criminology as a separate field of study emerges when the model underlying the explanation of criminal behavior\r becomes interdisciplinary. Only then does an intellectual justification for a separate field of study in universities exist that is ­compelling enough to support such a development. Today, the leading journal in criminology – the Journal of the American Society of Criminology – has as its s­ ubtitle An Interdisciplinary Journal: a clear statement of the importance of this perspective to criminology. But what do we mean by interdisciplinary theory? Most obviously, this approach assumes that more than one discipline is needed to explain criminal behavior. Any approach to explanation that is built on one discipline is, by definition, incomplete. But if we only have explanations based on the accumulation of variables from different disciplines, we have what the Gluecks proposed – multidisciplinary explanations. So an interdisciplinary theory goes beyond the assembly of contributions of different disciplines and integrates the contributions of these different disciplines into a coherent theory of criminal behavior. This approach emphasizes bringing perspectives together, not the competition of perspectives to see which one is “right.” In interdisciplinary theory, it is assumed that there is a role for biological, psychological, social, and cultural explanations, but that the relationship between these perspectives is as important and that no perspective can totally explain the influence of another perspective. Thus, interdisciplinary theory can be expected to contain elements of all of the explanatory perspectives but also to go beyond that to identify how each level of explanation influences, but does not eliminate, the other levels of explanation. For example, the question is not whether nature or nurture causes crime but how they interact to account for individual variations in criminal behavior. It is not a question of why poverty seems to be associated with higher crime rates, but how individual development and poverty interact to explain why some are delinquent and others are not. Each dimension of explanation is to a degree irreducible, and each is related to and influences the other. One of the most influential theories in criminology today is developmental or life course theory.4 This is a good example of how interdisciplinary theory is emerging as the dominant paradigm in the field. Robert Sampson (2001) suggests that this approach to theory is “best introduced by considering the questions it asks,” which he identifies as including: • • • • •

Why and when do most juveniles stop offending? What factors explain desistance? Are some delinquents destined to become persistent criminals in adulthood? Is there in fact such a thing as a life‐course persistent offender? What explains the stability of offending?

One of the early contributors to this approach, Terrie Moffitt (2001), addressed these questions by hypothesizing that there were two patterns of antisocial behavior: life‐course persistent  –  those who started early and maintained involvement in antisocial behavior throughout the life course  –  and adolescent‐limited  –  those ­ whose  antisocial behavior emerges and ends during that period of the life course.

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Moffitt (2001, p. 34) observes that the persistent pattern results from “childhood ­neuropsychological problems interacting cumulatively with their criminogenic environments producing a pathological personality.” With the adolescent‐limited pattern, “a contemporary maturity gap encourages teens to mimic antisocial behavior in ways that are normative and adjustive.” Clearly, biological, psychological, and social levels of explanation are evident even in this summary statement of her work. This is characteristic of efforts to answer the questions posed by Sampson, and it is a central characteristic of life course theory. For this reason, this approach offers a framework for criminology to move closer to an interdisciplinary theory of criminal behavior that will more fully justify the emergence of the field as a new discipline in the social and behavioral sciences. For almost two centuries after Beccaria, criminologists did not pay consistent and organized attention to the criminal justice system. Rather, the tradition of criminology begun by Lombroso – the search for the causes of crime – was the focus of criminology until the last half of the twentieth century. This period of searching for the causes of crime passed through four distinct phases of theoretical development: six single factor reductionism; systemic reductionism; multidisciplinary theories; and interdisciplinary theory. Today, interdisciplinary theory stands as the dominant model for explaining crime (and other human behaviors). Criminology today rests on two foundations: the interdisciplinary explanation of crime and the analysis of the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system. Both of these fundamental aspects of criminology are informed by the application of scientific methods (as called for by Beccaria, Lombroso, and Sutherland).

Society’s Reaction to Law Breaking But what of the other focus of criminology – how societies react to law breaking? As Ingraham (1987) observed, following his comparative analysis of criminal procedure, all systems of justice are organized to apprehend offenders, determine guilt, and impose punishments. Though the means to do this may vary in time and space, the functions are always performed. This focus requires within a society an agreement on the meaning of crime. Today, we see growing concern that criminology’s definition and measurement of crime has not changed to reflect the contemporary reality of crime. While efforts are underway to improve police reporting of crime (Strom and Smith 2017) and our surveys of criminal victimization (Langton et al. 2017), it is clear that these measures do not capture much of the crime as defined and experienced by members of society. Crimes by business, pollution, intellectual property theft, cybercrime and fraud, and hate‐motivated crimes are just examples of crimes that have become of increasing importance but are not counted by our traditional measures and are not investigated by police. This has prompted researchers to urge a reconceptualization of crime and the development of measures that are consistent with that reconceptualization (Lauritsen and Cork 2017). As this occurs, criminology will change its approach to estimating crime patterns and causes and will assist in developing just and effective ways to reduce these “new” crimes. While police and prosecution practices are heavily influenced by what we know about how these work best in the United States, no country seeks to emulate our

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approach to punishment. The high rate of use of imprisonment and the length of sentences given in the United States are not the standards for effective and fair justice systems around the world. In fact, many contend that US punishment practices are more like those of a developing, nondemocratic country than those of a highly industrialized, Western democracy. This aspect of US reaction to crime has sparked much discussion and some research. For much of the twentieth century, the rate of imprisonment in the United States hovered around 100 inmates per 100 000. This rate was so stable that Blumstein and Cohen (1973) developed a theory of punishment that argued this level would always remain, even in periods of high crime, because the system would adjust by shortening sentences or accelerating release from prison. Less than two years after this publication, imprisonment rates increased rapidly to current levels of about 500 per 100 000. Today in the United States there are over 2 million people in prison and another 4 million under community supervision by the criminal justice system. Why this has occurred and with what impact are important questions for criminologists and policymakers. While some will always offer a conflict or Marxist interpretation of such changes (e.g. prison populations increase to control the “dangerous classes”), the focus in criminology has been to better understand the increases before offering an explanation. The increase in prison populations has been the result of increased sentence lengths, slower rates of release from prison, and higher rates of return to prison for violation of conditions of release. Increases in the rate of commitment have only minimally contributed to the increase in prison populations (Blumstein and Beck 1999). Changes in criminal justice processes account for this increase, not changes in demography or the extent or nature of crime. Why have these processes occurred? I  suggest that three overriding factors have been most important in this shift in the  American response to crime. First, crime became more of a national political issue than ever before in US history; second, there was ­widespread acceptance of the apparent finding from research that criminal rehabilitation did not work (Martinson 1974); and, finally, there was widespread acceptance of the findings of research that a small number of persons (5%) accounted for a large portion of crime (over 50%) (Wolfgang et  al. 1972). Political and professional wisdom concluded that prisons could not change people; therefore, we should keep offenders in as long as the law would allow, that the laws and/or sentences should be changed to make sure this happened, and since we could not accurately identify the 5% we should adopt ­incapacitation as a universal means of controlling crime. Today, we are seeing the devastating ­ consequences of this approach for individuals, communities, and government budgets. Since 2000 the increase in prison populations has been a factor in the reduction in crime (best estimates are that the increase in prison populations accounts for 5–20% of the crime drop [Levitt 1997]), but some argue that the costs associated with this strategy have not been worth the benefits. In any case, we are now in a period where society’s reaction is changing to one that emphasizes risk assessment and the reservation of imprisonment for those who need to be incarcerated to protect the public. In this new era criminology becomes even more prominent in the development of effective strategies (Crimesolutions.gov). Research evaluating what works in corrections (MacKenzie 2008) is demanded by policymakers before they institute

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new programs. Cost‐effectiveness studies are in great demand (Aos 2004). The development of risk assessment instruments for corrections is widespread. Just as in earlier times police and courts recognized the value of criminology, now correctional policy‐makers have turned to the social sciences to assist them in the task of “right‐sizing” prisons and developing cost‐effective correctional programs, especially for the 700 000 persons leaving prisons each year and reentering society (Travis 2005).

Conclusion In almost 250 years, criminology has emerged as a separate social science that focuses on three primary questions: why we have law, why people break the law, and how society does and should respond to law breaking. Great progress has been made in all of these areas. The next great stride in the discipline will see the closer alignment of our approach to these issues – mainly in the greater use of theory in addressing law making and responses to law breaking. This will require the development of much better understanding of the causes of crime than currently exists. Recently, Weisburd and Piquero (2008) asked the question: How good are our theories in explaining criminal behavior and the distribution of crime? Their answer, which was based on an analysis of tests of criminological theory published in the leading criminology journal between 1968 and 2005, was not encouraging. They found that the  level of variation explained by the theories was low (80–90% unexplained); there was no improvement in explained variation over time; and the weakest theories were those trying to explain individual criminal behavior. This represents the greatest challenge to criminology – providing much better answers to the question asked by Lombroso: Why do we have criminals?

Notes 1 Criminology’s focus on the making of law has been on why certain behaviors that are not seen as so central to societies’ functioning are criminalized. Chambliss’s (1969) study of vagrancy laws, and the consideration of the impact of the criminalization of drug use and prostitution, are the most important of these efforts. Still, they are not central to the discipline. 2 For a discussion of this criminological work during this period, see Vold (1979), especially chapters 3 and 4. 3 This approach continues today in some public and political discourse. Too frequently, we hear that crime is caused by “welfare moms,” lead paint, unemployment, and a variety of other factors. Criminologists can usually respond, yes, but that is just one of a myriad of characteristics that may cause crime and the problem is that we do not know which is most important and how these many factors interact. This type of response reinforces the idea held by some that criminologists do not know much about crime. 4 As noted earlier, criminological theories do not easily disappear. The problem has been that these theories accumulate but are not cumulative. The issue addressed today in criminology is how to use an interdisciplinary framework to integrate these theories and develop cumulative knowledge.

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Aos, S. (2004). Benefits and Costs of Prevention and Early Intervention Programs for Youths. Olympia, WA: Washington State Institute of Public Policy. Bailey, D. (1994). Police for the Future. New York: Oxford University Press. Baumer, E. (2010) “Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing.” Paper presented at the Symposium of the Past and Future of Empirical Sentencing Research, Albany, NY. Beccaria, C. (1963 [1764]). Essays on Crime and Punishment (trans. Henry Paolucci). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs‐Merrill. Blumstein, A. and Beck, A. (1999). Population growth in U.S. prisons. 1980–1996. In: Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 26 (ed. M. Tonry), 17–61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blumstein, A. and Cohen, J. (1973). A theory of the stability of punishment. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 64: 198–207. Chambliss, W. (1969). Crime and the Legal Process. New York: McGraw‐Hill. Clear, T. and Frost, N. (2015). The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration. New York: New York University Press. Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray. Dugdale, R. (1877). The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism and Heredity. New York: Putnam. Durlauf, S. and Nagin, D. (2011). Imprisonment and crime: can both be reduced? Criminology and Public Policy 10 (1): 13–54. Frankel, M. (1974). Criminal Sentences: Law without Order. New York: Hill and Wang. Glueck, S. and Glueck, E. (1968). Delinquents and Nondelinquents in Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goring, C. (1913). The English Convict. Reprinted 1972. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. Green, E. (1970). Race, social state and criminal arrest. American Sociological Review 35: 476–490. Ingraham, B.L. (1987). The Structure of Criminal Procedure. New York: Greenwood Press. Langton, L., Planty, M., and Lynch, J. (2017). Second major redesign of the NCVS. Criminology and Public Policy 16: 1049–1074. Lauritsen, J. and Cork, D. (2017). Expanding our understanding of crime. Criminology and Public Policy 16: 1075–1098. Lemert, E. (1972). Human Deviance, Social Problems and Social Control, 2e. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Levitt, S. (1997). Using electoral cycles in police hiring to estimate the effect of police on crime. American Economic Review 87 (3): 270–290. Linton, R. (1954). The problem of universal values. In: Method and Perspective in Anthropology (Papers in Honor of Wilson D. Wallis) (ed. R.F. Spencer), 145–168. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lombroso, C. (1876). Criminal Man. Milan: Hoepli. MacKenzie, D. (2008). What Works in Corrections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martinson, R. (1974). What works? – questions and answers about prison reform. The Public Interest 35: 22–54. Merton, R. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review 3: 672–682. Moffitt, T. (2001). Adolescence‐limited and life course persistent antisocial behavior. In: Life‐ Course Criminology (ed. A. Piquero and P. Mazerolle), 91–145. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. National Academy of Sciences (2004). Fair and Effective Policing. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

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Wesiburd, D. and Majmunder, M. (eds.) (2017). Proactive Policing. Washington, DC: National Academies of Science Press. Paternoster, R. (2001 [1991]). Capital Punishment in America. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Paternoster, R. (2009). Deterrence and rational choice theories. In: 21st Century Criminology (ed. J. Mitchell Miller), 236–245. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. PERF (Police Executive Research Forum) (2016). Guiding Principles for the Use of Force. Washington, DC. Rose, D. and Clear, T.R. (1998). Incarceration, social capital and crime: examining the ­unintended consequences of incarceration. Criminology 36 (3): 441–479. Sampson, R. (2001). Foreword. In: Life‐Course Criminology (ed. A. Piquero and P. Mazerolle). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Schur, E. (1971). Labeling Deviant Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Sellin, T. (1938). Culture Conflict and Crime. New York: Social Science Research Council. Shaw, C. and McKay, H. (1942). Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sherman, L., Gartin, P., and Buerger, M. (1989). Hot spots of predatory crime. Criminology 27: 27–55. Strom, K. and Smith, E. (2017). The future of crime data: the case for the national incident‐ based reporting system. Criminology and Public Policy 16: 1027–1048. Sutherland, E. (1924). Principles of Criminology. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott. Travis, J. (2005). But They All Come Back. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Triplett, R. (2017). Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology. Boston, MA: Wiley. Vold, G. (1979). Theoretical Criminology, 2e. Prepared by T. Bernard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, S. (2010). The Color of Justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Press. Weisburd, D. and Piquero, A. (2008). How well do criminologists explain crime? In: Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. Vol. 37 (ed. M. Tonry), 453–502. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wellford, C. (1997). Controlling crime and achieving justice. Criminology 35: 1–12. Wellford, C. and Cronin, J. (1999). Factors influencing the clearance of homicide cases. NIJ Journal 1: 3–7. Wolfgang, M., Figlio, R., and Sellin, T. (1972). Delinquency in a Birth Cohort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wrong, D. (1961). The oversocialized conception of man. American Sociological Review 26: 183–193. Zatz, M. (1987). The changing forms of racial and ethnic bias in sentencing. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 24 (1): 69–92.

10 Critical Sexualities Studies Moving On Ken Plummer

As sex goes, so goes society. As society goes, so goes sexuality. (Weeks 2007, p. 20) For the first 150 years of its existence, sociologists paid very little serious attention to the study of human sexuality. True, Max Weber wrote a little about the rationalization of love, the Chicago School made some small forays into the sexual underworld of that city, and Kingsley Davis looked at the functions of prostitution (Heap 2003). But, as I documented nearly half a century ago, in general, “sociologists have failed to study sex” (Plummer 1975 , p. 3). This was really surprising since we now know, from much social and cultural history, that far from this being a time of massive sexual repression, it was a moment when there was a major incitement to a proliferation of discourses about sex (Foucault 1980). More and more people started to talk about their sexuality (albeit usually behind closed doors) as a new sexual world was starting to take place. Sociologists must have known this; but it must have been just too controversial and too difficult to study. But since that time, things have most surely changed.

Obdurate Features of Critical Sexualities Studies (CSS) For in the past half century, a substantial corpus of research and theory has emerged to help us to start to think sociologically about human sexualities in critical ways (Plummer 2002). Like most sociological fields of study, its development is characterized by conflicts and, like life, it moves in generational cohorts so that change is perpetual, and pasts are easily forgotten. That said, certain key elements

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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have ­ gradually emerged which are now seen as a basic paradigm of Critical Sexualities Studies (hereafter CSS). Put directly, while sexuality has been traditionally and conventionally seen as essentially biological and medical, as the property of biological individuals, CSS claims that for human persons sexualities is a profoundly social and political matter: the simple reduction of it to a biological or psychological fixed feature is seriously inadequate. In summary: Human sexual differences emerge through complex cultural symbolic systems grounded in material, biographical, and bodily lives and are embedded in wider shifting historical structures. They are always on the move, shaped by time and space, and orchestrated through power and inequalities. Sexualities harbor few – if any – fixed or permanent forms but derive their features from the structural and cultural milieu, historical moments and relationships in which they flow. Human sexualities are multiple, varied, and contradictory. Taking this seriously means approaching sexualities as meaningful, symbolic, and cultural; as material and embodied; as structural and shaped by intersectional inequalities; as historical and generational; as processual and emergent; as multiple; as conflictual and political; as mediated and as globally interconnected. From this, a broad set of sensitizing terminologies have been developed: sexual meanings, sexual selves, sexual identities, sexual cultures, sexual structures, sexual differences, sexual inequalities, sexual friction, sexual regulations, sexual embodiments and sexual affect (Gagnon and Simon 1973; Jackson 2010; Plummer 1982). Some of these characteristics will become clearer as we proceed, but a few opening comments will help. CSS starts with the centrality of human differences, as indeed biology does. But here we find the difference of sexualities will be found in the multiplicities of sexual meanings, behaviors, identities, cultures, and politics. A wide array of sexual meanings has now been studied, ranging from rape and gay youthful coming out to BDSM practices (bonding and discipline/ dominance and submission/ sadism and masochism) to the narratives of many books and films (see Kimmel 2007 for a selection). In these arguments, sexuality is not a simple biological release, but is engaged in for multiple social purposes (Plummer 2015a, p. 18). Human sexualities are critically cultural; dwelling in routine patterns of values, symbols, roles, and identities, they become “ways of life.” These multiple worlds have often been characterized as sexual worlds, sexual tribes, social movements, counter publics, and sexual networks (e.g. Plummer 1995; Warner 2002). Sexual cultures are never harmonious, well ordered, or consensual wholes; they are multilayered, fluid, negotiable, and emerging. But alongside this, human sexualities are also always material and structural. They are grounded in embodiment, emotions, economies, and environments. Sexual embodiment flows through sexual biographies and sexual subjectivities: the body is a sexed body that engages in “bodyplay” (Dowsett 1996, 2000). More, human sexualities are always grounded in structures: there are many useful ideas here, including sex hierarchy (Rubin 2011), compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1981), a continuum of sexual violence (Kelly 1989), hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995), heteronormativity (Warner 1993), and sexual fields (Green 2014). In CSS, human sexualities are usually analyzed through intersectional standpoints: that is they are told from points of views and positions, which connect in both lives and politically (Crenshaw 1991). Often these are connected to social movements, which reveal hierarchies of credibility and epistemologies of resistance

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that make some patterns of sexualities more or less credible than others (Medina 2013). Human sexualities are grounded in intersectional inequalities. Always shaped by class, gender, ethnicity, age, nation, and other human differences. This means too that human sexualities are always contested and conflictual: there will always be disagreements over what sexualities should mean and be. Human sexualities engage with values and politics; and need to be studied with a full awareness of social ­movements and political change.

The Emergence of CSS: Four Moments In order to sense a little of these ideas in action, it will help to examine a few critical moments in the development of this sociological paradigm and see how key ideas emerged.

Social Scripting and Social Constructionism Although the roots of the contemporary field of CSS goes back a long way (and can be located in the founding works of Krafft‐Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey (see: Bland and Doan (1998); Irvine 2005; Robinson 1976), the formation of a modern sociological studies of the sexual is usually attributed to the work of John Gagnon (1931–2016) and William Simon (1930–2000) with their key idea that sexuality should be seen not as a biological drive but as a socially constructed script (Gagnon and Simon 1973). In multiple papers theorizing the sexual in the mid‐1960s, they aimed to bring the study of the sexual into the regular orbit of social structure and regular social learning. As John Gagnon said: In any given society, at any given moment in its history, people become sexual in the same way as they become everything else. Without much reflection, they pick up direction from their social environment. They acquire and assemble meanings, skills and values from the people around them. Their critical choices are often made by going along and drifting. People learn when they are quite young a few of the things they are expected to be, and continue slowly to accumulate a belief in who they are and ought to be throughout the rest of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Sexual conduct is learned in the same ways and through the same processes; it is acquired and assembled in human interaction, judged and performed in specific cultural and historical worlds. (Gagnon 1977, p. 2)

Based at the Kinsey Institute, and hence grounded in a major empirical effort, their theoretical work was paradigm breaking in bringing the social to the forefront of thinking about sexuality. It moved sexuality from being seen as essentially biological and reproductive to the challenge of taking seriously its socially grounded multiple meanings. What marks all human sexualities from that of other animals is that it is always symbolic and meaningful and humans develop a range of sexual metaphors to live with: scripts, stories, discourses, subjectivities, habitus, ­assemblage. Gagnon and Simon’s pioneer work argued that sexual conduct is always



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scripted conduct in three ways. Personally, it guides sexual thoughts, fantasies, feeling, and behaviours. Interactionally, it guides sexual encounters. And thirdly, cultural‐­ historical‐politically, it lays down wider cultural codes and narratives: what Steven Seidman has called the macro‐structuring of scripts. (2007, p. 251)

“Scripts”, says Gagnon, “specify, like blueprints, the who’s, the what’s, the when’s, where’s and why’s for given types of activities” (Gagnon 1977, p. 6). Shortly after the publication of their key work, Sexual Conduct, in 1973 came the publication of Foucault’s extraordinarily influential book The History of Sexuality, which critiqued the old “repression hypotheses” and led to sexualities being seen as a discursive formation embodying power circuits. For him, Sexuality is the name given to a historical construct … a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of knowledge, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of power. (Foucault 1980, p. 196)

Foucault’s guiding imagery was that of discourse in a power/knowledge spiral, whereby new species, like the homosexual, the pervert, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the hysterical woman had appeared as targets for study (Foucault 1980). Foucault’s work  –  with all its challenging polemic  –  became the canonical text of the emerging sexuality studies.

Social Movements and Social Change CSS emerged side by side with the emergence of gay liberation and second wave feminism, challenging the heterosexist and patriarchal orthodoxies of the time and producing their own analyses of sexuality, gender, and power. The women’s movement generated an enormous and flourishing debate on sexuality in the 1970s. It started with Kate Millet’s claim for a need for Sexual Politics (1969) and Adrienne Rich’s (1981) critique of “compulsory heterosexuality” and went on to examine the history of rape (Brownmiller 1975). Most of all, by the early 1980s, the controversies of the “pleasure” and “danger” debate created abiding factions: prominent in this analysis was the contrasting focus on sexual violence and pornography posed against the potentials of female desire (Jackson and Scott 1996; Leidholdt and Raymond 1990; Vance 1984). Likewise, many ideas of gender and sexual fluidity, identity, cultural differences, and the structuring of homohate and homophobia, sex negativism and ultimately heteronormativity (and nowadays non‐normativity) started to be fostered within the gay and lesbian movement, a movement which ultimately generated the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) studies with its own panoply of courses, writings, and histories (e.g. Abelove and Barale 1993; Nardi and Schneider 1998). Taken together, these movements and moments helped to shape what came to be known as the “essentialist‐constructionist” debate – a debate that dominated sexualities studies from the mid‐1970s to the mid‐ 1990s, leading to major world conferences about it. Even today, its core debate hovers over much of the work in the field. (For further details, see Altman et  al. 1989; Fuss 1989.)

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From AIDS to Postmodern Queer In the early 1980s, the world started to confront the pandemic of AIDS/HIV. Tragic and fearsome as it was, it cannot be underestimated how it had the curious side effect of generating a worldwide program of public sex research, often with much furor over funding. Much of this research was indeed moribund, opportunistic, and limited to a very dull and expensive program of behavioral studies in classic positivist mold, which revealed little; but some of it produced striking work on sexual differences and behavior – and in particular, an awareness of how local knowledge, local communities, and local identities infuse sexual practices and generate new and changing sexual meanings and scripts. It established beyond doubt that sexual practices bring different meanings; that they differ from situation to situation; and that local communities generate different responses and epidemiologies. AIDS research also became a global industry, and through this, we start to see a growing awareness of the differences of sexualities across cultures (now regularly revealed through papers in the journal Culture, Health and Sexualities). Sex research gained funding, a professionalism, and a degree of legitimacy, even respectability, across the world. There was the start of an awareness of global sexualities. Toward the end of the 1980s, a significant theoretical turn emerged through the amplification of post‐modern theorizing and the development of queer theory. Largely unaware of the ideas of Gagnon and Simon, it drew mainly from literary theory, poststructuralism (especially Foucault), and feminist theory. The notion of any one true sexuality was attacked, and binary systems of gender and sexuality and heterosexual dominance were once again challenged, ultimately urging more transgressive and postmodern readings of human sexualities. At this time, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, and history took over the lead from sociology – and queer studies arrived in the academy. Whilst the ideas of Michel Foucault certainly loomed large in this (with his talk of “regimes of truth”), the roots of queer theory (if not the term) are usually seen to lie in the work of Eve Kasofsky Sedgwick (1991) and Judith Butler (1990). The former argued in The Epistemology of the Closet: … many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth century Western culture as a whole are structured – indeed fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century … any understanding of any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern Homo/heterosexual definition. (Sedgwick 1991, p. 1)

Fear of a Queer Planet deconstructs discourses and creates a greater openness and fluidity by suggesting that very few people really fit into the straightjackets of our contemporary gender and sexual categories. It hence becomes a stark attack on “normal business in the academy” (Warner 1993, p. 25), challenging the thoroughly gendered mode of thinking behind much academic work. One early leading proponent, David Halperin, suggests that, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers” (Halperin 1997 , p. 62). For much of this work, a key theme



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became sexual transgression and sexual dissidence: ironically, many of its ideas have now become institutionalized in universities, readers and careers (see: Corber and Valocchi 2003; Giffney and O’Rourke 2009; Lovaas, Elia, and Yep 2006). Trangression has become normalized. Recently, some original queer theorists have also worried about the directions it has been taking (Warner 2012). In sociology, the earliest contribution to this work was found in Steven Seidman’s Queer/Sociology (Seidman 1996) and following a queer path has been only one option open for critical sociologists. The sociologist William Simon took these ideas seriously in his important book Postmodern Sexualities (Simon 1996), claiming that the Grand Narrative of Sexuality was coming to an end. “Sex” was no longer the source of truth, as it was for the moderns with their strong belief in science. Instead, human sexualities had become destabilized, decentered and de‐essentialized: the sexual life could no longer be seen as harboring any essential unitary core locatable within a clear framework (like the nuclear family) with an essential truth waiting to be discovered: now there were only fragments. Many sociologists have not taken this route: queer theory is seen as following a path that is too literary, obscurantist, abstractly philosophical, and lacking any adequate empirical analysis of comparative historical social structures (Plummer 2005a; Stein and Plummer 1994;).

From Sexual Rights to Global Intimate Citizenship Ideas of “sexual rights” (and ideas of “gender rights” and “sexual orientation”) started to be pioneered in the late nineteenth century, but in its earliest days, the United Nations Human Right Commission was never explicit on such matters. Instead, issues were raised obliquely in debates about health, family, children and eventually “equality between the sexes.” Gradually ideas of rights moved across a range of contested areas and consolidated both women’s reproductive rights and women’s concerns with violence. And, as these rights themselves had to confront sexual issues, so sexual rights moved on to the agenda. By the 1990s it had become, as Rosalind Petchesky (2000) famously remarked, “the new kid on the block.” It became an organizing focus for social movements both conservative and radical; and as new alliances were made, new zones of conflict and arguments on the nature of human sexualities entered the public global stage at the United Nations and elsewhere. A stream of debates around women’s rights, reproduction and fertility, and abortion (which became known as “reproductive politics”), children’s rights, sexual violence, and HIV Aids gradually established a space for a language of sexual rights. Espoused initially by women’s groups, then by HIV/AIDS groups and gay and lesbian lobbies (mainly ILGA and the Sexual Rights Initiative, SRI), and latterly by human rights movements such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the main antagonists have always been the conservative wings of religious and family movements, creating strange “unholy alliances” between the Holy See and the traditional mullahs through the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). By contrast, a broad program of gay, lesbian, and transgender rights have been more readily put into place through the European Union through The Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999, The Strasbourg Court and Article 21 of The Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2009.

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During the 1990s, more and more thinkers moved to the development of ideas around Human Rights and Citizenship, applying them to areas like health and reproductive rights and the claims that sexual minorities had rights. David Evan’s Sexual Citizenship (1993) pioneered the idea theoretically, whilst international campaigning started attempts at establishing gender and sexual rights on world agendas through the work of the United Nations, the World Women’s Movement, the United Nation’s International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and the formation of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), and others. Growing out of this, the even broader ideas of intimate citizenship developed. The emphasis here was placed on citizenship as the right to choose: to choose your partner, your sexual activities, to have a child or not, or to control your own body. This was a citizenship of “the right to choose” a personal life (Richardson 1998, 2017; Roseneil et al. 2012; Petchesky 2000; Plummer 1995, 2001, 2003, 2005a; Weeks 1998). All this, of course, raised and continues to raise a complex set of issues (Richardson 2017). Most notably, can sexual citizenship ever allow for a radical, transgressive, dissident, or queer citizenship (Bell and Binnie 2000; Phelan 2001): can you, in short, stay “queer and radical” and yet be a “good citizen”? All this talk of sexual citizens subsequently led to talk of dissident sexualities showing how citizenship may well work directly against the “bad gays” and foster social exclusion processes. And at the turn of the century, these agendas became more and more prominent at a global level. In Asia and Latin America, in Muslim Countries and African Nations, the “rights” of human sexualities for every “imagined community” and nation state – along with their control and regulation ‐became more and more an issue. Can (and should) Western sexualities and western rights be transplanted across the world?

Complex Global Sexualities in the New Millennium And so, by the end of the twentieth century a sort of an agenda of study and action had been established and some progress made. But fairly soon into the new millennium, a rapidly transforming world order became ever more troubled, characterized by “wicked” (unresolvable) problems. Not “progress,” but “regress” (Geiselberger 2017). These changes can be readily marked by many symbolic events: 9/11, Snowden, the Tsunami of 2004, The Crash of 2008, the Chibok Schoolgirls, Syria, Putin, Brexit, Trump, and the rest. Cumulatively, these indicative symbols suggested a deep complexity of world problems almost beyond our understanding or resolution. Twenty‐first century sexualities now comes to dwell in a world of unusually high levels of global complexity. Facing global complexities means facing a world of global sexual and intimate complexities alongside narrative precariousness bringing the breakdown of any sense of a strong and trusted world. We now often face what have come to be called wicked problems: difficult or impossible to resolve because of change, complexity, and contradictory tensions. Most strikingly, complex sexualities means we are now witnessing six events: 1. An existential threat of environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, population crisis (both size and age structure), and the “end of the Anthropocene,” which sets a background scene of sexual angst, anxiety, and anger.



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2. An epoch defining “digitalization and mediation of social life,” which is ­radically transforming human sexualities into global mediated and digital sexual risk. Side by side with this is the rise of AI etc. and the possibility of robotic intimacies. 3. A widespread development and maybe collapse of neoliberal capitalism, which has brought a widespread marketization and commercialization of sexualities, alongside gross social and sexual inequalities. Part of this has meant the rise of large segments of the world population who have been excluded, becoming subjects of expulsion, precariousness, and dispossession. This is a world where human sexualities are almost wholly unstudied and unnoticed. 4. A resurgence of terrorism and violence, linked to a renewal of religious fundamentalisms often linked now to the growth of violent conflicts alongside social fear. Part of this is the continuing longstanding world historical tension between the genders, which is visible in various kinds of sexual violence, soft and hard. 5. A transformation of world politics indicated by the rise of populisms, the reordering of world orders, a kind of democratic fatigue. And with this has come a growing resistance to rights and citizenship claims and challenges to a global democratization of sexualities. 6. A development of fragmented global modernities, which poses the problem of the interrelationship between differing countries and states, and issues of global sex wars, migrating sexualities, and, hopefully, cosmopolitan sexualities: of how different world sexualities may live together. The new millennium was to become a global and digital millennium. Capitalism and neoliberalism brought global sex commodification markets, extreme individualism, gross inequalities, social exclusion, often dehumanization. New global technologies reshaped reproduction, health, and aging. New communications brought globally mediated sexualities and digital sexualities changing how sexualities live in time and space. New world politics brought global fundamentalist and modernizing sexual tensions to center stage. New migration patterns saw new relationships and sexualities, along with tourist sexualities, transnational friendships, long‐distance relationships: gay global parties, “cross‐border marriage,” “distant love” (Beck and Beck‐Gernsheim 2014). As immigration patterns changed and millions became displaced refugees, so issues of migrating sexualities along with sexual hybridity and a sexual diaspora began to take shape. Social movements, once local, became global  –  bringing global discourses about sexualities, and global sex politics. An army of new global sex specialists (the sex researchers, the sex medics, the sex educators, the sex therapists, and the sex lawyer) started to generate new glocal languages, “sex discourses” and money‐making activities as they traveled the world of international conferences. Global cities brought impersonal sexualities, “metrosexual sexualities,” red‐light zoning. And ultimately, glocal complexity brought a precarious multiplicity of changing and conflicting sexualities and gender possibilities across the wide‐sweeping canvasses of the world, generating widespread confusions, challenges, violence, and conflicts. In what follows, I briefly sketch just three of these issues, ­samples of a new world in the making.

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Digital Sexualities The most apparent shift in contemporary human sexualities has been its widespread mediation and digitalization. With the convergence of computers, phones, cameras, videos, scanners, televisions, web cams and screens, we find new sexual worlds of camsex (with video), cybersex (with computers), phone sex (with phones), gamesex (with computer games), “sexting” (with mobile phones), teledildonics (with robots and remote controls) and sexual networking (with social networks). Together these bring a thesaurus of new sexual practices and languages: cybersex, cyberporn, cyberstalking, cyberbullying; on line sex and dating, on line grooming; digital queer, digital porn, digital rape, digital victim, digital cottage, digital carnality. All signpost multiple new intimate relationships and sex practices that simply did not exist before the late twentieth century (Mowlabocus 2010; Nixon and Düsterhöft 2017; Waskul 2004). In all this we start to see a spectacular re‐imaging of human sexualities as it confronts a reordering of time, space, body, and relationships. Social network sites create new possibilities for making local and global sexual and intimate contacts (Grindr, the gay line, is a geosocial networking mobile app, set up in 2009 and claiming as of 2016 to have some 2.4 million users in 192 countries on a daily basis). Digitalism also makes available a perpetual flow of sexual representations (the people’s pornography). Hitherto unavailable widely, now every sexual fetish or curiousity can now develop its own complex imagery: there is a kind of “hashtag sexualities.” More, we can make our own porn through DIY/Gonzo porn. Generating new erotic embodiments, it also makes possible new eroticisms, providing actual direct physical sex contact through the technology itself, often through masturbation. Digital sexualities also make sex political: creating new global activisms around sexual politics, both conservative and radical. The trans and nonbinary community, the asexual community, the polyarmory community and the BDSM community are but examples. Much of this is achieved through the click of a Google search of sexualities. And at a more basic level, digitalism helps us change how we gain information and knowledge about sexualities in all their diversities and forms across the world (from guidance pages on infertility [there are over a million sites on sperm banks] to sites engaged in bride‐mail ordering). All this starts to raise critical issues. Sexual space gets reorganized: Sex and sex partners now become locatable across the globe. Sexual time gets transformed: Sex now becomes accessible instantly with the possibility for many of “perpetual sexual contact” through mobile phones. Sexual representations mutate as sex becomes “mainstreamed” with ubiquitous sexual images that were once rare or impossible. Sexual privacy reconfigures: Sex once private now becomes more and more publicly visible as old splits of private/public change. Sexual inequalities sharpen: The new digital divide creates a world of those who have access and those who do not. Sexual regulations change as global issues are raised of how states control these new communications and how states monitor what is going on. There are new possibilities of sexual surveillance. All this has led to multiple new patterns of risky digital sexualities. Most apparent is digital sexual abuse, cruelty, and crime  –  a world of sexual grooming, revenge porn, cyber‐stalking, trolling (inciting hatred online by posting abusive or inflammatory messages), baiting (humiliating by telling sexual stories about them), spamming (directing vast quantities of unwanted messages), and flaming (unwanted



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abuse often in live chat forums) – has appeared. Much of this feeds from and n ­ urtures a widespread misogyny, homophobia, racism, vigilantism, and narrative violence (cf. Aiken 2016; Lupton 2016). Digitalism also opens up new problems for the surveillance of sexual life. As “our every click is registered somewhere,” so it may be being monitored by someone else. Both business and governments have access to much of our digital data; There are problems posed for the sexual self: How is digitalism changing who we are sexually? At the simplest level, the “sexual selfie” renders the once‐private more public and suggests a growing intense individual self‐preoccupation, with the emerging possibly of a widespread narcissistic sexuality. Ultimately, this has led to the major risk of sexual dehumanization: How ultimately might digitalism lead us to new worlds where real human life will matter less? Might our brains even become rewired for a new mode of sex? What does an Internet of Things do to sexualities? How might  artificial intelligence (A.I), robots and sensor networks take our sexualities (and human life) beyond human control?

Neoliberal Global Market Sexualities A second central feature of globalization has been its linkage with neoliberal capitalism in the late twentieth century. This is a world dominated by money, ­markets, financialization, advertising, and the promotional and celebrity cultures – alongside the growing severity of inequalities. Neoliberalism has transformed human sexualities in three major ways: 1. Sexualities are now locked into a worldwide system of market circuits that produces, sells, and buys human intimacies. 2. Sexualities are shaped increasingly by an ideology of extreme “individualism of choice.” 3. Both of these factors are connecting sexualities to extreme processes of inclusion and exclusion as growing inequalities push more people to the edge of their societies. In short, sexualities become increasingly marketed, individualistic, and unequal (cf. Plummer 2005b). Take the example of market/commodified sexualities. Sexualities now dwell across at least nine commercial worlds. Most obviously there is the (i) major global industry of pornography. Its global economic value is very substantial but almost impossible estimate (much of the market is underground, it is increasingly virtual, no statistics are kept; its widespread nature has been called the pornographication of culture (McNair 2002). At the same time, there is now (ii) an extensive, overlapping, and ubiquitous world of advertising, entertainment, and sports that sells items through their sexual iconography and celebrity cultures, giving many objects a sellable erotic connection: perfumes, clothes, holidays, music, and dance are all linked to marketing sexualities. (iii) Goods are also being sold that are aimed directly at sexual activities like drugs (from Viagra and birth pills to poppers’ and “chemsex” (crystal methamphetamine, GHB/GBL and mephedron) (nitrate inhalants and crystal meth) as well as electronically developed sex aids (“electrosex”) and “sex toys” and

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“sex clothes” (BDSM costumes, and whips/harnesses to dildos, vibrators, and inflated blow‐up dolls). In China alone there are estimated to be some 200 000 sex shops, 2000 of them in Beijing (Burger 2012, p. 187). Increasingly, too, (iv) relationships are being sold: from mail order brides and “cyberbrides,” dating agencies, the global wedding industry and a “Pink Economy” to market gay life. Then there is (v) the marketing of emotions: from expensive sex therapy to standardized self‐help books selling “the 12 steps needed for a perfect relationship” (cf. Illouz 2008). Of course, a major market also exists via (vi) “real live sex acts” (Chapkis 1997) as all kinds of sex are put up for sale through sex work, male and female, and increasingly digital. Here we find stripping, table dancing/lap dancing, escorts and call girls/ boys, brothels, street prostitution, massage parlors, beauty shops, peep shows, sex tourism, telephone sex. Much of this involves rich/first world men as purchasers with excluded poorer women and men selling from low‐income countries. Closely connected to is (vii) the global sex trafficking trade. An estimated 20.9 million men, women, and children are trafficked for commercial sex or forced labor around the world today – in some 58 countries (UNODC 2012). There is also the (viii) global commercialization of new reproductive technologies (online, on Google) with one‐ stop shopping for surrogates to hire and the making of “the industrial womb” (Twine 2011). Gamete donation, surrogacy, and adoption have become multibillion markets that pose new ethical and legal challenges. Finally, there is also a costly and growing (ix) transgender, intersex, and cosmetic surgery industry. Although there are many isolated analysis of sex work, there has been no major attempt to put together the wide scale of the overall industry. (e.g. Agustin 2007; Bernstein 2007; Jeffreys 2008, Poulin 2011). All this takes places side by side with the rise of what might be called pauperized sexualities: a world of massive sexual inequalities. The most extreme division across the globe is between the rich and the poor. The total global income by fifths of the population shows the richest 20% of the global population receives some 74% of all income. At the other end of the social scale, the poorest 20% of the world’s people, by contrast, struggle to survive, living damaged lives as refugees, the global poor, the dispossessed. Their lives fall in the cracks or are pushed beyond society, beyond care, beyond rights. Sexual lives dwell in locational power: the social divisions that stratify sexualities by economic groupings (such as caste, class, slavery, the rich and the poor), by gender orders (of men, women and the linked “third” or intermediate worlds of gender muddle), by age and generation, by health, by ethnic and racial divides, by religions, as well as by “nations” and cultures. They face the “pathologies of power” whereby many come to be marginalized, colonized, subordinated. In the simplest terms: wealthy white rich men have usually ruled the world; poor indigenous women have usually been pushed into the margins of the wretched. Their sexual worlds have differed accordingly. And all this has major consequences for sexual lives. While many live in worlds of market sexualities, many others confront sexualities in dire circumstances: Here we find sex among the emaciated (over 20% of the people [about 1.3 billion] lack the nutrition they need to work regularly); the sick (some 50 000 people die each day from poverty related causes); the unhygienic (about 2.4 billion lack basic sanitation); the grieving (child birth and death) the homeless (some 10 million people ­worldwide) and migrant, exiled and dispossessed.



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Global Sexualities and Contested World Sexual Cultures An overarching feature of this new world I am describing has been the shrinking of the interpersonal globe and the increasing interconnectivity across it: the growing globalization and glocalization of sexualities (Altman 2001; Aggleton et al. 2013; Binnie 2004). Both digitalism and neoliberalism are a major part of this, as are the resurgence of fundamentalisms, the transition of politics, and so on. Part of this has been the emergence of what might now be called the global sex wars. Sexualities have always had a potency for generating symbolic battles. CSS has long taken an interest in such conflicts and how they have manifested themselves in social movement activisms. As we have seen, the latter part of the twentieth century brought a number of gender and sexual social movements that marked what might be called the move toward a progressive sexual politics. But the twenty‐first century has also highlighted global change, resistance, even regression. Challenges are being made globally toward feminism and LGBTQ movements as wars are being waged against abortion, reproductive technologies, gender mainstreaming, marriage equality, gay rights, transgender rights, antidiscrimination policies, and sex education. Polarization is now taking place not just within countries but across the world as new global battle grounds are being delineated, which are likely to shape much of the coming century. Much of this is connected to a return to religious fundamentalism (Altman and Symons 2016; Kuhar and Patternotte, 2018). It is through such conflicts that the limits of much contemporary social science are revealed. With its eyes cast narrowly only on the United States and Europe, “the West,” the complexity of the sexualities of most of the world had been ignored (Connell 2007). To take the major example of LGBT/queer politics, Joseph Massad (2002, 2007) looks at same sex reactions in Arab culture and argues that it is quite mistaken to force Western ideas of the homosexual or sexual rights on to a quite ­different and diffuse Arab sexualities: What is emerging in the Arab (and the rest of the third) world is not some universal schema of the march of history but rather the imposition of these western modes by different forceful means and their adoption by third world elites, thus foreclosing and repressing myriad ways of movement and change and ensuring that only one way for transformation is made possible.

Massad has a major point. And we could go further: the US gay movement could be seen as fostering a growing Islamophobia within its global queer organizing. Through this it cultivates a form of “homo‐nationalism” that marks out the “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” US patriots from “the other.” And this “other” becomes the dangerous racialized terrorist and the sexualized enemy (cf. Puar 2007).

Critical Global Sexualities What this has led to increasingly is a growing focus on world sexual cultures as autonomous but interconnected. Of course, human sexualities have always been global and worldwide. The diversities of human sexualities across all cultures across have long been documented (cf. Ford and Beach 1952/1965), as have the ways they

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have moved across it: through travel, migrations, armed conflicts. But all this accelerates under modernity. Now, following the work of Eisenstadt (2000), Therborn (2004) and others we can start to speak of multiple modernities and locate different pathways and outcomes of multiple modernist/global sexualities with deeply varying routes moving along different trajectories across different countries in the world, each displaying their own local transformative sexual cultures. The routes into contemporary global and plural sexual worlds are varied, achieved through different pathways: through colonization, through conquest, through innovation, through evolution, and through diffusion. All countries are moving toward their own very different versions of a global twenty‐first century sexualities – struggling with their own political and religious conflicts and the contradictions posed by their vast inequalities and past traditions of religions, tribalisms, colonizations, conflicts. Clearly, the contemporary sexualities of Shanghai have not been shaped in the same historical ways as the routes through the Ottoman Empire to modern Istanbul, and these are definitely not the same as the paths of sexual development of Nigerian, Indonesian, or Iraqi sexualities. It could hardly be otherwise as different histories unfold. Gradually it seems every society in the world is building its own understanding of its sexualities. For example, in 2007, Sylvia Tamale put out a wide call for African scholars and activists to speak out about their sexualities, leading to the edited collection African Sexualities (2011) that brought together multiple African voices to speak about a very wide range of sexualities – not just in academic articles but also in memoirs, photographs, poetry, and more. The goal was to write outside the norms and theories of the West and yet to show the plurality and complexities of African sexualities – their practices and identities, taboos and stigmas, violence and transgressions. Not theorized as “the other” of the West, we start to get the foundational fragments for understanding specific cultural variations and hence ultimately to build up a world portrait of world sexual cultures. Likewise, in 2005 the Asian Queer Studies Conference saw some 600 academics and activists gathered together in Bangkok, marking a turning point for all this challenging new work. Publications have proliferated. In the past decade or so, then, there has been a major move toward the study of sexualities across the world, bringing new global scholarship into play. Critical global sexualities recognizes the unique set of cultural issues raised by each state and country across the world: in Muslim cultures, in Latin America, in South Africa, in India, in China and Russia, in South East Asia, and others. All flow from different past complex and multiple sexualities and all lead to possibilities for differing future plural sexualities. For example, we now face a China (population around 1.4 billion) rejecting “human rights” and sexual rights; even as it struggles with Daoist, Confucian, and Communist pasts to meet each other at a major capitalist market turn. Here is a fragmented contemporary Africa (population: around 1.3 billion) whose sexualities have been shaped by poverty, corruption, Christianization, civil war, and colonialism. Here are the complex multiple Muslim cultures (with a world population of around 1.6 billion) with sexualities torn by variant antagonistic interpretations of Islam and gender facing enormous conflict over modernity with religion and the “West.” Here are Latin America and Caribbean cultures (population around 650 million) torn apart first by colonialism and then



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by populism and dictatorships. And then there is a Russian (population: 144 ­million) where homophobia flourishes and indeed is used as a major weapon in world politics. (e.g. Corrales and Pecheny 2010; Dave 2012; De La Dehesa 2010; Epprecht 2008, 2013; Healey 2017; Jeffreys and Yu 2015; McLelland and Mackie 2014; Rahman 2014; Wieringa 2002; Wieringa and Sivori 2013).

Conclusion Jeffrey Weeks once aptly remarked: “As sex goes, so goes society. As society goes, so goes sexuality” (Weeks 2003, p. 20). Our human sexualities are always on the move: never fixed or stable. Human sexual life is persistently up for reworking and reorganizing. In this chapter I have tried to capture a little of this change, glimpsing a few critical moments in the development of CSS over the past half century. It is not comprehensive; there are other changes that could have been mentioned (e.g. Seidman et al. (2016, 3rd ed.). But this is what sociologists study. They ask: How do sexualities dwell in an ever‐ changing world? Above all, I hope to have shown that human sexualities are constantly being reshaped through the contingencies of emergent time and space. Two important ideas flow from this: generational sexualities and cosmopolitan sexualities. The idea of generational sexualities suggests that while human sexualities live in a present in which they are studied, they are grounded in a history of age cohorts of the past that live on as ghosts in the present. Such ideas have become more and more prominent in queer theory, which has made the whole issue of temporality a problem for thinking. Likewise, the key idea of cosmopolitan sexualities is emerging to suggest the complexities of different, changing world sexual cultures with the ultimate challenge of finding ways to live with these differences in the future (Plummer 2010, 2015a, 2015b). A long‐term project for CSS is to build the social imaginaries of these generational and cosmopolitan sexualities. Both ideas suggest a core complex global normative order of multiplicities where possible common human values of caring, dignity, rights, and justice may be struggled for across nations. While CSS must increasingly look globally and critically at the diversities of the sexual worlds and perspectives of others (even those others who call themselves our enemies), a cosmopolitan imaginary is also needed that will help us find ways of both appreciating and living with differences even as we struggle to find common values and shared assumptions that will enable us to build better future sexual worlds for all. Such worlds just might be able to promote an equality and dignity of genders and sexualities, worlds of justice, care, and love for all, worlds that will enable a flourishing of human diversities. It seeks an inclusive sexuality for all while aiming to reduce the harm of what can be called dehumanizing sexualities.

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11 Racial and Ethnic Issues Critical Race Approaches in the United States Brittany C. Slatton and Joe R. Feagin

Introduction “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” questioned Donald Trump, president of the United States, during a 2018 immigration meeting in the White House. Trump’s comments were in reference to US immigration from countries populated primarily by blacks and Latinos, such as Haiti and El Salvador. According to news reports, he inquired “why [do] we need more Haitians?” and expressed a desire for greater immigration from the mostly white country of Norway (Scott 2018). This was not his first racist tirade. During an early presidential campaign speech at New York City’s Trump Tower, he racially stereotyped and disparaged Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals (Kopan 2016). Despite his blatant racial framing, nonetheless, Donald Trump was rewarded by (mostly white) voters with a presidential victory. Subsequently, he received continued support from ordinary whites, white politicians, and other elite whites who regularly overlooked, justified, or downplayed his highly racialized behavior. Mainstream social analysts often consider the racial framing and behavior of whites like Trump as primarily about the character of extremist individuals or small groups somehow disconnected from the larger white majority. These social analysts, including many social scientists, do not move beyond conceptualizations of individualistic prejudice and bias to engage a critical race analysis that centrally examines this framing and behavior as empirical evidence of systemic patterns of racism central to US society. The intent of this chapter is to problematize this mainstream social science approach to racial and ethnic issues and to provide a broad overview of critical race approaches as “best practices” for researching and analyzing US racial matters.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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We divide this chapter into three sections. In the first section, we critique mainstream theories, revealing how they are limited in analysis of racial matters and ultimately aid the maintenance of existing white racial‐power structures. We then provide a detailed analysis of critical race approaches to race and ethnic studies scholarship. Attention is given to theoretical underpinnings of major theorists who advance a critical race approach. These theorists provide powerful scholarship articulating new modes of thought that identify and challenge conventional notions of racism as “rare and aberrational rather than systemic and ingrained” (Crenshaw et  al. 1995, p. xvi). In the second section, we present critical race scholarship that examines racial and ethnic oppression and documents the contemporary ways racist thoughts, values, emotions, and actions are systematically sustained. In the final section, we discuss the resistance and counter‐frame strategies employed by people of color and their centrality to critical race approaches. Oppressed groups have not passively accepted systemic racism but have always, in varying ways and degrees, fought back and attempted to redefine their own space and meaning in society.

Critical Analysis of Mainstream Race and Ethnicity Theories Mainstream social science research on race and ethnicity inadequately delineates theories and concepts on race that privilege white ideals, culture, thoughts, and interpretations. Historically, influential mainstream scholars have mostly been white men, such as Gunnar Myrdal, Robert Park, and Milton Gordon. These scholars provided mid‐twentieth‐century theories on race that privileged a white male lens. Their limited theoretical approaches continue to be influential, and while their major concepts and theories have sometimes been updated, they still provide the theoretical and methodological agenda for much social science and other research on race and ethnicity today. These approaches have provided such concepts as “assimilation,” “tolerance,” “stereotypes,” “prejudice,” and “racial bigotry,” which, while frequently helpful analytical concepts, are severely limited in capturing the full extent of a racialized society and of how white racism is a foundational and systemic reality in the United States (Feagin 2006, 2010). A substantial proportion of contemporary work on race and racism in mainstream social science has focused on the actions of prejudiced individuals (e.g. “bigots”), thus placing the theoretical focus of racism at the micro (individual) level, rather than connecting micro‐level racism to deeper and broader systemic (macro) structures of racism (Feagin 2006, 2014). It is problematic when social scientists engage in research that focuses solely on individual racism because it can lead to inaccurate assumptions. For example, numerous mainstream social scientists and other social analysts suggest that serious or blatant racism is dead or declining, in part because the social science instruments used to measure individual racism are relatively superficial (Alba 2009; Bonilla‐Silva 1997). When social science researchers focus solely on individual racism, without a structural‐historical analysis of institutional racist realities, they assume or imply that social institutions in themselves are not systemically racist and that studying contemporary racism is mainly a matter of measuring the percentage of people

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holding certain “racist beliefs” (Bonilla‐Silva 1997). Mainstream scholars and media analysts often represent individual racism as a type of “irrational thinking.” This is problematic because people who are overtly racist in their thinking may then be defined as “pathological,” while those who are not so “irrational” are assumed to be “racism‐free” (Bonilla‐Silva 1997). What gets ignored in this analysis is that the structural foundation of racism has the very rational function of providing and reproducing white socioeconomic privileges, benefits, and power at the expense and exploitation of people of color. Ignoring white racial oppression as the persisting foundation of countries like the United States is a central problem of past and current social science research on race and ethnicity, even sometimes that with a more critical bent. Take the example of the contemporary theory of racial formation, developed by pioneering social science scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986, 2014). The central point of this race‐critical theory is that racial formation is a societal process whereby specific racial projects (racial ideologies, interpretations, and representations) are created, changed, destroyed, and historically situated (Omi and Winant 2014). This theory is more critical of existing political and other social institutions than the major mainstream approaches and has been especially influential in theorizing the role of government (the “state”) in racializing society, especially through the creation of racial categories and racialized institutions. However, despite this theory’s analytical benefits, a critical problem is that it tends to view contemporary US racial groups – white, black, Latina/o, and Asian – as capable of developing racial projects, which together can greatly or equally affect the major racial formation(s) in US society. This aspect of the theory is problematic because it does not thoroughly address the undergirding structural foundation of the United States – a foundation of white‐imposed racial oppression that still continually provides greatly disproportionate racial privileges and benefits, some obvious but many hidden, for whites at the expense of Americans of color. Thus, contemporary black Americans can and do develop a series of “racial projects” and perspectives that resist oppression. Yet, that does not mean that these resistance projects and perspectives will carry determinative and central weight in a society where they still do not wield much transformative power because of centuries of deep‐lying white oppression and exclusion from major socioeconomic resources. Elite and rank‐and‐file whites still mostly decide the extent of the dominant racial discourse in contemporary society, and the extent to which the demands and perspectives of racially marginalized groups will be even recognized and acted upon. A critical race legal scholar, Derrick Bell, developed the concept of interest‐convergence – that is, racial progress is made only to the “extent that the divergence of racial interests [from whites] can be avoided or minimized” (Bell 1995 [1980], p. 24). Elite whites, in particular, must agree for major racial change to take place in US society. A particularly problematic theoretical approach is that of contemporary biosocial theories of race, which have an old history yet have seen a recent resurgence in the social sciences. Spearheaded by the work of contemporary socio‐genomists, biosocial theories critique social constructionist explanations of race, arguing that “human genetic variation consists of clines and clusters ‘that are homologous to racial and ethnic categories’” (Elias and Feagin 2016, p. 135). By asserting a biological or socio‐ biological basis for what are demonstrably socially constructed racial categories,



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these racist theories are not so different from the pseudo‐scientific racist arguments of most nineteenth century white scientists. Despite these similarities, biosocial theories have received contemporary mainstream coverage in such prestigious publications as the New York Times. Critical race scholars have demonstrated that the new biosocial theoretical approaches are as problematic as their nineteenth century predecessors. First, genetically based claims are in fact a social construction as they are “influenced by the researchers’ own human assumptions and decisions” about which “DNA samples” and what “genetic data to analyze” (Elias and Feagin 2016; Morning 2014, p. 190). For example, these researchers’ assert broad “race” differences where they are actually studying differences in less‐broad geographical populations. Second, and most problematic, if genetic explanations of human behavior are used to shape public policy decisions – as some white social scientists believe they should be – vulnerable, marginalized groups of color will again be the most detrimentally harmed, as is evidenced in earlier US historical eras of “biologically” based public policies (Elias and Feagin 2016; Morning 2014).

Critical Theoretical Approaches to Race: Undergirding Institutional and Systemic Racism Critical race approaches offer a theoretical space where scholars can critique and analyze mainstream assumptions of race and ethnicity that do not question the normativity of white power structures or do not provide a critical enough analysis of those power structures. While mainstream analysts of race and ethnicity often focus their analysis on prejudiced individuals and assert or imply that an “American creed” of liberty and justice for all is central to the United States, critical scholars start by recognizing well‐institutionalized racism as an essential analytical concept. African American scholars have been early developers of critical race approaches, even though their important and groundbreaking scholarship has often been denied or devalued by white scholars in their disciplines. African American sociologists such as W.E.B Du Bois (1992 [1935]) pioneered in some of the earliest critical scholarship on institutional racism, white colonization, and racial oppression. Oliver C. Cox (1948, 1959) – a rare and dissenting black member of the white‐dominated Chicago School of Sociology – emphasized racial exploitation and the nexus between capitalism and white racial oppression in his pathbreaking works Caste, Class, and Race and The Foundations of Capitalism. In the 1960s, Stokely Carmichael (later, Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton’s critical work Black Power theorized institutional white racism as “active” and “pervasive” racist attitudes and practices that permeate “the society on both the individual and institutional level, covertly and overtly” (Ture and Hamilton 1967 p. 5). There are a significant number of important social analysts who examine various US institutions from a critical race lens (see Delgado and Stefancic 2001), but in this chapter we will focus substantially on those who have extended the specific concept of systemic racism and documented it with empirical field research. Thus, expanding on the influential institutional racism theorizing of Carmichael, Hamilton, and other critical black analysts, Joe Feagin (2006, 2010, 2014) and his colleagues have articulated a broad critical theory of systemic racism. Systemic racism is defined as the “foundational, extensive, and inescapable hierarchical system of US racial

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oppression that has been devised by whites to subordinate people of color” (Elias and Feagin 2016, p. 258). It is a material, social, and ideological reality manifested in all major institutions and involving the deep foundation and surface structures of racial oppression, whereby whites – as racial oppressors – are unjustly enriched materially and socially and people of color – the oppressed groups – are unjustly impoverished (Feagin 2006, 2012). To rationalize whites’ oppressive treatment of blacks, Native Americans, and other groups of color, Feagin (2006, 2010) demonstrates that whites developed a broad white racial frame. This white frame, a white worldview, has been documented in US society as early as the seventeenth century and includes an array of critical features, including white‐racist prejudices, stereotypes, narratives, images, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate (Feagin 2006, 2010). A central feature of the white racial frame is “complete silence about well‐institutionalized white racism and a failure to criticize whites’ collective role in negatively shaping the broad US racial landscape, including hierarchical racial group relations” (Elias and Feagin 2016, p. 260). Whites draw on this racialized knowledge to interpret, rationalize, and legitimize oppression against people of color, as well as to legitimize their privileged positions. This white frame presents whites as the pinnacle of superiority and morality, and people of color, particularly blacks, as negative and inferior – often regardless of their adoption of white cultural norms. To a lesser extent, many people of color come to understand US society, at least in part, through the white racial frame (Feagin 2010; Picca and Feagin 2007). This frame is pervasive in major institutions, and it is difficult to live in US society without adopting aspects of the racial frame, consciously, or unconsciously. In sum, systemic racism theory and research addresses (i) the array of whites’ discriminatory practices targeting black Americans and other Americans of color, (ii) whites’ unjustly gained material and social resources, and (iii) the emotion‐ laden racial framing – long ago created by whites – that rationalizes whites’ unjustly gained resources, privileges, and power (Feagin 2006). Critical race approaches, including Feagin’s systemic racism and Carmichael and Hamilton’s institutional racism approaches, are also characterized by other important conceptual concerns, especially (i) the foregrounding of both ordinary and elite white discriminators, (ii) the challenging of hegemonic white‐racist ideologies by people of color, and (iii) the centering of the experiential voices of people of color.

Foregrounding Ordinary and Elite Whites Critical race approaches are concerned with analyzing both ordinary and elite whites, because their hierarchical positions in society are very germane to understanding the operation of systemic racism (Elias and Feagin 2016, p. 268). Social scientists have generally been reluctant to provide in‐depth critical analysis of whites, especially those who are most powerful in society. Those researchers who do so often experience academic marginalization from colleagues, administrators, and journal editors and book publishers. One central concern to systemic racism scholarship is white men – particularly elite white men, since they occupy the highest level of “societal power and control” (Feagin and Ducey 2017, p.1). The top rank of elite white men “form a dominant oligarchy in which they, a very small minority of US residents, rule over all others in society” (Feagin and Ducey 2017, p.1). These men dominate most US institutions and are thus



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in control of US governments, courtrooms, universities and colleges, television and radio programing, police departments, and major capitalistic firms. In fact, since the seventeenth century, elite white men have made most major economic and political decisions and have been the most influential in shaping international relations (Elias and Feagin 2016). Hence, some systemic racism scholars have found it to be of utmost importance to foreground powerful white men in analyses of racial oppression.

Challenging the Hegemonic Ideology of Colorblindness and Postraciality A critical race approach is concerned with refuting hegemonic ideologies, such as contemporary white ideologies of colorblindness and postraciality. Mainstream analyses of race typically view racism as existing only when one can identify specific discriminators with intent to discriminate. Thus, US courts tend to ignore status‐race and historical‐race, that is, the historical reality behind dominant racial categories such as white, black, Latino, and so forth. Instead, they focus on formal race, treating racial categories as disconnected from North America’s history of racial oppression (Gotanda 1995). Ignoring the deep structures of racism facilitates the continuation of contemporary racial/ethnic discrimination and encourages colorblind/postracial approaches to examining and addressing racism. A critical race approach, such as the systemic racism approach, combats these problematic suppositions and is thus essential to supporting current and future societal processes of atonement and reparations for past and present racial injustice.

Experiential Voices of People of Color To a large extent, mainstream approaches to racial issues privilege a white interpretation and lack a serious in‐depth analysis of the experiences of people of color. Thoroughly discussing the experience of racism through the voices of people of color threatens white power structures and is consequently avoided in most mainstream approaches. Thus, to document the lived experiences of racism, to adequately understand racial oppression, and to develop the best ways to counteract it, critical theorizing engages the voices of people of color (Yosso and Daniel 2005, p. 123). According to critical race legal scholars Delgado and Stefancic (2001, p. 9), underscoring the voices of people of color “holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know.” This valuable experiential knowledge is often expressed in critical theory through the usage of storytelling, narratives, oral histories, and other forms of qualitative research techniques (Chou and Feagin 2008; Delgado 1995; Delgado and Stefancic 2001; Solorzano and Yosso 2002).

Contemporary Critical Race Scholarship Systemic racism and other critical race approaches employ a variety of methodologies to address the foundational and systemic realities of racial matters. Empirical research methods of in‐depth interviews, comparative‐historical analysis, content

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analysis, surveys, and multi‐method approaches allow these critical scholars to foreground powerful white elites, critique racist power structures, and counter the legitimated and hegemonic (white) knowledge in society. In this next section we discuss several systemic racism and other critical race studies to illuminate contemporary examples of “asymmetrical racial group relations” and continued widespread oppression experienced by people of color (see Elias and Feagin 2016, p. 263).

Contemporary Forms of White Racism: Frontstage and Backstage Racism US society has moved away from a legalized acceptance of overt racial discrimination, a process that has resulted in contemporary whites using more subtle, covert, and backstage ways to maintain and enact racist beliefs and behaviors. According to mainstream media and social science analysts who accentuate colorblind and postracial framing of society (e.g. Alba 2009), blatantly racist and overtly discriminatory attitudes of whites rarely exist anymore. However, such inaccurate conclusions are commonly based on survey research studies that use superficial questions to measure racial attitudes and do not adequately account for social desirability bias. Research shows that discussing sensitive subjects, such as racial matters, often leads to socially desirable responses whereby respondents provide answers that fall in line with the socially correct temperature of the time. In today’s society, researchers may find that whites are “less” racist, because they provide “colorblind” or “postracial” responses to superficial survey questions that are asked of them by strangers (e.g. survey researchers on the phone). Additionally, responses to interviewers’ questions on racial matters have been shown to be affected by the characteristics of the interviewer. Older research by Hatchett and Schuman (1975) found whites were more likely to provide black interviewers with responses that were racially liberal, i.e. more colorblind, whereas their responses to white interviewers were often more racist and frank. Studies that remove the social correctness and interviewer effects lessen social desirability bias in responses to questions on racial matters (Kellner 2004; Sudman and Bradburn 1982). Critical research on racism reveals that, contrary to mainstream survey findings, much of the old‐fashioned racist framing among whites has not dissipated. These old‐fashioned racist views still exist, but they have often moved in their routine expression to “backstage” settings, since many whites now realize that regularly expressing strong racist views in the public “frontstage” is no longer socially acceptable. For example, critical research on well‐educated young whites by Picca and Feagin (2007) sheds light on racial performances that whites commonly engage while in such frontstage and backstage settings. Their research analyzes racial events that 626 white college students at numerous colleges and universities reported in journals kept for a few weeks. Their data show most whites know when and where to engage in openly racist performances. More than 7,000 backstage‐racism and frontstage‐ racism events were reported. Backstage racism is when whites engage in racist performances in settings with just other whites (e.g. friends and relatives) among whom they feel comfortable and have little fear of being reprimanded. When in the frontstage, such as around people of diverse racial‐ethnic backgrounds, a great many white individuals will engage in racial performances of colorblindness, hiding, or playing down their racist views. Significantly, the majority of racist commentaries



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and performances the students reported, for both backstage and frontstage settings, were directed at African Americans, showing the continuing centricity of blacks in the dominant white frame. In backstage settings, many whites feel safe in making racist comments or telling racist jokes, a common backstage interaction and essential component of sustaining modern racism. For example, one white college student in Picca and Feagin’s research described racial joking of white fraternity members in the backstage: As I sit in a room with a bunch of frat guys, Phil walks in chanting “rotchie, rotchie, rotchie!!” I asked quietly what that term means and I am answered with a giggle and a quick “its slang for nigger like niggerotchie.” … The guys I hang around (white college males) spend their “bored time” making up new ways to criticize each other, and the easiest way to do that is to call each other racial slurs when everyone is clearly white … If there happened to be people of a different color in the room, they would never say anything like that … I see that making racial slurs is only really “racial” when it is said to the person of the race. Otherwise, it is more of a term people use to define someone, where sometimes it has negative connotations. (Picca and Feagin 2007, p. 97)

In this diary entry, the student reveals how white students use code language to express racial slurs in an exclusively white setting. Instead of saying “nigger” the students replace it with a code word, so if outsiders intrude into this space they will not understand it. The central protagonist was open to explaining the code meaning for “rotchie” to the student diarist because he was in a backstage setting. An important point represented in this diary entry, and found often in Picca and Feagin’s (2007) data, is that whites rationalize other whites’ racist behavior. Their friends and acquaintances are not “really racist,” for in their view that phrase is reserved for Klan members. Use of racial slurs is not seen as racist if they are not addressed directly to people of color.

Asian Americans: the “Model Minority” Myth There has been relatively little critical race research that substantially documents Asian American experiences of systemic racism. Mainstream media and some social scientists assume Asian Americans do not experience substantial racist stereotyping and imagery like other racial groups (Prashad 2003). To the contrary, Asian Americans have experienced longstanding anti‐Asian racial framing by whites, which has not been adequately addressed in social science research yet is paramount in the experiences of racial hostility and discrimination Asian Americans often face. Claire Jean Kim (1999, 2003) and Chou and Feagin (2008) are among the researchers who have examined the effects of systemic racism on Asian Americans – particularly the harsh effects of the “model minority” myth. Created by white politicians and commentators in the 1960s (Feagin 2014), the model minority myth inaccurately portrays Asian Americans as a successful minority that is racially and socially “problem free” (Yu 2006). Although some Asian American groups have achieved significant economic success, this “model” myth is a gross overgeneralization of their experience. In fact, many Southeast Asian ethnic groups, such as the Laotians, Hmong, and Vietnamese, have relatively high numbers of families living below the US poverty line (Chang 2000).

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By claiming Asian Americans have been successful through hard work, as opposed to government assistance, the model minority myth generally fulfills an important white political agenda (Yu 2006) – to blame blacks (and Latinos) for their problems and chastise them for protesting discrimination rather than “working hard” like Asians. Not only has this myth operated to counter black resistance but it also delegitimizes Asian American protests against discrimination and reduces the possibility that federal and state governments will take action to meet the social and economic needs of Asian Americans (Feagin and Feagin 2008). The myth creates other problems for some Asian Americans who accept the model minority as a positive representation, thereby limiting the relationships they form with other groups of color fighting against systemic racism (Chou and Feagin 2008). Additionally, Asian Americans who have attempted to live up to this myth may experience serious health problems because of the intense pressure to succeed. For example, Asian American teenagers have a high rate of depression (Center for Medicaid Services 2002). One Cornell University report found Asian American students committed half of all suicides at the university, although they made up only 17% of the student population (Harder 2005). Additionally, elderly Chinese American women have a substantially higher suicide rate than elderly white women, and young Asian American women have a very high suicide rate. High SUICIDE rates among Asian American women may partially be a consequence of them experiencing even greater pressure to imitate the model minority myth than men (Amusa 2006; Cohen 2007; Chou and Feagin 2008). Asian American communities are seriously affected by other forms of anti‐Asian stereotyping and discrimination. Common anti‐Asian stereotyping and discrimination includes the enforcement of a “foreigner” status (Tuan 2003; Wu 2002) whereby Asian Americans are regularly considered outsiders or immigrants regardless of how many generations their families have lived in the United States. Chou and Feagin’s (2008) study on Asian Americans’ experiences with racism illustrates this, as from this respondent: I got into this disagreement with one of my coworkers because we have this person, she’s rather old. She’s from Cambodia. She is an assembler, so all she does is she comes to work for eight hours, she assembles some stuff. She goes home. Because her English is poor, he wouldn’t say she’s “American.” I say she has American citizenship, she pays American taxes, you know, she does everything to be qualified to be American citizen. His argument is she doesn’t speak the language well. I tried to tell him … that’s just unfair because she did everything the American government asked her to obtain American citizenship. Now somebody said she’s not American. (Chou and Feagin 2008, p.129)

Here the respondent illustrates the reality of many Asian Americans, that regardless of American citizenship, they will never be considered truly “American” by many whites and other non‐Asians. Not surprisingly, as a way to avoid this hostility, nonacceptance, and other forms of anti‐Asian discrimination, some Asian Americans hyper‐conform and buy strongly into the white‐constructed racial hierarchy and racial frame. Since those groups at the bottom of the US racial hierarchy face added vilification, some Asian Americans fight hard to maintain their middle status in the hierarchy and thus aggressively adopt white ideals, values, and even stereotypes from the white racial frame (Chou and Feagin 2008).



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White Men’s Deep Framing: Mythologizing Black Women As stated previously, many mainstream media analysts and numerous social scientists assume that race and racism are no longer central components of the everyday lives of whites and that whites are dramatically less racist than in the past. Downplaying the significance of racism can also be seen in current research and analyses of black–white interracial relationships. A major problem of much interracial relationship literature is that most scholars do not provide a critical analysis of the overwhelming white exclusion of blacks as relationship partners (Feliciano et al. 2009; Lewis 2016) or they downplay the role of race in whites’ relationship decisions (Rosenfeld 2005; Yancey and Yancey 1998). Census data show a distinctive and persistent trend over time: black women are not intermarrying at significant rates with white men or men of other racial groups. Research indicates that the incidence of black women–white men marriage is not as positively influenced by education and class status as for other forms of intermarriage with whites (Lee and Edmonston 2005; Qian and Litcher 2007). Studies of online dating trends show that black women (and blacks in general) are a severely excluded dating group when whites are making such choices. A study of internet dating by Feliciano et al. (2009) found that of the white men who specified a racial preference, 93% had excluded black women – the most excluded racial group for these men. Similarly, Lewis (2016) found Black women were far less likely to receive online messages from potential white male daters than all other racial groups of women. Although white men are less likely to indicate a racial preference in dating advertisements, their openness to interracial relationships is largely exclusive to non‐black women (Feliciano et al. 2009; Phua and Kaufman 2005). These studies find that black women are persistently excluded as dating and marriage partners for white men yet do not provide an adequate and in‐depth conceptual analysis to explain this phenomenon. However, the use of a critical theory that underscores how white racism continues to act as a central societal structure and, thus, to affect decisions white men make regarding black women allows us to better analyze what is taking place. Brittany Slatton’s (2014) qualitative research has, using self‐administered open‐ended online questionnaires, looked carefully and intensively at this longstanding exclusion of black women by white men. She engages critical race theory and uses the concepts of social construction and deep racial framing. According to her research, influential white men have for centuries had the power to socially construct black female bodies in raced, gendered, and classed terms. Historically, elite white men constructed black female bodies as sexually licentious, naturally immoral, diseased, animalistic, and masculine (Collins 2005; Hammonds 1997; Jones and Shorter‐Gooden 2003; St. Jean and Feagin 1998). Black women were, and today still are, considered everything that a white woman is not in terms of beauty, sexual morality, femininity, and womanhood (Collins 2000). This white male construction of black female bodies is representative of many white men’s (as well as white women’s and other men’s) deep framing, which is our common‐sense worldview and “cognitive infrastructure of the mind” (Lakoff 2006, p. 12). The deep frame of a great many white men contains white‐constructed, racialized, gendered, and classed pseudo‐knowledge of black women and is the lens through which a great many come to perceive, interpret, emote, and engage in actions where black women are concerned. Slatton’s (2014) study found that well over three‐quarters of her 134 white male respondents – despite most having very limited

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contact or experiences with black women  –  defined black women as unwanted women and ascribed a bevy of negative attributes to them. For example, one respondent stated the following: “Just the term ‘black women’ conjures up thoughts of an overweight, dark‐skinned, loud, poorly educated person with gold teeth yelling at somebody in public. I hope that doesn’t make me racist but honestly that’s the first thing I think of.” This respondent described himself as having had no black female friends and rare interactions with black families growing up, yet he has a deeply entrenched framing of black women. This is an example of the deep racist frame in operation, whereby whites do not need experiences with black women to have such views. Learned from parents and friends or the mainstream media, their deep frame of white‐constructed racialized knowledge acts as a cognitive, emotional, and action/reaction guide on how to think about, understand, define, and interact with black women and with black people generally (Slatton 2014, 2018).

Resistance Previous sections document systemic racism and other critical race research, underscoring the continuing experiences of racial hostility and discrimination in the lives of people of color. However, in the past and present, people of color have not passively accepted racism and domination, but have engaged in resistance strategies. A critical race approach acknowledges the ways in which groups of color fight back against white power structures that subsist on racial subordination. Critical race theorists have a rich history of providing insightful narratives and counter‐stories (Delgado 1995; Ross 1989; Torres and Milun 1995) to engage in resistance and theorize how people of color create their own meaning systems in a white‐normative society. An analysis of the narratives and counter‐stories of people of color finds they employ counter methods as tools to dispute narratives and stories of the dominant white group (Yosso and Daniel 2005). According to Delgado, the “stories or narratives told by the [dominant group] remind it of its identity in relation to outgroups, and provide it with a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural. The stories of the outgroups aim to subvert that reality” (1995, p. 60). Drawing on the black critical tradition, Feagin (2013) extends the literature on resistance with the concept of counter‐framing, an interpretive tool people of color use to resist the white racial frame’s negative ideas, stereotypes, and images of them. Aggressive counter‐framing provides a way for individuals and organized groups of color to fight against oppression and resist the way white racial framing defines them as inferior and whites as superior. Consider briefly some resistance strategies of African Americans and Asian Americans. African Americans have a long history of resistance and counter‐framing that traces back to centuries of slavery in North America. An integral component of resistance for enslaved Africans involved religion. White slaveowners taught enslaved Africans about Christianity to encourage docile acquiescence to slavery, teaching obedience and long‐suffering. Many enslaved Africans, however, used Christianity in an alternative form that linked it to traditional African religions, including using biblical ideas to preach deliverance from slavery. The valiant yet unsuccessful 1831 slave revolt of Nat Turner, a Baptist preacher, and 70 other enslaved Africans



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(Greenberg 2003), is but one example in a long tradition of the centrality of religion and religious leaders in significant black resistance. Enslaved African Americans have also resisted by counter‐framing the white racial frame’s definition of blacks as inhuman, dependent, and unworthy of liberty and justice. For example, the 1829 pamphlet, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, by David Walker – a young black abolitionist and early black critical-race thinker – provides one of the earliest statements on influential whites, such as Thomas Jefferson, who framed blacks as inherently incompetent and incapable of learning. Walker asserted racial oppression to be the barrier to black learning. He aggressively identified white slaveowners as stifling black talents to sustain black subordination. David Walker’s Appeal also asserted a strong counter‐frame to the white construction of blacks as inhuman; he proclaimed, “Are we MEN!! – I ask you, O my brethren! [A]re we MEN?” (Walker 1829, p.36). Resisting white racism and oppression by claiming their right to be treated as humans and not animals has long been a key component of black resistance framing. In more contemporary times, African American resistance to legal segregation has been observed in the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s–1970s. In these movements, black men, women, and children resisted and emphasized their rights to liberty, justice, and black power. They counter‐framed white definitions of them as unattractive by asserting “Black is Beautiful” (Ture and Hamilton 1967) and “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Even more recently, in 2013, black women activists began a “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement that spread rapidly and operates now in many local communities across the United States and in some other countries. This black‐led movement has specifically protested police brutality and other police malpractice, as well as other patterns of institutionalized discrimination. Effectively using traditional and social media, BLM groups have been successful in developing activists’ social networks and aggressive counter‐framing. Thousands of people, including many youths, have participated in BLM‐related demonstrations pressing for major reform in the criminal justice system (Graham and Smith 2016). Note that a central component of black resistance has been the passing on of a resistance counter‐frame to children, generation after generation. Most black Americans today have some degree of a resistance frame they can employ when faced with white oppression. Robinson and Ward (1991) note that contemporary black (particularly black women’s) resistance strategies must be more than resistance for survival, but also resistance for liberation. Other research shows that resistance to white racism by many people in various groups of color has taken the form of aggressively assimilating to dominant white ideals and values. For example, among Asian Americans many change their names to white Americanized names in the hope of avoiding white hostility and discrimination (Chou and Feagin 2008). There are often good reasons for such conformity. For example, many Japanese Americans’ employment of strategy is rooted in the extreme racialized experiences that second‐generation Japanese Americans faced when they were forced by white soldiers into US concentration camps during World War II. After release from these camps, many second‐generation Japanese Americans placed great pressure on themselves and their children to assimilate aggressively to white culture, ideals, and values (Tanaka 1999), including a strong adoption of key

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elements of the dominant white racial frame. Many did this in the hope of preventing and avoiding present and future white discrimination. Because Asian American groups have fewer centuries of historical experience in dealing with white racism than African Americans, fewer people among them have as yet constructed as strong a resistance counter‐frame as the majority of African Americans. Nonetheless, some in Asian American groups have developed a strong counter‐frame and engaged in more overt resistance against white racial framing. This includes the “yellow power” youth movements that took place alongside the 1960s–1970s black power movements, as well as the relatively recent pan‐Asian and other Asian American anti‐discrimination organizations (Chou and Feagin 2008; Daniels 1988; Zhou and Gatewood 2000). Additionally, despite generally lacking a well‐developed anti‐racist counter‐frame, most people in Asian American groups do have strong home‐culture frames – frames predicated on important Asian American cultural and community beliefs and values – which allows them to engage in at least modest acts of resistance to anti‐Asian racism. Through use of their home‐culture frame, Asian American groups are able to maintain and assert their distinctive cultural perspectives that can offer important everyday strategies of resistance (Chou and Feagin 2008; Feagin 2010).

Conclusion Systemic racism and other critical race research shows the continuing importance of understanding and analyzing racial matters as foundational and systemic in US society. Mainstream race‐ethnic theorists and many politicians and media commentators  –  especially those who are white  –  strategically push colorblindness and postraciality as the “new” signs of the times, thereby providing a convenient way to deny or downplay systemic racism and to ignore the emotional, psychological, and economic effects of centuries‐long oppression experienced by people of color. Colorblindness and postraciality allow whites to marginalize experiences and claims of injustice by people of color. This racialized reality has even played out on the largest political stage in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 US presidential elections. However, the adoption of critical theoretical concepts in approaching racial matters allows analysts to challenge this colorblind ideology with strong social science theory and related empirical evidence. The critical race approach to US racial matters is not just concerned with presenting data on systemic racism, but often takes an activist stand. “It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it; it sets out to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better” (Delgado and Stefancic 2001, p. 3). The ability to bring about positive racial changes in the operation and structures of society is greatly impeded by whites’ racial framing of society, which rationalizes white dominance and the subordination of people of color as normative. Thus, a key component in evoking societal change is through the process of very actively deframing and reframing a racialized society and its dominant racial frame. This process is a difficult one, especially for whites, as the major components of the old racist frame are deeply embedded in minds and societal institutions. In the white case, this deframing process means that a majority



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must examine their deep‐seated thoughts, values, and emotions that are imbedded in their white racial framing, and then reframe by accepting critical knowledge regarding systemic racism. For real change, such large‐scale reframing must become expressed in the adoption of widespread anti‐discrimination policies and programs. Whites must not only think differently about race but actively oppose racial discrimination, reject white racist performances in backstage and frontstage settings, and regularly engage in anti‐racist activism (see Feagin 2006, 2014).

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12 Families Medora W. Barnes

In recent decades, questions about how family “should” be done have lingered and led to messy struggles in public policy and in households around the country. The word family itself still continues to invoke nostalgic and ahistorical ideas of what families were like in the past. Contemporary conversations around family are no longer as straightforward as asking if the family is in decline. Even scholars, who largely agree about the family patterns occurring, sometimes disagree about the meaning of the trends, and what families will be like in the future. Some scholars today have proposed the worldwide rise of an egalitarian dual‐earner model, which they believe is taking the place of the former breadwinner‐homemaker family ideal (Esping‐Andersen and Billari 2015; Goldscheider et al. 2015). Yet questions remain regarding whether this is something individuals across all nations and social classes want and/or can achieve. Thus, the study of the family in the twenty‐first century can be characterized as one of diversity, change, and multiple possibilities. This chapter will briefly describe some of the key changes in family patterns that have occurred over the past few decades. Next it will focus on some of the changes in daily family life through examining intersections of work, family, and parenting, as this has been an area of public concern and rapidly growing research. Finally, it will end with a discussion of the future of the family through exploring proposed theoretical models and “new frontiers” of family change. It is not possible to consider all these issues in‐depth in a chapter of this length, so key authors and concepts are being highlighted. Furthermore, due to the vastness of the literature, the data for this chapter is drawn most often from the United States; however, as similar processes are occurring in many countries, comparisons from around the world are used throughout.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The most significant change in families over the past half century is often characterized as the diversification in family forms, experiences, and pathways (Cooke and Baxter 2010; Wharton 2012). While individuals in the mid‐twentieth century tended to follow fairly similar pathways into legal marriage before having children, this is no longer the case. It has been argued that today there is no one “normal” family, as cohabiting families, single‐parent families, childless families, stepfamilies, and same‐ sex families all challenge hegemonic ideas of the heterosexual, married, biological, two‐parent family. Therefore, sociologists have generally moved away from studying families using “the framework of a conventional, uniform family life cycle” (Cherlin 2010, p. 403). As diverse as families have become, so too are the theories and methods used to study them. Since structural‐functionalism  –  especially as identified in the work of Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) – ceased to be the dominate theoretical perspective in the study of families in the latter half of the twentieth century, no one theoretical perspective has risen up to take its place. Instead a variety of theories are drawn upon – f­eminist theory, symbolic interactionism, theories of the life course, exchange theory, and many others are regularly used as theoretical underpinnings in family research. Likewise, studies of the family are characterized more by their methodological diversity than by the dominance of one paradigm. While there are strong demographic and quantitative studies being done, there are also many family ­sociologists who rely on interviews and observation. Time use studies and time diaries have also become popular ways to track the everyday activities of family life (Craig and Mullan 2011).

Key Changes in Family Patterns There are various ways in which the overall transformation in marriage and family life has been conceived. Andrew Cherlin (2004) drew upon many key changes when he described what he called “the deinstitutionalization of marriage.” He argued that the social norms that define people’s behaviors within the institution of marriage have weakened throughout the late twentieth century. While the norms that regulated marriage could previously be taken for granted, they had weakened enough that individual couples could now no longer routinely rely on a shared understanding and needed to negotiate how to act within their relationships (2004, p. 848). Some of the changes – discussed in more detail below – which encouraged this deinstitutionalization, included women entering the paid labor force in large numbers, changing gender roles, increasing nonmarital cohabitation and childbirth, the rising age of marriage, and the increase in divorce and single‐parenthood. The deinstitutionalization of marriage can be viewed as having both positive and negative ramifications. Individuals now have more freedom regarding when, whom, and whether to legally marry – and couples have greater opportunities to create equal relationships and to work out individualized arrangement that suit them (Cherlin 2004; Goldscheider et  al. 2015). At the same time, it can lead to increased conflicts between partners, and at an institutional level, there have been concerns that families are more contingent and less stable than in previous years. These same changes have also been theorized by European demographers as being part of the second demographic transition (SDT), with the first demographic

192 Medora W. Barnes transition (FDT) referring to the historical declines in mortality and fertility in ­several European populations beginning in the eighteenth century (Goldscheider et al. 2015). Demographers have found the SDT theory a useful way to refer to the significant departure that occurred from earlier family patterns in relationship formation, ­dissolution and fertility. Like Cherlin (2004), they see these as being influenced by both economic changes and cultural shifts in values, such as a greater emphasis on individualism, emotional satisfaction, and romantic love within relationships ­ (Goldscheider et al. 2015). For many scholars, one of the most significant factors that influenced change in the family was the large numbers of married women and mothers entering the paid labor force in the late twentieth century, and the concurrent changes in gender norms (Bianchi 2000; Jacobs and Gerson 2004). While this led to greater personal and financial freedom for women, for many it simply added paid work to their family responsibilities, instead of rebalancing them. In addition, when gender norms ­weakened, many worried that it weakened the foundation of the family as well. To understand how complex a phenomenon gender is within the family, it’s important to realize that changes in gender roles have been viewed as both the logical ­outcome – as well as the cause – of changing family demographics such as decreased fertility rates (Smock 2004). Increases in unmarried cohabitation marked another important shift in family patterns. While unmarried heterosexual cohabitation was quite uncommon in the United States in the 1970s, it increased very rapidly, so that by the 1990s, the majority of marriages were preceded by a period of cohabitation (Manning and Stykes 2015; Manning et al. 2014). Today it is seen as a normative part of the life course by the majority of young Americans, and has also been increasing among older divorced or never‐married adults (Brown et al. 2012; Manning and Stykes 2015). In the majority of Western countries, cohabitation precedes marriage for many couples and also serves as a legitimate alternative for others. The legal status of cohabitation and the level of institutionalization within a society varies greatly between countries and leads to different outcomes. In Sweden, cohabiting couples have nearly the same rights and privileges as married couples, and in this context, long‐term stable cohabiting partnerships are common (Perelli‐ Harris and Gassen 2012). Childbearing and childrearing within stable, legally supported cohabiting unions are not believed to be disadvantageous to children, and this is increasingly common throughout northern and western Europe (Perelli‐Harris and Gassen 2012). Canada is another example, where federal legislation gives many of the same rights to couples who have cohabited for a year or more, as it does to those who are married (Le Bourdais and Lapierre‐Adamcyk 2004). Patterns of unmarried cohabitation look a little different in the United States, where federal policy has focused more on marriage promotion than on institutionalizing cohabitation. In the United States, cohabitation also tends to be on average a relatively short‐term experience, with the majority of couples either marrying or dissolving their union within three to five years (Smock 2000). The short‐term nature of these relationship is concerning, as many cohabiting couples have children, and child well‐being is often linked to family stability (Cherlin 2010; Musick and Michelmore 2015). The United States continues to show evidence of a divergence, as those with less education are less likely to ever legally marry and more likely to

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experience union dissolution, although the gap in cohabitation rates based on education has been shrinking (Manning and Stykes 2015; Smock 2004). Most industrialized nations have seen a rise in the age of marriage, as a new stage of “emerging adulthood” has formed (Arnett 2007). This is linked with the overall transition to adulthood, which has undergone a transformation in the past half‐ century. With the changes in the economy due to globalization and deindustrialization, many young adults in post‐industrial nations now take longer or struggle to achieve financial and residential independence. For young adults without an advanced education, it is increasingly hard to find a steady career, as temporary and contract jobs have become more common. Those young adults who invest in an advanced education, often delay family formation and legal marriage until they are finished. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) notes the average age of first marriage increased between 1990 and 2014 (OECD Family Database 2016). In the United States, the median age of marriage is now over 27 for women and 29 for men (Pew Research Center 2018), and it is even higher across many other countries. While the median age of marriage has risen within the United States, the age at cohabitation has remained stable for men and women, leading some to argue that the increase in cohabitation rates has functionally offset changes in the levels and timing of marriage (Manning et al. 2014). Although many adults are postponing marriage and some forgoing it, scholars argue that the majority of Americans still highly value marriage and see it as the ideal for a romantic relationship. Surveys show that adults today continue to hold very high expectations of marriage (Pew Research Center 2018). They expect their spouse to be their best friend and intimate partner, sometimes to the extent they are less likely to socialize with friends and neighbors, or help their families, than are their never‐ married peers (Gestel and Sarkasian 2006). People who marry may be willing to grant so much time and energy to their marriage relationships because living in a “divorce culture,” where beliefs and practices exist that anticipate the possibility of divorce, can affect all adults and increases anxiety about their relationships (Hackstaff 1999). Even if the symbolic importance remains high, data shows that marriage rates are declining and that the average adult today lives a greater proportion of their life unmarried. In the 1970s, married couples constituted the vast majority of all US households, while today they are less than half (US Census Bureau 2016). Although marriage rates in the United States have been declining since the early 1980s, roughly 80% of Americans still are predicted to marry at some point in their life (Cohen 2015). This is in contrast to other countries, such as Chile, Portugal, and Spain, which have seen a much steeper decline in marriage rates (OECD Family Database 2016). Those people in the United States who remain most likely to marry are those with higher incomes and education levels. Although they may not have as much financial need to marry, they are more sought after and have better choices in the “mate market,” as well as can more easily afford the lavish wedding that many couples see as a prerequisite to marrying (Cherlin 2004; Smock 2004). While poor adults may also hold marriage in high esteem, they may not be able to find partners they deem to be “marriage material” or save up enough for even a small wedding celebration (Edin and Kefalas 2005; Smock 2004). The choices regarding who one can marry are also more open than they used to be. Same‐sex marriage has become increasingly common and legal in more countries each year. In 2000, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize same‐sex

194 Medora W. Barnes marriage. Since then, an additional two dozen countries have legalized same‐sex marriage, including the United States, most of northern and western Europe, and several countries in South America (Pew Research Center 2017). Interracial marriage has also become much more common in the United States – increasing from only 3% of newlyweds in 1967 to 17% in 2015 (Pew Research Center 2018). Interreligious marriage has also been growing since the mid‐twentieth century in both the United States and Europe. While about 19% of those people who married before 1960 had a spouse who was part of a different religious group, among those married since 2010 this number was about 4 in 10 Americans (Pew Research Center 2018). In addition to postponing or declining to get married, another factor in the likelihood of an adult living unmarried is divorce. Throughout the twentieth century, divorce rates gradually increased in the United States, until the 1970s when changing laws, norms, and values intersected to create sharp increases. Since 1980, the divorce rate has declined slightly, and those with a college degree are less likely to divorce than others (Cherlin 2010). The increase in divorce rates was not just a US phenomenon, as most industrialized nations saw increasing divorce rates that coincided with women entering the labor force and changing gender roles (OECD Family Database 2016). Due to the different national contexts, the peak divorce rates were achieved in different years and remain varied across nations. Divorce rates have always been a little difficult to predict, as they involve making predications decades into the future about marriages happening now. Scholars remain divided regarding the future of divorce rates and what they mean for families. In recent decades, some of the individual factors regarding who is more at risk of divorce have begun to shift. In the United States, women with higher levels of educational attainment used to have lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates – today, the opposite is true (Cherlin 2010; Schwartz and Han 2014). Furthermore, the “traditional” breadwinner–homemaker family style that was esteemed by functionalist Talcott Parsons and economist Gary Becker used to be associated with more enduring marriages, yet studies suggest that a more equitable division of domestic and paid labor helps stabilize marriages today (Cherlin 2016; Goldscheider et  al. 2015). Outside the United States, there is evidence in several countries to suggest that factors affecting the divorce rate are changing but it is unclear whether this is due to cohort replacement, changing societal norms, or some other factor. The role of educational attainment varies, as it is highly significant in some countries and has no relationship with the risk of divorce in others (Goldscheider et al. 2015). Increasing cohabitation and changes in marriage and divorce have also affected the number of children being born to unmarried and single parents. While the majority of children in the 1960s and 1970s were born to married parents, the percentage of children born outside of marriage has dramatically increased throughout most industrialized nations (Musick and Michelmore 2015; Smock 2004). When examining childbearing in the United States, family patterns that are highly differentiated by social class and education have led some to argue for an overall explanation based on “diverging destinies” (Manning et al. 2014). College educated individuals tend to be more likely to legally marry, and have low levels of  childbearing outside of marriage (Musick and Michelmore 2015). In contrast, ­disadvantaged individuals are more likely to engage in cohabitation  –  in place of legal marriage – and have high rates of nonmarital childbearing.

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The latter half of the twentieth century also saw historic declines in fertility rates across many nations around the world. Family size dropped as more effective birth control became widely available, childrearing became more expensive, and families chose to invest more resources into fewer children. Additionally, as more jobs were available for women in the paid labor force, the opportunity costs (or value of what they were giving up) of staying home to raise children became higher, and may have led to a preference for smaller family sizes. Economic changes that led to increasingly tenuous ties to the labor market among uneducated young men, and workplace policies that led to high rates of work–family conflict, may also have also discouraged fertility (Cherlin 2016; Goldscheider et al. 2015). By 2013, close to half the world’s population was living in one of the 83 countries with a below‐replacement fertility rate, leading to widespread political concern (United Nations 2015). In response, 43 countries had some type of policy in place designed to increase fertility rates (United Nations 2011). One piece of the story of the overall decline in childbearing has been the rise in those who are intentionally childless, or “childfree.” Currently, about 20% of American women ages 40–44 have never had a child, twice the percentage that were childless in the 1970s (Blackstone 2014). Being childfree, or childless (whether voluntary or not), tends to occur most often in developed nations and most often among those who are economically privileged. Women without children tend to have a higher income, higher labor force participation, and are less likely to be affiliated with a religion (Blackstone 2014; DeOllos and Kapinus 2002). Studies have found that common reasons childfree adults tend to cite for not wanting to have children include a desire to focus on their career, and to nurture their relationship with their partner and maintain an active, satisfying sex life (DeOllos and Kapinus 2002). Although there are (harmful) stereotypes of women without children as being less warm than their peers, research has found that childless families do fulfill both the emotional and sexual needs of their family members (Blackstone 2014). Overall, intimate relationships are more voluntary than in previous times and people now spend more of their adult lives single. Legal marriage is a choice – and perhaps more important symbolically then functionally – except for those who have substantial economic assets to contribute or protect. Having children is also a choice, not a given, as the childfree movement reminds us. In recent years young people in Japan have drawn attention for their extremely low rates of interest in dating, sex, or childbearing (Haworth 2013). As some scholars struggle to discern whether this apparent turn away from family and relationships may be due to unfriendly work places, technological substitutes, or changing values/ desires, other scholars argue that we are entering a new phase of rebounding family life based on stable, egalitarian partnerships (Esping‐Andersen and Billari 2015; Goldscheider et al. 2015)

Changes in Daily Lives: Family, Work, and Parenting As part of the concerns about the post‐modern family, sociological and interdisciplinary research on work–family intersections or “balance” has grown at a staggering rate in recent years. The entrance of the majority of mothers into the paid labor force sparked change across most industrialized nations (Bianchi 2000; Jacobs and

196 Medora W. Barnes Gerson 2004). Subsequent research examined the “subtle revolution” that occurred (Gerson 1985) and reshaped family life for all members. In the nineteenth century, the ideal woman was one in the home, caring for children and responsible for domestic work. Although, this “cult of domesticity” was certainly not achieved by every family – poorer or nonwhite women usually found it an impossible task to avoid paid labor – the ideal remained largely hegemonic into the middle of the twentieth century. The latter half of the century saw a transformation where married women and mothers of even very young children joined the paid labor force in countries around the world. Driven by increased opportunities for women, stagnant or decreasing wages of their partners, deindustrialization, and a growing service economy, women’s participation in the labor force increased rapidly (Bianchi 2000; Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Women’s paid work rose during this time not only in Western Europe and North America, but in Central America, the Caribbean, northern and southern Europe, Oceania (i.e. Australia, New Zealand, and the surrounding Pacific Islands), Central and Southeast Asia, and southern Africa (Heymann and Earle 2010). By the first decade of the twenty‐first century, in OECD countries approximately two‐thirds of all mothers with children under age 15 across were working in the paid labor force (Wharton 2012). The majority of children in the United States are now born into households with no stay‐at‐home parent – as the majority of families instead comprise dual‐earner or single‐parent households – and concerns about work–family conflict have increased. The concept of work–family conflict has been one of the most extensively and long‐ studied concepts in the literature (Wharton 2012). This conflict is a relatively common experience among employees, especially among those with children to care for at home (Bianchi and Milkie 2010). While women have been reporting fairly high levels of work–family conflict for decades, men have also begun to report more work–family conflict, as higher expectations are placed on them at home (Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Current scholarship often differentiates between work‐to‐home conflict and (less often) home‐to‐work conflict, depending on the sphere being negatively influenced. Both types have negative consequences for individuals and can lead to lower life satisfaction. Intimate relationships can become strained when the work stress or the resulting psychological anxieties are brought home by individuals, leading to lower satisfaction with family and relationships (Allen et al. 2000). As more women entered paid labor, questions began to emerge concerning the equity, or fairness, of the division of unpaid domestic labor in the home. Nearly 30 years ago, Arlie Hochschild (1989) coined the term the “second shift” to refer to the unpaid work that employed married women were doing in the home, in addition to their paid work. This added burden of unpaid labor – that their spouses were not doing – left them less leisure time, less time for sleeping, and overall more pressed for time (Hochschild 1989). She argued that the United States experienced a “stalled revolution” when more women entered paid employment, in that gender roles changed faster at work than they did at home, where men had not increased their hours in domestic labor to the same extent. Recently there has been some debate concerning if the “stalled revolution” may still be in place or if certain societies or groups have finally begun to achieve greater equity (Bianchi et al. 2012; Wharton 2012). Several studies have shown that men’s and women’s overall allocation of their

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hours spent on paid and unpaid work has become more similar, with the gender gap in both housework and childcare narrowing significantly (Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Bianchi et al. 2012). The gender gap in housework has been narrowing due to women doing significantly less housework than in previous years and men increasing their hours. The smaller gender gap in childcare is entirely due to men increasing their time, as women have also increased the hours they spend. Overall, mothers still spend nearly twice as much time doing childcare than fathers, and mothers of young children who also work full‐time appear to have the longest total work weeks (Bianchi et al. 2012). In addition to the total hours spent, studies also highlight the difference in the types of unpaid work being done. Today more attention is being paid to studying both childcare and the “invisible” mental labor, such as worrying, processing information, and managing the division of labor, all of which women still tend to be in charge of more often (Bianchi et  al. 2012; DeVault 1991; Walzer 1998). Although men are increasing their share of domestic work, in some households a “manager‐helper” dynamic still appears to exist with fathers taking a secondary role, especially in the mental labor that supports childrearing (Coltrane 1996; Walzer 1998). Some types of housework (albeit not all) can at least temporarily be left undone or can fit in around parents’ work schedules. Therefore, gender differences in time spent in childcare and cultural ideas about who is primarily responsible for children may be one of the key forces holding back gender equality (Bianchi et al. 2012; Walzer 1998). Research done among lesbian and gay couples generally indicates that both gay and lesbian couples have a more equal division of household labor than heterosexual couples (Goldberg et  al. 2012). Although couples still often have some level of inequality, this tends to center on one partner spending more hours in paid work and the other doing more unpaid family work (Carrington 1999; Goldberg et al. 2012). Gay men have been found to spend more time on cleaning compared to heterosexual couples; perhaps because for some gay men it is seen as a way to symbolically legitimize their household (Carrington 1999). There also is some evidence that same‐sex couples may desire to portray their division of housework as more egalitarian than it in fact is (Carrington 1999). Overall, both gay men and lesbians may be more likely to equally share both areas, as they may be less likely to “do gender” through family work, as they are enacting family roles outside of a heterosexual context (Goldberg et al. 2012). Studying the “chore war” that takes place in many households is complex because reported beliefs do not always match enacted behaviors. Research has found that the majority of young men and women now report that they would prefer a marriage in which both spouses work and both take care of the house and children (Pew Research Center 2013); however, most heterosexual families  –  especially with young ­children – still report an unequal and gender differentiated division of labor. While this certainly is partially due to workplaces often not being set up to accommodate caregiving (Williams 2000), it also may be due to the “stickiness” of gender beliefs. Using a “doing gender” perspective, household labor has often been symbolically constructed as “women’s work” and viewed as a way for women to simultaneously perform gender and display love for their family (DeVault 1991; West and Zimmerman 1987). This perspective suggests that housework is not necessarily allocated rationally,

198 Medora W. Barnes but instead is a mixture of cultural norms and individual beliefs about how gender affects the amount and type of housework an individual does. Gender theories of interaction may be especially useful in explaining the increased gender differentiation during the initial transition to parenthood, due to the strong connections between genders and mothering/fathering. Scholars have suggested that people “do” parenthood in the same ways that people “do” gender, in that they are defined through social interaction (Walzer 1998). When new mothers attempt to enact the role of “mother” as they understand it, they may do a larger share of the carework because they view this as part of a mother’s responsibility. Constructions of good parenting have not remained static over time. In her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Sharon Hays (1996) described the rise of an ideology she termed “intensive motherhood,” which appeared at the same time that more women entered the labor force, and therefore, had less time available for their children. The cultural ideals of intensive mothering expect women to be uniquely responsible, intensely devoted, and constantly attuned to their child’s emotional, physical, and educational needs (Hays 1996). The increased time that women now spend doing childcare is believed to be in response to these increasing expectations of intensive motherhood. How a woman attempts to respond to the pressures of motherhood is influenced by her social class location and race/ethnicity. The social and economic resources available to a woman greatly affect her ability to live up to intensive mothering ideals and expectations (Edin and Kefalas 2005; Hays 1996). Patricia Hill Collins (1994) criticized the focus in mothering on only domestic labor and the dichotomy between the public and private spheres. She argued for placing the experiences of African American women, who historically have always had to balance paid labor and childrearing, at the center of theorizing about motherhood. This would allow for both paid and unpaid work being done on behalf of one’s children to be seen as “motherwork” (1994). Parenting pressures have also increased for fathers. While the “male provider” ideal had dominated cultural understandings of good fathering in the nineteen and into the twentieth century, beginning in the 1970s the “involved father” ideal gradually gained prominence (Coltrane 1996). Men today are expected to do more than simply provide for their children – although this is still expected as well. They are expected to be hands‐on, emotionally supportive, and spend time with their children. Although economically disadvantaged fathers experience difficulty providing for their children, they are also eager to embrace an involved father role, which emphasizes relationships and nurturance (Edin and Nelson 2013). While mothers still spend more time caring for their children, these changing beliefs have encouraged fathers to spend more time caring for their children than in the past (Craig et al. 2014). Many studies have examined how policies can help families reconcile work and family responsibilities and lead to greater equity between partners. While it is impossible to review all policies that may assist families, the availability or lack of paid parental leave deserves special attention, as it can be highly influential on mothers’ continued employment, the division of unpaid labor, parental bonding, and infant and maternal health (Kamerman 2006; McGovern et al. 2000). Experts agree that at least partial wage replacement is essential in making it possible for women  –  especially

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low‐income and single women – to be able to take even a minimum period of leave (Kamerman 2006; McGovern et al. 2000). Many countries, including Canada, Japan, and most of the European Union, have policies in place that allow women to be on maternity leave with either full or partial wage replacement for one to three years. Although very long periods of supported leave can lead to negative work outcomes for women and increase gender inequality (Gornick 2000; Hartmann and Lovell 2009), the lack of available paid leave forces families to make difficult decisions concerning paid work, and can encourage women to withdraw from the labor market altogether. The United States is one of only three nations in the world that does not offer any paid maternity leave. Since the passage of the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) over 25 years ago, both men and women can take up to 12 weeks of job‐protected unpaid parental leave, if they meet certain employment criteria, such as being full‐ time permanent workers (see Armenia et al. 2014 for analysis of compliance rates). The leave is unpaid except for in a handful of states that have more recently passed programs providing partial reimbursement. Individual workplaces may also choose to offer paid leaves or allow workers to apply paid vacation days, sick days, or personal days toward a parental leave. When only unpaid leave is available, usually only one parent (if any) takes a leave, and it is most often the mother. In addition to the mother’s biological recovery, this is due to what Risman calls the “logic of gendered choices” (1998, p. 29). Even among couples without a preference for a traditional division of labor, the economic opportunity costs for a woman’s time at home are still often lower than for her partner on average due to the continuing gender wage gap. Subsequently, when a mother stays at home with a newborn for several weeks and a father takes only a few days off, it is easy for unequal parenting patterns to form and feel “natural” going forward (Walzer 1998). Men also are highly unlikely to take parental leave unless it is paid, as going without earnings for several weeks is not viewed as a legitimate option for most men (O’Brien 2013). One strategy some European countries (notably the Nordic countries, Germany, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain) have used is nontransferable “daddy quotas,” reserving a portion of a family’s leave allotment for fathers only (O’Brien 2013). Getting men to take some paternity leave is important, as it provides time for men to develop greater confidence and skill in their own parenting and encourages them to form active fathering patterns (Coltrane 1996; Lamb 2004). This active ­participation is believed to be beneficial for father–child relationships and child outcomes (Lamb 2004), as well as leading to more equal long‐term patterns in the division of childcare by influencing patterns at a critical time when household work is being renegotiated (Hook 2010; Kotsadam and Finseraas 2011).

The Future of the Family A few scholars have recently begun to argue that after all the upheaval and change in family lives over the last half century, the “stalled revolution” and the changes brought on by the SDT are finally being resolved, and we are entering a new phase of family living based on stable, egalitarian partnerships (Esping‐Andersen and Billari 2015; Goldscheider et al. 2015). They argue that the second half of the “gender

200 Medora W. Barnes revolution” is slowly coming into being, which will stabilize family turmoil caused by the first half of the gender revolution. The first half of the gender revolution is believed to have changed women’s behaviors more than men’s, which may have put stress on relationships and led to gender inequity in the home (Goldscheider et al. 2015). In the second half of the gender revolution, men are joining women in the private sphere of the home as equal partners; a situation they argue will ultimately strengthen families (Goldscheider et al. 2015). Other scholars believe likewise and argue for a slowly emerging new worldwide era in families, which they describe as a “gender‐egalitarian equilibrium” (Esping‐Andersen and Billari 2015). One piece of evidence for this new family era is the rebound in fertility rates that some nations have experienced in the past decade after historic declines. This rebound is believed to be largely due to men becoming more equal partners in the home (Esping‐Andersen and Billari 2015). The recovery has been most apparent in those OECD countries that have high levels of gender equality, high rates of female and male employment, and state policies that support the successful combination of work and family life (Goldscheider et al. 2015). They also point to other changes in family and work patterns. Marriages of employed woman used to be less stable than those of nonemployed women, yet, as previously noted, in several countries today the most stable relationships are among dual‐earners, and fathers’ contributions to domestic labor are on the rise (Goldscheider et  al. 2015; Sayer and Bianchi 2000). Similarly, patterns that imply adults’ weak commitment to relationships in recent decades (declining marriage, increasing divorce, serial cohabitation) are believed to be stabilizing (Esping‐Andersen and Billari 2015). Although these patterns are not evident in every country, it is argued that this is simply due to the speed at which the idea of egalitarian partnerships is spreading and the varied pace in which the new “gender‐egalitarian equilibrium” is taking hold (Esping‐Andersen and Billari 2015). While this “happy ending” is a compelling narrative, it is yet unclear how well it explains what is happening in families in the United States and in many other countries around the world (Cherlin 2016). As Cherlin writes, “The announcement of a new egalitarian era may seem premature … How widely and quickly the new mode of family life will spread remains to be seen.” (2016, p. 122). Families continue to be influenced by the culture, economic structure, and social policies that they live under, and it is uncertain that a larger gender egalitarian movement will ultimately have similar results in all countries, or in all families within those countries. Even though the majority of young American men and women share the same ideal of an egalitarian partnership, supporting the argument of a gender revolution, Gerson (2010) found that their “plan B” varied by gender. Young women often sought to invest in paid work, so that if they could not find an appropriate partner who shared their ideals, they could live independently. Even with the majority of young women now working, men are expected to have a steady job in order to be considered a good long‐term partner, which complicates partner selection (Cherlin 2016; Pew Research Center 2018). While highly educated young adults may be able to find stable careers, their less educated peers continue to struggle with the types of contract and part‐time work that have risen in the global and post‐industrial economies in North America and Europe. Current research shows that for Americans without a college education, living in areas with greater income inequality and with

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fewer available job opportunities decreases the odds one will marry prior to having a first birth (Cherlin et al. 2016). It’s possible that for the foreseeable future, this lack of permanent work for less educated adults may serve as a continuing force in delaying partnership formation and parenthood, as well as encouraging short‐term cohabitation over marriage (Cherlin 2016). While economic uncertainty can affect the partnership and parenthood choices of young people around the world, their choices also look radically different based on whether they are living in a country with a more or less generous social welfare regime (Gornick 2000). In countries with extensive social welfare benefits, these might be able to compensate for labor market difficulties that will continue to trouble young adults in countries with less generous benefits. It appears that the arguments best fit the Scandinavian case, where full‐day universal childcare, ample parental leave, and other policies may be influential in why there is no class difference in egalitarian attitudes and behaviors, and union dissolution (Esping‐ Andersen and Billari 2015; Goldscheider et al. 2015). Although the patterns among educated young adults in the United States are similar to those in Scandinavia, the less‐generous social welfare system and lack of federal policies supporting parenthood and work–family integration may be why an overall societywide trend toward more stable partnerships is not present. Instead, today the United States appears to have two different family models coexisting in the same country based on social class (Cherlin 2016).

New Frontiers As scholars argue over the pace and scale of change within the family, others continue to study emerging and unresolved questions about who “counts” as family and what daily family life will be like in the years ahead. Technology continues to be one force blurring the lines on constructions of family faster than legal or social system can adapt. The number of children born to parents using assisted reproductive technology has grown rapidly in recent years. Not only has in‐vitro fertilization increased, so too has the use of egg and sperm donors. Creating families using donor gametes creates new kinship categories, such as “donor siblings,” who share the same anonymous sperm donor (Hertz and Mattes 2011). Surrogacy also creates unique “contractual” family‐like relationships between the surrogate and the intending parents (Jacobson 2016). These categories challenge traditional understandings of family and what reciprocity and responsibility are involved in these roles. In some ways, these conversations are similar to longstanding, yet unresolved ones, tied to other family patterns that have not yet been fully institutionalized. While stepparents and blended families have become increasingly common, how these family members should interact, including the lines of authority and responsibility, remains unclear (Cherlin and Feurstenberg Jr 1994; Sweeney 2010). This creates a process of constant negotiation of appropriate interaction around childrearing, which can lead to increased conflict (Sweeney 2010). When a blended family involves cohabitation rather than legal marriage, it can lead to additional confusion, especially if sexual activity takes place among individuals to whom it would be forbidden if a biological relationship were present (i.e. nonrelated teens living as siblings). Similarly, “ex”

202 Medora W. Barnes spouses and former legal relatives connected by “divorce chains” continue to be in a similar position where the expectations within their relationship and the boundaries of kinship can be unclear. Lastly, concerns continue to be raised over how technology is being integrated into many aspects of the family. From the increasing popularity of dating apps to GPS devices that track the location of one’s children, the rapidly growing presence of technology is a reality in family life in industrialized nations. While adolescents are often the ones stereotyped as spending large amounts of time on smartphones or social media, worries have also risen about the consequences of parents engaging in these behaviors. Comics and memes circulate with family members sitting around a dining room table and everyone interacting with their smart phone, rather than each other. How well does this capture family life in the twenty‐first century? For some adults, the pressure to always respond to work emails is driving their constant online presence. In a move designed to improve work–life balance, in 2017 France passed the first “right to disconnect” law requiring companies with more than 50 employees to establish hours when employees should not send or answer emails (Morris 2017). It’s unclear whether this is a sign of more countries being willing to pass laws to protect employees’ time at home. Like many other aspects within the study of family, constantly emerging new technology continues to open up a range of possibilities for what family patterns and experiences will be in the future.

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204 Medora W. Barnes Haworth, Abigail. 2013. “What happens to a country when its young people stop having sex? Japan is finding out.” The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/ young‐people‐japan‐stopped‐having‐sex. Hays, S. (1996). The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hertz, R. and Mattes, J. (2011). Donor‐shared siblings or genetic strangers: new families, clans, and the internet. Journal of Family Issues 32 (9): 1129–1155. Heymann, J. and Earle, A. (2010). Raising the Global Floor: Dismantling The Myth That We Can’t Afford Good Working Conditions For Everyone. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hill Collins, P. (1994). Shifting the center: race, class, & feminist theorizing about motherhood. In: Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency (ed. E.N. Glenn, G. Chang and L. Forcey), 45–66. New York: Routledge. Hochschild, A.R. (1989). The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. New York: Viking. Hook, J.L. (2010). Gender inequality in the welfare state: sex segregation in housework, 1965–2003. American Journal of Sociology 115 (5): 1480–1523. Jacobs, J. and Gerson, K. (2004). The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jacobson, H. (2016). Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies. Rutgers University Press. Kamerman, S.B. (2006). Parental leave policies: the impact on child well‐being. In: International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research (ed. P. Moss and M. O’Brien). United Kingdom: Department of Trade and Industry. Kotsadam, A. and Finseraas, H. (2011). The state intervenes in the battle of the sexes: causal effects of paternity leave. Social Science Research 40 (6): 611–1622. Lamb, M. (ed.) (2004). The Role of the Father in Child Development, 4e. New York: Wiley. Le Bourdais, C. and Lapierre‐Adamcyk, É. (2004). Changes in conjugal life in Canada: is cohabitation progressively replacing marriage? Journal of Marriage and Family 66: 929–942. Manning, W.D., Brown, S.L., and Payne, K.K. (2014). Two decades of stability and change in age at first union formation. Journal of Marriage and Family 76: 247–260. https://doi. org/10.1111/jomf.12090. Manning, Wendy D., and Bart Stykes. 2015. “Twenty‐five Years of Change in Cohabitation in the U.S., 1987–2013.” (FP‐15‐01). National Center for Family & Marriage Research. https://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college‐of‐arts‐and‐sciences/NCFMR/ documents/FP/FP‐15‐01‐twenty‐five‐yrs‐cohab‐us.pdf McGovern, P., Dowd, B., Gjerdingen, D. et al. (2000). The determinants of time off work after childbirth. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 25: 527–564. Morris, D.Z. (2017). New French law bars work email after hours. Fortune (January 1): http://fortune.com/2017/01/01/french‐right‐to‐disconnect‐law. Musick, K. and Michelmore, K. (2015). Change in the stability of marital and cohabiting unions following the birth of a child. Demography 52: 1463–1485. O’Brien, M. (2013). Fitting fathers into work‐family policies: international challenges in  turbulent times. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 33 (9/10): 542–564. OECD Family Database. 2016. “SF3.1: Marriage and Divorce Rates.” http://www.oecd.org/ els/family/database.htm

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13 Sociology of Education Joseph J. Merry and Maria Paino

In the previous edition of this text, Hallinan and Liu (2012) note that the sociology of education is a relatively recent subfield having established itself in the second half of the twentieth century. Since this time and even since the previous edition of this book, the subfield has (i) continued to grow in its size and scope, (ii) accumulated additional evidence pertaining to some of the most fundamental topics in the area, and (iii) grap­ pled with many of the challenges most central to discipline – namely the development of subfield‐specific theory and a movement toward a sociology of education rather than a sociology of schooling (Brint 2013). To this last point, Brint argues for a move away from an isolated focus on schools and student achievement per se. Instead, researchers can benefit from an understanding of different forms of education, global education perspectives (see also Buchmann 2011), and studies of the interplay bet­ ween schools and other societal institutions (see also Renzulli 2014). Keeping these developments and challenges in mind, we organize this chapter in five sections. First, a broad overview of recent educational trends along the lines of race, class, and gender is presented. Next, school reform and policy developments are addressed, especially as they are related to school choice and school organization. From this point, attention is shifted to students’ learning “outside of school,” focusing on early childhood, summer learning, and after‐school lessons. Highlighted next is the emerging issue of disparities in students’ digital and technological skills. Finally, the entry concludes with a discussion of recent sociological findings in the realm of higher education.

Recent Trends: Race, Class, and Gender It is common practice for studies regarding the sociology of education to summarize the state of knowledge along the three main stratifying lines of race, class, and gender. In order to more fully develop the subsequent sections of this chapter, an update of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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broad trends is provided rather than a full overview of the many seminal studies on these topics throughout the years (for detailed reviews, see Arum et al. 2015; Davies and Guppy 2014; Hallinan and Liu 2012). In terms of racial inequalities in education, the long‐run trend is toward a gradual narrowing of achievement gaps in the elementary and secondary school years. Since 1970, white–black and white–Hispanic achievement gaps, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), have narrowed by 30–40% (Reardon 2015). Furthermore, racial disparities in high school graduation rates have reached an all‐time low (Reardon 2014). These trends certainly represent progress, but they must be examined in context. For one, these achievement gaps remain quite large. Average achievement levels for black and Hispanic students are nearly two grade levels behind their white counterparts. Moreover, while the gap in high school graduation rates has narrowed, significant disparities persist in higher education. Minority students con­ tinue to be underrepresented at the most selective colleges and graduate at lower rates compared to white students. In 2016, the percent of young adults (25–29), by race/ ethnicity, with a college degree is as follows: 19% Hispanic/Latino, 23% black, 43% white, and 64% Asian/Pacific Islander (NCES 2017). Importantly, these disparities exist at a time when the returns to a college degree are at historically high levels (Goldin and Katz 2008; Putnam 2015). Researchers point to persistent disparities in family resources and the impact of segregation as key reasons as to why these racial/ ethnic gaps remain (Downey 2008; Oliver and Shapiro 2006; Reardon 2017). Social class‐based achievement gaps have widened over time, with some indication that this trend has slowed in recent years. While the learning gap between students from the richest and poorest families used to be smaller than the racial/ethnic achieve­ ment gap, the reverse is true today. In fact, since the 1970s the gap between students from the top income decile of households (90th percentile), compared to the students from the bottom decile of households (10th percentile) has widened by approxi­ mately 40%. In some estimates, the poorest children are nearly three to four years’ worth of school‐year learning behind their well‐off counterparts (Reardon 2011, 2014). Not surprisingly, these patterns go on to shape educational degree attainment. Students from poor families represent a disproportionately high share of high school dropouts or those whose highest degree is a high school diploma. Meanwhile, only 6% of students at the most prestigious colleges come from families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution (Reardon 2014). Scholars point to several interrelated factors that may explain the widening social‐class achievement gap. For one, in the context of growing economic inequality, parents of means may allocate more of their disposable income to invest in the development and education of their children, therefore securing important educational advantages that other families cannot afford (Duncan and Murnane 2011; Kaushal et  al. 2011; Schneider et  al. 2017). Indeed, Duncan and Murnane (2011) report that high‐income families spent about $2700 more per year on child enrichment than did low‐income families in the early 1970s. By 2005–2006, however, that figure had jumped to $7500 in constant dollars. Importantly, it should also be noted that these social‐class achievement gaps are large at school entry, a point we return to later in this chapter. Gender inequalities in society exist at many levels, with men most often in the advantage (Epstein 2007). However, in terms of educational achievement and attain­ ment, women often surpass men. Female students in the United States have long

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outperformed their male counterparts when it comes to making better grades or in terms of classroom citizenship, as rated by teachers. However, it has only been since the 1970s that women started to catch up with and gradually earn college degrees at a greater rate than men (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). While women now maintain an eight‐percentage point advantage over men when it comes to four‐year degrees, discipline‐specific inequalities persist, and this often translates to lower overall earn­ ings for women. Research suggests that the gender composition of college majors plays a role in later income disparities, where degrees from more female‐dominated majors tend to be devalued (Bobbitt‐Zeher 2007). In order to close gender gaps in subject‐specific performance, field of study, and eventual career earnings, researchers are quick to point out the salience of high academic expectations and the wide avail­ ability of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curricula (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013; Legewie and DiPrete 2014). Indeed, academic gender gaps are typ­ ically the smallest in school contexts with rigorous curricula and high academic expectations. Moreover, recent research again documents the importance of the early childhood years for the subsequent educational outcomes. Gansen (2017) highlights patterns of gender socialization during preschool that serve as powerful mechanisms in teaching young children certain assumptions about gendered interaction, power, and heteronormativity.

Policy Developments, School Choice, and School Organization Standards‐Based Reform Era Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone a tremendous change in federal policies, which has produced what scholars refer to as the standards‐based reform era (McDermott 2011). Since the mid‐1980s, when the national report A Nation at Risk took public schools to task for their mediocrity, and issued a call to action to public school teachers and officials to improve the state of the American education system, the federal government has increasingly had more oversight in the public school system. The Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which began in the 1960s during the Johnson era, was reauthorized under Clinton as the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), and then again in 2001 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). These federal policies largely focus on accountability through academic achievement, and large data collection efforts. More recently, states requested waivers from NCLB (US Department of Education 2013) and NCLB was reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which sent a great deal of control and autonomy back to the states. Sociologists of education note that schools are changing how they are organized in response to an increase in accountability policies, which is a direct result of the standards‐based reform era. Simultaneously, we have seen a burgeoning of charter school laws across the United States, and these laws allow more and more charter schools resulting in an exploding charter school population. A great deal of the rhetoric around the ­expansion of school choice options, especially charter schools, highlights the need for families to have the opportunity to choose a school with good educational out­ comes. What has emerged alongside the standards‐based reform accountability era



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is a n ­ eoliberal school choice policy movement that touts school choice as a market‐ based solution to inequalities in academic achievement at the school‐level. This movement is characterized by neoliberal language about “privatization, account­ ability, and standardization in education” (Aguirre Jr. and Johnson 2005, p. 150), and has emerged from broader neoliberal frameworks that criticize excessive ­governmental involvement.

School Choice The issue and availability of school choice is a persistent issue in the US education system. Historically, only wealthy families had access to schooling options outside of neighborhood schools. These choices included private schools, tutoring, home schooling, or the ability to move and/or purchase a house in a neighborhood or school district with good schools. More recently, a wider array of options has become available within the realm of the public education system. These include school vouchers, open enrollment, magnet schools, and charter schools. While school choice options have increased, there is a significant body of research to suggest that racial, ethnic, and class disparities still exist around who gets to choose (Lauen 2007). Among parents who hail from lower‐income or minority backgrounds, those who have more education are more likely to exercise school choice (Lee et al. 1996), but white and upper‐class parents remain more likely to exercise choice overall (Archbald 2000; Teske and Schneider 2001). Given the growing popularity and enrollment in charter schools, we focus our discussion on the proliferation of charter schools. Charter schools are a public choice option that are growing in popularity, and currently serve more than 6% of the public school population. The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, and 44 states and Washington, DC, have ­created laws that permit charter schools (Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia are the six states without charter school laws). Unlike magnet schools, charter schools are not always authorized and operated by the school district, and can abandon some federal and state requirements. In situa­ tions of high demand, charter schools must use a lottery system to enroll students. Charter school laws vary from state to state, however, and some states allow a great deal of latitude regarding who can authorize a charter school. For example, Arizona allows several different entities to authorize a charter school, including the state board for charter schools, universities, and local school districts. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Alaska only allows local school districts to authorize charter schools. Charter schools may operate with a specialized mission and curriculum, much like a magnet school (e.g. fine arts, STEM, Montessori), but charter schools can also use a curriculum that is similar to traditional public schools (Archbald 2000). While charter schools are often hailed as innovative forms of education, research demonstrates that charter schools are generally trending toward generic and nonin­ novative missions and curricular goals (Renzulli et  al. 2015). Using organizational theories to understand how schools function like other kinds of organizations is an important aspect of this research, and helps sociologists of education think about schools as organizations, especially with regard to issues that all types of organizations face (e.g. foundings, closures, structures, market niches) (Paino et  al. 2014, 2017; Renzulli and Roscigno 2005; Renzulli et al. 2015).

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The vast majority of charter schools serve urban students, and in some cities, charter schools are becoming the new norm. For example, in cities like Detroit, New Orleans, and Washington, DC, approximately half of the students attend a charter school. Demographically, charter schools rarely mirror the traditional school  population (Frankenburg and Lee 2003). Approximately 16% of the public school population is black, but black students make up nearly 33% of the charter school population. Similarly, Latino/Hispanic students represent approximately 20% of the public school population, but Latino/Hispanic students are 27% of the charter school population. Unlike traditional schools, charter schools have a much higher rate of closure, with an annual rate of closure around 4% (Teske and Schneider 2001). Closures occur due to a wide range of issues that include academic achievement failures, financial issues, management problems, low enrollment, and trouble with facil­ ities. Despite the growing rhetoric that charter schools are being held academi­ cally accountable through closures, the vast majority of charter schools close for nonacademic reasons. Indeed, finances are the most common reason charter schools report closing their doors, with only about 10% of charter schools citing academic reasons as the reason for closure. And even in cases where academic achievement is a cause for closure, finances remain an important aspect of the closure (Paino et  al. 2014). When a charter school closes, the students become displaced and must search for another school. These kinds of educational transi­ tions are generally not associated with positive educational outcomes; therefore, the high rate of charter school ­closures may be disproportionately harming stu­ dents of color, who are attending charter schools at higher rates than their white counterparts. Academic achievement remains the primary focus for most discussions on school choice, and it is unclear whether charter schools systematically improve, harm, or do not affect academic achievement. Many studies compare charter school data to tra­ ditional school data, but the results are quite mixed. Some charter schools demon­ strate excellence in academic achievement, especially for low‐income children (Dobbie and Fryer 2011), while others look a great deal worse than neighboring schools (Raymond 2009), and still other charter schools largely mirror the nearby traditional schools (Hanushek et al. 2007). Sociologists of education are still striving to explain why some charter schools succeed and others fail.

Organization of Schools – Teacher and Principal Relationships For decades, scholars have classified schools as “loosely coupled” organizations (Bidwell 2001; Weick 1976), meaning the various subparts of a school are linked to one another but more or less operate independently from one another. For example, teachers create lesson plans and choose teaching techniques with little or no input and oversight from administrators or other teachers. In a similar vein, schools have been compared to “egg crates,” with each teacher and classroom existing in the same building but isolated from the other teachers and classrooms (Lortie 2002). Loose‐coupling often occurs between formal organizational struc­ tures (e.g. policies) and technical activities (e.g. teaching), and has helped scholars understand why schools look largely the same year after year, despite many large‐ scale policy changes (Eagly and Johnson 1990; Pitner 1981; Shakeshaft 1987).



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However, sociologists have begun to revisit and reinvigorate some of the taken‐ for‐granted theories and assumptions that explain how schools are structured. Recent research suggests a shift in how some parts of schools are organized (Coburn 2004; Diamond 2007; Hallett 2010; Paino 2018). Accountability in ­education, a byproduct of the standards‐based reform era, has recoupled and more tightly coupled some policy and practices. As a result, teachers are reporting greater degrees of chaos and turmoil (Hallett 2010), and are responding to forces of control in various ways (Golann 2018). The general trend for coupling in schools is nonlinear; further, it is not just the implementation of federal level policies that impact changes in coupling (Paino 2018). For instance, the transition into NCLB (2003–2004) produced a period of looser coupling, while more recent policy eras (2007–2012) are associated with increasingly tighter couplings in schools. In districts where there is tighter coupling between the district and the school, coupling at the school‐level is also tighter (Diamond 2012; Paino 2018). Principals are also key factors in shaping the day‐to‐ day activities within a school (Jennings 2010; Spillane et  al. 2002, 2011), and research highlights the gender differences in leadership styles. Female principals express an interest to be actively involved with their teachers and school (Charters and Jovick 1981); they are more likely to communicate with teachers, make class­ room visits, patrol the hallways, and actively engage with those who work in the school (Fauth 1984; Ingersoll 1996; Pfeffer 1981; Shakeshaft 1987), while male principals prefer to use more traditional, nonparticipatory management styles (Lee et al. 1993). Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that female principals are associated with tighter coupling in schools (Paino 2018). Teachers report a preference for autonomy, arguing that each classroom is a unique learning environment with varying learning styles and needs (Ingersoll 2003; Lortie 2002). Therefore, teachers favor loosely coupled schools because they dislike being heavily monitored and losing any control of their classrooms. An increase in control that results from accountability policies is associated with a “bounded autonomy” for teachers, where teachers mediate the relationship bet­ ween the new institutional environment and their actual practice by calling on their preconceived notions of teaching (Coburn 2004, p. 234). Recent high‐stakes educational policy does impact teachers’ classroom instruction (Desimone 2013; Diamond 2007), but research also suggests that classroom practices are more likely to be tightly coupled with the shifting institutional environment (i.e. stan­ dards‐based reforms) when principals support the mandates (Hallett 2010; Young 2006). When principals actively seek to tighten relationships with teachers and increase control in their schools (i.e. tightly couple their schools), they are faced with resistance and opposition (Hallett 2007, 2010). Teachers will report chaos and turmoil for themselves and the students when faced with recoupled or tightly coupled schools (Hallett 2010). New research finds that teachers will respond in various ways to the increase in school control (Golann 2018). While some teachers can easily conform to an environment of increased control, other teachers must change their teaching style and imitate their colleagues or find a way to adapt new policies to fit with their own styles. But another group of teachers reject the increase in control and exit schools where the environment has become too controlling (Golann 2018).

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Schools and Inequality in Context Researchers have made considerable progress in recent years when it comes to expanding the scope of studies within the Sociology of Education. Heeding advice from Brint (2013) and Renzulli (2014), scholars have continued to situate schools and educational outcomes within a broader social context. Key to this effort are studies that seriously consider the time children spend outside of formal school­ ing – during the early childhood years, summer breaks, and after school hours. This is an especially important focus as the average US student (by the age of 18) has spent only 13% of his/her waking hours in a formal classroom setting (Downey et al. 2004; Walberg 1984). Before detailing research findings along these lines, the influence of this body of work in developing subfield specific theory is discussed. Downey and Condron (2016) and Raudenbush and Eschmann (2015) epitomize these efforts. In these recent pieces, the authors deliberate a counterfactual approach to educational outcomes – how does the “educational regime” a student receives in school compare to the regime they would otherwise receive in the absence of ­schooling? Downey and Condron (2016) propose what they term the “refraction framework”: [It is] a perspective on schools and inequality guided by the assumption that schools may shape inequalities along different dimensions in different ways. From this more balanced perspective, schools might indeed reproduce or exacerbate some inequalities, but they also might compensate for others – socioeconomic disparities in cognitive skills in particular. (p. 207)

Similarly, Raudenbush and Eschmann (2015) emphasize the differential returns to “doses of schooling” as they note disadvantaged children often benefit the most from schooling and that schools’ equalizing effects may be most pronounced in the earliest and most formative years of students’ educational careers.

Before Formal Schooling Begins Achievement gaps are large at kindergarten entry. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study‐Kindergarten (ECLS‐K). Reardon (2011) estimates that nearly 90% of the eighth grade achievement gaps (in reading and mathematics) between students from the richest and poorest households is in place during the fall of kindergarten. Gaps in social–emotional skills by social class are also largely in place at school entry (Downey et al. 2017). In terms of early racial inequalities, Quinn (2015) notes that black–white achievement gaps in mathematics, reading, and working memory are all sizable at school entry and change only modestly during the course of kindergarten. Across gender lines, Owens (2016) finds that boys’ higher levels of behavioral problems (compared to girls) at ages four to five are influential in explaining gender gaps in later schooling, controlling for other observed early childhood factors. Furthermore, cross‐national evidence is in accord when it comes to the salience of early achievement gaps. While Canadian students hold a sizable advantage over their United States in readings skills at ages 15–16, Merry (2013) shows that this gap is entirely in place at ages 4–5 when measured with a comparable



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early childhood reading assessment. Similarly, Bradbury et al. (2015) compare s­ tudent learning outcomes over time in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The authors report that 60% or more of later socioeconomic achievement gaps in each of the four nations are already in place at young ages. Combined, these findings emphasize the critical importance of children’s early years and they help to contextualize the efforts of students and teachers once formal schooling begins. However, research and policy efforts are underdeveloped during these early childhood years. Indeed, Torche (2016) has recently stated: The new findings about early human development invite a novel understanding of the role of schools in reducing the influence of the accident of birth. If the learning process starts at conception, then the early life course should be a legitimate domain of educa­ tion policy … Compensatory policies that provide educational resources to disadvan­ taged children are necessary, but starting earlier than age five might yield the most substantial payoffs. (p. 230)

To this point, and in line with Raudenbush and Eschmann’s (2015) notion of greater returns on earlier educational investments, Magnuson and Duncan (2016) emphasize that even modestly effective preschool programs produce long‐lasting and equalizing effects. To return to the theme of theoretical developments in the field, these efforts showcase the importance of taking a life‐course perspective in the Sociology of Education (Alexander et al. 2014; Caudillo and Torche 2014; Duke and Macmillan 2016; Heckman 2006). In even more detail, Duke and Macmillan (2016) call for a “critical period life‐course contingency perspective” that models “the reinforcing processes of cognitive and noncognitive skills from infancy to early adulthood” (p. 175). Moving the discipline forward with a focus on formative early years and reinforcing life‐course processes will surely contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of educational outcomes.

Summers in Between School Years One of the most compelling methodological approaches used to situate schools in their broader social context has been highlighted by researchers who leverage the typical school year calendar as a natural experiment (Alexander et al. 2001; Downey et al. 2004; Heyns 1978). In effect, these researchers ask, what does student learning look like on and off the “treatment” of schooling? While school‐year learning rates are undoubtedly influenced by school and home inputs, any learning gains or losses that occur during the summer vacation are more strictly a product of children’s home environments. To illustrate this point, Alexander et  al. (2001) propose the “faucet theory” as a framework – during the school year the “faucet of resources” is turned on at a comparable rate for all children, but during the summer months it may only be families of means that can keep the faucet running to some extent. Thus, when it comes to learning inequalities, schools tend to be more a part of the solution than the problem. Several recent studies have utilized similar seasonal comparative techniques to better understand how and when achievement gaps take place and what exactly this means for the role that schools play.

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Generally, these studies emphasize the following: (i) all students tend to learn at a faster pace during the school year, (ii) there is considerably more variation in summer learning rates compared to school year learning rates, (iii) certain achievement gaps (notably, gaps along the lines of social class) tend to widen in the summer months, but stay constant or even narrow during the school year. Apart from these patterns, however, the evidence is less clear. The black–white achievement gap continues to grow when school is in session (Quinn 2015) while the Asian–white gap may shrink during the school year and reestablish during intervening summers (Yoon and Merry 2017). Moreover, recent estimates from Downey et al. (2017) suggest that when it comes to social–emotional skill growth, schools tend to play a neutral role – these gaps are large at school entry and do not appear to diverge at different paces, depending on the season (school vs. summer). This pattern may, in fact, be more representative of seasonal pat­ terns across the board. Von Hippel and Hamrock (2016) re‐estimate seasonal models for all available large‐scale datasets and find that over time, across multiple grade levels and subject areas, seasonal patterns are varied. Some summer periods may show signs of “summer setback” for disadvantaged students while others show relatively stable gaps. Regardless, there is much to be learned from these studies. Few methodological approaches offer a more comprehensive way of separating school and nonschool effects. These seasonal studies also provide researchers with a compelling approach to respond to Downey and Condron’s (2016) “refraction theory” where, depending on the outcome, existing inequalities may be “refracted” via the medium of school­ ing in different ways. Schools may serve an equalizing or compensatory role in one regard while exacerbating inequalities in others. Finally, seasonal comparative studies from other affluent nations provide an additional layer of context. In both Canada (Davies and Aurini 2013) and Finland (Holtman 2017), summer setback along the lines of social class is less pronounced than what is typically found in US studies. The authors note that greater societal inequality in the United States leads to more variation in home resources. It is therefore not surprising to find stronger evi­ dence of diverging socioeconomic summer learning rates in more unequal contexts.

Learning Outside Formal Schooling One final line of research that helps broaden the scope of the sociology of educa­ tion has to do with student participation in supplemental education services, ­sometimes referred to as “shadow education” (Merry et al. 2016; Park et al. 2016). Park et al. (2016) note that these academic activities (private tutoring, test‐prep, cram schools, learning centers, etc.) constitute a third realm of student learning. Traditionally, scholars have considered learning inputs from (i) school and (ii) the family, but the rise of supplemental educational points to a third distinct set of educational processes. Importantly, these three realms influence and respond to one another. Park et al. (2016) conceptualize this new realm specifically as “partic­ ipation in academically oriented learning activities that occur outside of schools and are organized to teach students specific curricula via instructors or learning materials” (p. 232). The authors highlight the rising global trend toward these sup­ plemental education services and note that while both public and private forms exist, private (for a fee) lessons are especially important as researchers consider the relationship between education and inequality.



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One of the clearest trends in this research literature is the strong positive relation­ ship between family socioeconomic status and student participation in private supplementary education (Buchmann et  al. 2010; Stevenson and Baker 1992). Lareau’s (2003) notion of “concerted cultivation” speaks volumes in understanding demand for such private academic lessons. Parents of means tend to seek out and utilize structured activities that may enhance academic advantages for their chil­ dren. Importantly, there is evidence that affluent parents make this type of investment to a greater extent than in past decades (Duncan and Murnane 2011). Indeed, Schneider et al. (2017) take this finding a step further with a connection to rising economic inequality. Tracking state‐level changes in inequality, that authors con­ clude that contexts with higher economic inequality translate to larger gaps in parental investments. In contexts of high inequality and high demand for educational advantages, many scholars predict a continued intensification in supplemental edu­ cation. That said, the evidence to date is rather mixed when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of private lessons, learning centers, cram schools, and other supplementary programs. Collectively, studies indicate modest positive effects for these programs, but this evaluative research is quite young and typically suffers from a lack of consistency in conceptualizations across studies (Park et al. 2016). The bottom line, however, is that we should expect to see increased participation in these supplemental education forms and that scholars in the sociology of education are in a unique position to investigate the complex ways that families, schools, and supplemental education services influence one another (Lubienski and Lee 2013; Merry et al. 2016).

Emerging Issues Digital Divide, Digital Capital Several decades ago, computers and technology were not an everyday part of educa­ tion and schools, but a reliance on technology and computers has led to an emerging issue within the sociology of education. Sociologists are increasingly interested in understanding digital inequalities as computers become ubiquitous and essential components of education. The concept of the “digital divide” has two levels. The first digital divide has historically referred to the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” of digital and technological access. The second digital divide deals less with access to technology and more with training and competency using the technology. For the most part, we have overcome the first digital divide as access to computers and technology is no longer a real barrier for most people. But, vast inequalities remain between those who are digitally competent and fluent with technology and those who are less competent or fluent (Hargittai 2010; Robinson 2009). For example, poor kids are much less likely to learn complex computer skills, and are also more likely to spend time using computers and technology for gaming and non­ academic activities. In fact, poor kids actually may have more screen time than wealthier kids, but screen time alone does not close the gap. The use of technology and computers begins at a very young age, and the ability to effectively use technology results in gains in human capital. For example, students

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learn how to use a program such as Microsoft Excel, and then have a skill set that may help them perform tasks in a given job. In addition to human capital gains, stu­ dents who can convey digital fluency to teachers and authority figures may also reap indirect benefits, which translate to long‐term gains in positive evaluations from teachers and high levels of academic achievement. Sociologists refer to this concept as digital capital, which is the digital dimension of cultural capital (Paino and Renzulli 2013). The digital dimension of cultural capital functions through the same mechanisms as traditional measures of cultural capital (i.e. highbrow arts). Students participate in activities that expand their actual skills and knowledge, but the partic­ ipation in these activities simultaneously indicates esteem to those in positions of authority. Thus, when teachers are aware of the digital competence of their students, those students will see direct benefits in academic achievement, but they will also experience better evaluations from their teachers, which also transfer to greater academic achievements (Paino and Renzulli 2013). Research is still relatively new and developing in this area, but future sociologists of education can be expected to pay close attention to the inequalities that may result from advances in computers and technology.

Recent Sociological Insights on Higher Education Recent research on higher education highlights the many inequalities among stu­ dents pursuing postsecondary education. Students who receive more financial assistance during college are more likely to graduate from college, but are less likely to maintain as high of a grade point average (Hamilton 2013). Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) discuss how universities propel students along various pathways: a mobility pathway (students pursuing degrees like nursing, teaching, or accounting), a professional pathway (high‐achieving students who are pursuing highly ranked and competitive programs), or a party pathway (highly affluent students who are socialites). But, the university is structured to privilege the party pathway; thus, uni­ versities are reproducing the class systems already present and creating a culture of low expectations from both students and faculty. In a similar vein, informal univer­ sity norms also perpetuate class differences among college students. Students’ social class is a major factor in determining how students communicate with professors in college, but Jack (2016) notes a more complex relationship. Students hailing from poor backgrounds, but who had the opportunity to attend college preparatory schools, are better prepared for these interactions in university environments. Community colleges, on the other hand, are unique institutions because they simultaneously increase opportunities for college attendance but reduce the chances of a baccalaureate degree (Brand et al. 2014). Despite the fact that many community college students express a desire to obtain a four‐year college degree, very few stu­ dents actually go on to do so (Anderson 1981; Brand et  al. 2014; Goldrick‐Rab 2010), although recent research suggests that not all community college students experience this “cooling out” effect. In particular, low‐income women may have stable aspirations for college attainment relative to their community college peers (Nielsen 2015). The financial returns on attending community college education are



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not as good as that of earning a bachelor’s degree (approximately 75%), and when community college students fail to complete a baccalaureate degree they are leaving a lot of money on the table (US Census Bureau 2009). Sociologists continue to acknowledge how systems of higher education often reproduce and/or exacerbate already present inequalities. Once again responding to Brint (2013) and Renzulli (2014), recent sociolog­ ical research on higher education has also considered how the social institution of education is influenced by and, in turn, exerts influence on other institutions such as the family, employment, and local economies. For one, studies on student debt showcase not only increasing debt burdens (Dwyer et al. 2012; Houle 2014) but also associated life‐course changes such as boomeranging, or the pattern of young adults returning home to live with their parents after college (Houle and Warner 2017). More broadly, the act of taking on student debt to finance a college education has been described as a double‐edged sword, both a resource and a liability. However, the nature of these liabilities appears to disproportionately affect those from more disadvantaged backgrounds (Dwyer et  al. 2012; Houle 2014). Recent work also details the role of higher education in shaping career preferences, networks, and employment options (Binder et al. 2016; Rivera 2015). Indeed, Rivera (2015) showcases the symbiotic relationship between elite univer­ sities and “elite professional service” employers and then describes how this ­process often leads to a pernicious reproduction of inequalities via markers of prestige and perceived merit. Finally, Sutton (2017) illustrates how local econ­ omies and markets can play a role in high school curricular stratification and options for the subsequent transition to higher education. When curricula are more closely linked to demands of local employment opportunities (that do not necessarily require a bachelor’s degree), this may limit college prep opportunities, even for high‐achieving students.

Conclusions This chapter provides an overview of diverse trends and developments within the field of sociology of education. Many of the topics discussed could easily be expanded into standalone chapters, and there are other areas of research that simply could not be addressed here. These substantive limitations aside, the information presented here builds on prior reviews of the field and sets the stage for future research efforts. To summarize this review, recent trends in educational outcomes across the strat­ ifying lines of race, class, and gender were emphasized. Educational inequalities in all these areas continue to change in important ways. Key sociological insights give us a better understanding of these changes and how we can address various achievement gaps moving forward. Next, recent developments in educational policy especially as they relate to school choice and school organization were discussed. In response to major policy shifts, the landscape of American schooling is being reshaped. Particularly, school choice options are increasingly available, yet there is little evi­ dence to suggest school choice is a promising pathway when it comes to addressing educational inequalities. Recent standards‐based and accountability reform efforts have also contributed to changing relationships within schools. Greater coupling

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and administrative control in schools influence day‐to‐day activities and have impor­ tant implications for teacher autonomy. From this point, attention turns to students’ time outside of formal schooling. Here the critical ways that educational outcomes are closely tied to early childhood experiences, summer breaks, and the growing variety of learning experiences taking place outside the school walls are detailed. Together, these research literatures sug­ gest that school reform efforts ought to seriously consider children’s broader social environments. While schools vary in quality, they may nevertheless provide an important equalizing effect, especially when compared to the more divergent and privatized educational experiences that students may receive outside of formal K–12 schooling. The discussion then turned to the increasingly consequential divide in digital capital and the implications of these disparities for students’ progress and learning. Finally, several developments in the realm of higher education were reviewed. Recent research examines inequalities within universities via class‐based pathways and strategies as well as inequalities between higher education settings (community colleges compared to traditional universities). Also documented are recent sociological insights on the intersections of higher education and career pref­ erences, labor market opportunities, and the role of college debt. This review highlights broader developments and shifts in the field when it comes to developing and refining theory. Also emphasized are efforts to broaden the scope of research so that we may approach a more comprehensive sociology of education rather than an isolated study of schools and student achievement. Sociologists of education are uniquely well‐positioned to contribute to a more thorough under­ standing of how schools are situated in their social context. Research in the sociology of education has great potential for informing policy development, reform efforts, and public discourse on the critical objective of educating future generations.

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14 Sociology of Religion Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Christopher P. Scheitle

For much of the twentieth century, most mainstream sociologists ignored religion. Anthropologist Anthony Wallace summarized the then‐prevailing view that, “The evolutionary future of religion is extinction. Belief in supernatural beings and supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nature’s laws will erode and become only an interesting historical memory…. Belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as the result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge” (1966, p. 265). But affairs have changed dramatically since then. Peter Berger, one of an earlier era’s most eloquent theorists of secularization, proclaimed a shift “from the crisis of religion to the crisis of secularity” concluding that “those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril” (1996, p. 12). Sociologists’ renewed interest in religion was spurred by global events that spotlighted religion’s vitality – including violent Islamist groups, political mobilization of religious groups in the United States, religious movements that helped overthrow both communism in Eastern Europe, and right‐wing dictators in the Philippines and Latin America. In 1994, the American Sociological Association finally formed a section on the Sociology of Religion. Other disciplines also created sections for studying religion about the same time, and membership in these organizations has flourished (Schmalzbauer and Mahoney 2012). When social scientists assumed secularization was inevitable, it allowed lazy thinking about religion. The dearth of professors in the social sciences with a significant background in religion (Gross and Simmons 2009) makes gaining ­competent knowledge of religion more time consuming. Thus, much empirical and theoretical work remains to bring scholarship “up to speed.” This chapter is an attempt to map out helpful recent work, and to suggest areas that need more

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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attention. We first give a brief overview of the origins, spread, and interaction of the major religious traditions and then discuss comparative and historical research about the social impact of religion. We then shift to research about individuals, starting with a discussion of survey measurement, and then discussing the impact of religion on ­various individual outcomes.

Globalizing Religion Religious transformation is taking place on a global scale. In the past two centuries, and especially since World War II, Christianity has spread rapidly in Asia; both Islam and Christianity have grown in Africa; Protestantism has increased in Latin America; and Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam have spread to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean (Jenkins 2011; Montgomery 1996; Pew Research Center 2015). Everywhere major world religious traditions like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity have spread at the expense of indigenous and tribal religions, although often these indigenous religions persist as folk traditions within global religions. Many new religious movements (NRMs) have emerged by combining elements of different traditions. Population migrations with religious implications are underway, and old religious cleavages have reasserted themselves in places like Israel/Palestine, India, Myanmar, and Indonesia. Rates of marriage and childbearing also influence the long‐term ­trajectories of religion. In some societies the nonreligious population has increased, but on a global scale the nonreligious population is decreasing because they have fewer children (Pew Research Center 2015). Thus, the growth of the nonreligious depends disproportionately on conversion. Meanwhile, Pentecostalism  –  which developed in the early twentieth‐century – is spreading rapidly and has become the dominant form of Christianity in many places. Large segments of many societies have changed their religions, and members of these “imported” religions have been disproportionately influential in their home societies, both in the West and non‐West (Jenkins 2011; Woodberry 2012a; Yang 2011). But neither globalization nor major religious change is new. Ancient DNA suggests that turnover and intermixing of populations has been common for thousands of years. People who live in a place today almost never descend exclusively from people who lived there thousands of years ago (Reich 2018, p. xiii). Similarly, archeologists have found East Asian spices in Egyptian mummies; Roman coins in Japan and Vietnam, Ming Dynasty Chinese coins in East Africa, Muslim and Buddhist objects in Viking tombs, and Coptic/Egyptian manuscripts in the bindings of Medieval Celtic texts. Alexander the Great’s empire extended to India, leaving Greek rulers in power from Central Asia to Egypt. The Mongols conquered from Korea to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Muslim empires spread from Spain to Western China. Thus, religions interacted and shaped each other long before we have good records. These types of interactions and conquests radically altered the dominant religion all over the world, and changed both the content and practices of religions as well. Often, religious traditions disappeared (or almost disappeared) from the areas where they developed and had their greatest early strength. In the process, all major world

226 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle religious groups used forced, incentivized, and voluntary conversion  –  including Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and “secular” groups like Marxists, Fascists, and Enlightenment Liberals. Societies that do not practice one of the major world religious traditions have also used their share of violence (Edgerton 2010; Keeley 1997). In fact, no beliefs or practices (whether secular or religious) would be widespread without converting others at some point in time. What varies is when those conversions took place, what caused them, and what maintains them: Everyone in an area is unlikely to believe and practice the same things without force or social sanction. In contexts of freedom, people differ and change. Thus, forced change and incentivized conformity are not particularly religious, monotheistic, or modern. A brief overview of the spread and interaction of the major religious traditions helps illustrate this point, and shows the potential of religious history for sociological research (Montgomery 1996). The following section expands the discussion beyond North America and Europe; undermines a sense of the naturalness or inevitability of the current distributions of religions; and invites sociological comparison by using similar standards and vocabulary for different religious and nonreligious traditions. We often think of Hinduism as being nonmissionary and springing organically from the Indian subcontinent. Hindu nationalists have fought to integrate this view into education (e.g. Jain and Lasseter 2018), but linguistic, textual, and genetic evidence makes this contention questionable. The earliest “Hindu texts” (the Rig Vedas) were probably promulgated on the Indian subcontinent by West Eurasian/ Arian conquerors. The language of the Vedas is Indo‐European (related to Latin and Greek); their mythology is similar to Greek and Scandinavian mythology; and DNA of South Asians suggests a West Eurasian conquest: i.e. mitochondrial DNA (passed from mother to daughter) indicates almost no West Eurasian ancestry; whereas Y‐chromosome DNA (passed from father to son) indicates strong West Eurasian ancestry. Moreover, high caste Indians and groups that speak an Indo‐ European language have more West‐Eurasian ancestry than other Indians. DNA also suggests that the caste system has been practiced for thousands of years (Reich 2018, pp. 123–153). High‐caste Hinduism (i.e. Brahmanism) also had missionaries who encouraged others to convert (Nanda 2011; Sen 2012). Various Hindu empires spread Hinduism through Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Subsequent rulers replaced Hinduism with Buddhism and Islam, but Hindu temples and artistic forms are scattered throughout the region – e.g. Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The Indonesian island of Bali is still predominantly Hindu. Hindu missionaries even competed with Buddhist missionaries to spread their faith in China (Sen 2012). Over the centuries, the teachings and practices of Hinduism have also changed – most notably in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in reaction to Christian missions (Oddie 2006; van der Veer 2001). Buddhism developed in the Indian subcontinent, and initially spread to central, south, and southeast Asia. It did not spread to east Asia until the first millennium CE (600–1000 years after the death of Gautama Buddha). In India, Buddhism eventually disappeared. Important strands of Tantric and Mahayana Buddhism developed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they cross‐fertilized with Greek culture1 and possibly with Eastern Christianity – which arrived in India and central Asia by the first



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or second century CE. Many of the early Christian documents and images discovered in central and east Asia were found in Buddhist monasteries (e.g. Dunhuang); and a Christian monk helped translate important Buddhist texts into Chinese. There are even Christian inscriptions and evidence of a resident bishop in Tibet from before the rise of Tibetan Buddhism (Baumer 2006; Jenkins 2014; Moffett 2014). This early interaction between Christians and Buddhists is visible in the similarity between Eastern Christian church architecture and Buddhist mandalas (Gantzhorn 1991, pp. 39–44). Both Buddhism and Christianity spread from central Asia to China (although Buddhism also entered China via maritime trade routes a couple centuries earlier). After a period of tolerance and expansion, both Buddhism and Christianity were banned and persecuted as foreign religions. Over time, Christianity disappearing from China and central Asia (c. 1300), whereas Mahayana Buddhism flourished. Among other advantages, Buddhism arrived first, won imperial sponsorship, and had a more proximate supply of missionaries (Baumer 2006; Crosby 2004; Moffett 2014; Parenti 2003; Sen 2012, 2015). Eventually, Buddhism came to be viewed as an indigenous religion; Christianity is not. Initially, Buddhist societies were more religiously diverse, with different types of Buddhism propagated in the same areas, but over time, state sponsorship and repression segregated the broad families of Buddhism – with Theravada Buddhism practiced in south and southeast Asia, Mahayana Buddhism in east Asia, and Tantric Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia. At times Buddhist groups violently suppressed competing Buddhist groups, other world religions, and indigenous religions (Bodiford 2004; Crosby 2004; Jerryson and Juergensmeyer 2010; Parenti 2003; Sen 2012, 2015). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new strands of Buddhism developed through interaction with Christianity and anti‐Christian Western intellectuals. These neo‐Buddhist forms have in turn spread widely in Europe and North America (DuBois 2009; Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988; van der Veer 2001; Welch 1968). We often think of Judaism as a nonconversionary, ethnically based religion, but before the fourteenth century CE, Jewish missions to non‐Jews was common and included examples of mass conversion (e.g. of a Turkic tribe – the Khazar) and forced conversions (Bowersock 2012, 2013, pp. 85–89; Golb 1987; Loewenberg 2012; Seltzer 1990). In fact, forced conversion of Christians to Judaism in southern Arabia spurred a regional war that paved the way for the emergence and spread of Islam (Bowersock 2013; Reynolds 2012). Both the persecution of Jews and the creation of diaspora trade networks led to the ancient dispersal of Jews across Asia, Europe, and North Africa, and later dispersal to the Americas and southern Africa. However, in recent years the Jewish community has become more concentrated in Israel and North America. Christianity originated and had much of its early strength in the Middle East and North Africa. Christianity’s spread to Europe is widely known, but it simultaneously spread east, north, and south – probably reaching India and Afghanistan before it reached England, and reaching Sudan, Ethiopia, Tibet, China, and Mongolia long before it reached Scandinavia or the Baltics (Baumer 2006; Jenkins 2014; Moffett 2014). There were even large Christian and Jewish populations in Arabia at the time of Mohammed – and Mohammed interacted directly with them (Bowersock 2013;

228 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle Loosley 2002; Reynolds 2012). Yet with the rise of Islam, Christianity in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia significantly declined (Jenkins 2014). The pre‐Islamic Christian presence in central Asia is visible in the Christian symbols still used in Persian and central Asian carpets (Gantzhorn 1991). The reintroduction of Christianity into Africa and Asia after 1500 is often associated with Western colonization. Some of this growth was through force (e.g. Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America), but most conversions in Africa and Asia were not forced, and the greatest growth occurred either before or after European colonization or in areas where the major colonial threat was not “Christian” Europe (Jenkins 2011; Kane and Park 2009; Montgomery 1996; Walls 1996; Woodberry 2012a). Islam generally spread in the wake of conquest: force and incentivization was used (non‐Muslims paid higher taxes and had legal handicaps), but much conversion was voluntary (Baumer 2006; Reynolds 2012; Ye’or 1996). Muslim rulers were also often tolerant – Christian monasteries on the Persian Gulf thrived during the first century of Islam (Loosley 2002). Shortly after the death of Mohammad, Muslims split into two major groups over the issue of succession: the Sunni and the Shiites. Currently, Islam is the fastest‐growing major religion, but mostly because of high birthrates. Although Muslims missions (da’wa) are widespread, attempts to convert non‐Muslims has been disproportionately successful among groups that have been abused by Christians and Hindus – e.g. African‐Americans, Australian Aborigines, Mayan Indians, and Rwandans after the genocide (Chitwood 2014; Farquhar 2016; Johnson and Scoggins 2005; Lacey 2004). Enlightenment‐inspired ideologies have also spread through forced, incentivized, and voluntary conversion. The French Revolution descended into the reign of  terror, and Napoleon spread Enlightenment reforms across Europe. Even in the  nineteenth and twentieth centuries Enlightenment‐inspired elites in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Mexico, Uruguay, and elsewhere forcibly secularized society through state intervention  –  confiscating church land, shutting down religious schools, kicking out Catholic religious orders, and constricting the training of new clergy (Helmreich 1966; Helmstadter 1997; Ruiz 2014; Talmon 1952; Tudesco 1980). Marxist revolutions also killed tens of millions who did not conform to their ideology (e.g. Stalin, Moa, Pol Pot), and eugenicists instituted “scientifically based” racist policies to slow the propagation of people they considered unfit (Leonard 2016). Even the US Agency for International Development (USAID) restricts aid from going to countries that do not conform to particular attitudes and behavior (USAID 2012). Thus, power shapes both religious and nonreligious changes. The emphasis on forced and incentivized change in this section does not imply that most change is forced or incentivized. Nor does it imply that strong believers in anything are inherently dangerous  –  that probably depends on what they believe. Nor does it imply that all religion and nonreligious traditions are equally susceptible to violence and repression of alternative perspectives – that is an empirical question (Marshall 2009; Woodberry 2012a). But hopefully highlighting commonality between traditions invites fruitful, empirically-based research and can help us understand when and how ideas and identities spread and change, and when groups do this through coercive and noncoercive means.



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Religious globalization has profoundly shaped both “imported” and “indigenous” religious traditions. As people adopt new religions, they adapt them to their context and use them for their own interests. As established religions react to new competition, they are transformed as well. For example, Protestant missions in Latin America motivated the Catholic Church to focus more resources in marginalized communities and opened the way for Liberation Theology (Smith 1991; Trejo 2012). These interactions of religious traditions provide an ideal laboratory for the study of cultural change. Global religious diversity and change also allow sociologists to study roots of long‐term differences between societies. Although most things have multiple causes, comparative and historical research shows plausible links between particular types of religion and the rise of both cumulative, experimental science (Harrison 2001); long‐term economic divergence between societies (Kuran 2012; Woodberry et  al. 2014), differences in educational provision (Woodberry 2004), the rise of civil society and the public sphere (Woodberry 2004, 2012b; Young 2006; Zaret 2000), the development of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) (Anheier and Salamon 1998; Barnett 2011; James 1987; Woodberry 2004, 2012b), the emergence and spread of abolitionism (Turner 1982; Woodberry 2004), differences in how societies provide welfare (Kahl 2005), the development and spread of liberal democracy and human rights (Harper 2016; Woodberry 2004, 2012b), the development of the rule of law (Berman 1983, 2009; Whitman 2008) and so on. However, one problem with historical research in a limited area (e.g. Europe) is the difficulty of adjudicating between competing explanations. Fortunately, Protestant and Catholic missionaries provide a quasi‐natural experiment for debates about the social impact of religion in Europe. When there are competing religion and nonreligious arguments for a development in Europe, we can test between them by comparing the impacts of European settlers, colonial investments, missionaries, and so on. This research tends to confirm the primary importance of religion: e.g. societies that had greater exposure to Protestant missions currently have more education (Cogneau and Moradi 2014; Gallego and Woodberry 2010; Woodberry 2004), better health (Wood et al. 2007; Woodberry 2007), more book publishing and higher newspaper circulation (Cagé and Rueda 2016; Woodberry 2012b), more economic development (Bai and Kung 2015; Bryan et al. 2018; Chen et al. 2014; Woodberry et al. 2014), lower corruption, and more political democracy (Woodberry 2004, 2012b). Many of these studies also use techniques designed to isolate causal coefficients: i.e. instrumenting, regression discontinuity, natural experiments, and so on.

Rethinking Micro‐Level Secularization A major area of macro‐historical research in the sociology of religion has been the reconsideration of secularization theory – particularly at the level of individual belief and practice. The persistence of religious commitment and activity at the grassroots, particularly in the United States, spawned attempts to better theorize religious growth and strength.

230 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle One important theoretical approach is the “religious economies” theory (Finke and Stark 2005; Iannaccone 1994; Stark and Finke 2000), which uses rational choice theory to try to explain the continued vitality of religion based on competition and strictness. An annual review article by Chaves and Gorski (2001) and a methodological critique by Voas et al. (2002) dampened some enthusiasm for this theory, but it continues to be influential. A second theoretical approach to rethinking micro‐level secularization is “subcultural identity” theory (Smith 1998). This theory synthesizes insights about moral identity, reference group theory, and the social functions of intergroup conflict to explain how religious subcultures thrive in the context of modern pluralism. Religious groups that create both clear distinction from and significant engagement and tension with relevant outgroups are able to thrive. Both the religious economies theory and subcultural identity theory reverse secularization theory’s premise that cultural and religious pluralism undermines religion. Until recently, data from the US showed stable religious service attendance and beliefs and increasing church membership (Finke and Stark 2005; Stark and Finke 2000). However, in the 2000s the growth of the “nones” (i.e. those who report no religious identity) and a gradual decline in religiosity suggested to some that secularization had finally come to the United States (Voas and Chaves 2016). However, the extent of, reasons for, and meaning of these changes is still debated. Most “nones” do not become atheists or agnostics; most still believe in God and have supernatural beliefs – although less Judeo‐Christian. For example, they disproportionately believe in UFOs, the zodiac, palm reading, reincarnations, and so on (Routledge et al. 2017). Moreover, the growth of nones seems to be driven by an aversion to religion in politics and possibly new sexual norms – not by education, urbanization, exposure to science, or other mechanisms proposed by traditional secularization theories (Hout and Fischer 2014; Schnabel and Bock 2017). Moreover, most of the decline in attendance and religious identity is by nominal Catholics and mainline Protestants. The proportion theological conservative and the proportion who have high levels of attendance, prayer, etc. is stable or increasing (Schnabel and Bock 2017). Moreover, disaffiliation is greater among those how do not attend college than among those who do (Schwadel 2011; Uecker et al. 2007). In Europe, there is more evidence for secularization in religious service attendance and affiliation with Christian churches, but the reasons for this is still debated (Berger et al. 2008; Brown 2009; Stark and Finke 2000). Conversely, in east Asian societies like China and Singapore religiosity seems to be increasing in conjunction with modernization (Chong and Hui 2013; Yang 2011). Moreover, on a global scale the proportion nonreligious is decreasing because the nonreligious have fewer kids than the religiously devout (Pew Research Center 2015). It remains to be seen whether enough religious children will be converted to nonreligious perspective to counteract this trend.

Religion and Social Movements Much recent work in the sociology of religion has also focused on religion’s role in social movements. Moderns have inherited from the skeptical and revolutionary Enlightenment the view that religion is naturally conservative, defensive, and allied



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with ruling elites – as, for example the French Catholic Church was in the eighteenth century (May 1976). In many cases, religion has proved to be conservative, elitist, and allied with forces of oppression. But it also readily inspires movements for social justice and democratization (Etherington 2005; Smith 1996; Woodberry 2004, 2012b). Historically, in the United States, religious actors and organizations were crucial in the fight for religious freedom in the eighteenth century (Shah and Hertzke 2016) and against slavery in the nineteenth century (Turner 1982; Woodberry 2004; Young 2006). In the mid‐twentieth century, the black church was central in mobilizing and sustaining the black civil rights movement, with active support from returning missionaries (Hollinger 2017; Marsh 1999). People and organizations of faith have also played crucial roles in the anti‐Vietnam war movement, the Sanctuary movement to protect illegal Central American refugees, the environmental movement, the Central America peace movement, and in organizations such as Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, and the American Friends Service Committee, to name a few (Smith 1996). Around the world, religious movements have played a significant role in birthing liberation theology; the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979; the insurrection against El Salvador’s military regime in the 1970s; Solidarity’s resistance to the Polish communist state; the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines; resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile; the anti‐Apartheid movement in South Africa; and the fall of the East German regime in 1989 (Elphick 2012; Smith 1996). In many movements, religion has provided activists with sacred legitimation and moral imperatives. Religion can foster self‐discipline, sacrifice, and altruism; furnish movements with trained and experienced leadership; and supply congregated participants. Movements often reduce start‐up costs by using preexisting religious communication channels, authority structures, and social control ­mechanisms. Religion can also provide shared transnational identities beyond nation and language. Finally, religion can offer movements transnational organizational linkages; and the protection of “open spaces” in civil society (Smith 1996; Woodberry 2004, 2012b).

Religion’s Influence on Individuals Much of the sociology of religion also focuses on individual outcomes. In this section we examine some of the larger subfields in this area. However, to understand and improve this literature, it is necessary to first discuss measurement.

Improving Measures and Methods Measuring religion well on surveys is crucial, but many standard measures are still inadequate. This problem is accentuated because religious movements, identities, and organizations are continually changing. Survey measures are often too broad to be useful (e.g. Protestant, Catholic or Jewish) or bias results against particular groups (e.g. biblical literalism) (Woodberry and Smith 1998). Better measures of religion often exist, but need to be used. Most surveys – especially longitudinal surveys – have either no questions on religion or only a few poorly constructed ones.

232 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle Fortunately, high‐quality data are increasingly available and are transforming scholars’ perceptions of religion. Scholars have made the greatest progress in measuring Protestant groups; and some progress in measuring the “nonreligious” (Hout and Fischer 2014; Kellstedt and Guth 2018), but little progress in differentiating types of Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and so on (although see Roemer 2008; Tarakeshwar et al. 2003; Welch and Leege 1988, 1991). One difficulty for measurement is confusion over terms – e.g. what to call theologically conservative Protestants (CPs). Although there are many distinctions within this group, scholars often divide denominational families by race (dividing out black Protestants, and dividing white theologically CPs into four major movements: fundamentalists, Pentecostals, charismatics, and evangelicals. In this case, evangelical refers to a movement that tried to distinguish itself from fundamentalists and Pentecostals by being less separatist and more intellectually and culturally engaged. But what do we call the roughly 25% of the US population who are connected to one of these movements? Through the early 1990s, academics and reporters often referred to them collectively as fundamentalists (using the term for the more separatist wing to refer to everyone); in the 2000s, academics and reporters generally refer to them collectively as evangelicals (using the term for the more moderate wing to refer to the whole). The two uses of the labels “fundamentalists” and “evangelicals” often create confusion (Woodberry and Smith 1998). Thus, in the wake of political involvement by white theological conservatives in the Trump campaign, and advocacy of Trump by Jerry Falwell Jr. (a fundamentalist) and Pat Robertson (a Pentecostal), many moderates are abandoning the label evangelical (Nyhan 2017; Zauzmer and Bailey 2017) or debating how to differentiate themselves from the association with right‐wing politics (Bailey 2018). Thus, to minimize problems with ambiguity, we use CPs as the general label for white theologically CPs and neo‐­evangelical for the moderate wing of CPs. Other scholars disagree with the approach, but there is no problem‐free solution. In North America, religious denomination is the most common way scholars identify religious groups. With good denominational lists and categorization schemes, scholars can effectively differentiate mainline‐liberal, CP, and black Protestant denominations, as well as Pentecostals. Unfortunately, many denomination questions lack sufficient detail to distinguish the mainline and CP denominations within larger religious families such as Lutheran or Presbyterian. Fortunately, Steensland et  al. (2000) provides a useful scheme for recoding denominations (also see Woodberry et al. 2012). Another way to differentiate religious groups is according to beliefs or identity. In North America, “biblical literalism” or “biblical inerrancy” are the most common beliefs used to identify CPs. However, people vary widely in what they mean by “literal” and “without error.” Moreover, because these measures exclude many better‐educated neo‐evangelicals and charismatics who are not literalists or inerrantists, it makes CPs appear poorer and less educated than other measures (Schwadel 2011; Woodberry and Smith 1998). Ideally, researchers should use multiple beliefs as indicators of a latent belief system (Woodberry and Smith 1998). Most research does not distinguish subtypes of CPs or Catholics, although there are striking differences between Pentecostals, charismatics, fundamentalists, and neo‐evangelicals. In fact, many of the characteristics scholars and journalists attribute to CPs as a whole are driven entirely by Pentecostals and/or fundamentalists



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(Bartkowski et al. 2011; Beyerlein 2004; Blanchard et al. 2008; Clark and Stroope 2018; Smith 1998; Woodberry and Smith 1998). Some scholars ask respondents which religious tradition or movement they identify with, but most do not. Recently, voter exit polls ask respondents if they are “evangelical or born again” without even restricting the category to Protestants or distinguishing these two groups. Yet, even using the same dataset, how scholars measure CPs makes them look very different on multiple outcomes (Alwin et al. 2006; Hackett and Michael Lindsay 2008). To measure religiosity, scholars typically use church attendance, prayer, or subjective importance of religion. These religious measures work equally well for different groups of American Catholics, Protestants, and Jews (Woodberry 1997a). However, so far no one has tested whether any measures of religiosity work equally well for other major world religions. This becomes increasingly problematic as surveys spread to Africa and Asia and as religion in Europe and North America becomes more diverse. If measures of religiosity work better for some religious groups than for others, this biases other coefficients in the model and distort our understanding of differences between religious groups. Recently, some scholars have become suspicious of self‐reported measures of religiosity, for example, claiming religious people in the United States greatly inflate their actual church attendance (Hadaway et al. 1993). Others have suggested that social desirability bias is minimal, pointed out methodological problems and data selection that artificially inflate the attendance gap (Hout and Greeley 1998; Woodberry 1997b, 1998). Moreover, a recent experiment by Robert Woodberry and Erin Metz McDonnell identified the exact names of everyone who attended mass in several locations and linked them to a survey of the community, but found no evidence of overreporting mass attendance – those who said they attended mass that week did. Another major problem has been the rapid decline in survey response rates, particularly for telephone surveys. Expensive face‐to‐face surveys like the General Social Survey (GSS) and the American National Election Study (ANES) still have good response rates and allow valid statistical inferences. But most scholars and journalists rely on nonrandom convenience samples, or surveys with terrible response rates. Valid statistical comparisons are impossible on most of these surveys. Thus, media reports about, for example, religion and politics are suspect unless confirmed with high‐quality surveys (Wuthnow 2015). Scholars should always favor results from random samples of the general population with good response rates over results from other surveys – if they do not, it suggests lack of knowledge or political bias. One response to the crisis of survey quality is using indirect and unobtrusive measures: e.g. trends in book content using Google Ngrams (Finke and Bader 2017). The statistical methods used in sociology are often also problematic. Unfortunately, most statistical research on religion still uses correlational studies with statistical controls, which makes it susceptible to omitted variable bias. In addition, many studies capitalize on chance and do not evaluate reverse causation, including intervening variables as controls, etc. Published findings in the social sciences are seldom replicated, and replication attempts often fail (Makel et  al. 2012; Simmons et  al. 2011). Recently, there have also been high‐profile cases of data fabrication. These problems have led some scholars to conclude that most published research in the social sciences is false (Ioannidis 2005; Ziliak and McCloskey 2008). Although these critiques may be overstated and are focused on the social sciences in general, they

234 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle highlight the importance of making data and models public and of academic humility. Methodological sloppiness and nonreproducible results can be especially problematic in research about topics social scientists want to be true and thus are less likely to challenge and more likely to spread. Several statistical techniques promise to mitigate some of the problems outlined above. First, most research analyzes mean differences between religious traditions, but some also measures diversity within religious groups and the change in diversity over time (DiMaggio et al. 1996). Second, scholars are mixing qualitative and quantitative research more effectively. Qualitative research suffered because it was difficult to determine how representative case studies, “insider documents,” or interviews are. Conversely, survey research often misses important nuances, and allows researchers to project alien meanings onto research subjects. Some scholars mitigate this problem by conducting qualitative interviews with a random sample of people contacted in a regular quantitative survey (Smith 1998), or collecting rich contextual data of the churches that the people contacted in a survey attend (Emerson et al. 2010). Third, some scholars are using causal analysis to study religion. Currently most statistical research about religion has omitted variable bias/endogeneity. If we study whether religion influences educational attainment, to get unbiased causal coefficients we must include all the causes of educational attainment in the model, perfectly measure all of them, and perfectly model the relationship between all the causes and educational attainment. If we do not, other coefficients in the model will be biased – and we never know how much, or in which direction (Allison 1999). In response, scholars have developed techniques to isolate causal coefficients. There isn’t space to describe these techniques, but the following is a list of techniques with publications that use them to understand religion: instrumenting (Bai and Kung 2015; Chen et  al. 2014), regression discontinuity (Cogneau and Moradi 2014), natural experiments (Gruber and Hungerman 2008; Woodberry 2012b; Wydick et al. 2013), and randomized control trials (Bryan et al. 2018). Of course, these techniques also have unprovable assumptions, and using them incorrectly creates problems (Deaton 2010; Owen 2017), but by combining multiple techniques with different assumptions, we can make different theories harder or easier to believe. Using better samples and techniques is especially important in contexts of religious and political tension. It is too easy to see group differences, assume that vocal leaders highlighted in the news represent the thinking of most group members, and assume that religion caused those differences. However, careful research can (i) make the mean differences between groups concrete (they are seldom as large as the polarization apparent in the news), (ii) reveal the diversity and overlap between groups, (iii) identify the meanings and motivations a representative sample of the members of a group give for their behavior, and (iv) help identify which differences are caused by religion and which by nonreligious factors currently associated with a particular religious group.

Health Another major strand of research analyzes the relationship between religion and health. Most of this research suggests that religiosity has a consistent, moderate, positive influence on life expectancy, health, and psychological well‐being



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(Ellison and Hummer 2010; Wood et al. 2007). These salutary effects are consistent across hundreds of studies and persist despite an impressive array of statistical controls for social ties, physical mobility, health behavior, and socio‐demographics. They are consistent for a wide variety of illnesses and surgeries, for multiple age groups, social classes, races, ethnicities, and nationalities. Studies also suggest that certain conservative religious groups have greater positive health outcomes (Ellison and Levin 1998). Generally, church attendance has the greatest positive impact  –  although other forms of religiosity have additional positive influences. Greater social support, more satisfying family relationships, and healthier behavior (e.g. less smoking, alcohol abuse, and risky sexual behavior) account for some, but not all, of this positive impact. Of course, not all forms of religiosity promote health and psychological well‐being. A significant amount of research focuses on abusive churches, “toxic faith,” and maladaptive religious coping strategies (Bjorck and Thurman 2007). Similarly, theorists like Sigmund Freud (1961) and Albert Ellis (1962) argued that religion is neurotic and damaging to self‐esteem and self‐efficacy. Most of this research, however, is based on theory, anecdotal evidence, and nonrandom samples. The overwhelming empirical evidence suggests that these cases are rare (Pargament and Raiya 2007). However, there remain some important weaknesses in the field of health and religion. First, almost all this research has been done in North America and Europe, where Christianity and Judaism predominate. The minimal survey‐based research conducted elsewhere suggests the association between religion and mental and physical health varies by religious tradition (Krause et  al. 2002; Roemer 2008; Tarakeshwar et al. 2003; Wood et al. 2007). If these results hold and it becomes clear that different religious traditions have differing effects on health, it will require reformulating some theories. Second, most of the research only looks at the direct impact of religiosity, but much of religion’s impact may be indirect (e.g. through greater social support). With structural equations modeling, researchers could model both the direct and indirect impact of religiosity. Finally, because few longitudinal surveys include questions about religion on early waves, many of the conclusions are based on cross‐sectional evidence or short time‐lags. This makes it difficult to control for selection bias and bidirectional causation. It also means that researchers cannot measure the cumulative impact of religion well; just a snapshots of respondents’ religiosity over a limited period of time.

Education A substantial literature focuses on the relationship between religion and education (Horwitz 2018; Schwadel 2014). On average, those who attend religious services more often complete more years of schooling, have greater high school and college completion, have higher educational expectations, put more effort into school, have higher GPAs, do better on standardized math and reading tests, and so on. For instance, college students who attend religious services more report putting more time in on academic work and have higher grade point averages (Mooney 2010). Interestingly, university education does not seem to reduce religiosity or the strength of religious belief. On average, the religiosity of children declines when they leave their parents’ home (and generally increases when they get married and have

236 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle kids of their own), but the decline in religiosity is greater for those who do not go to college than those who do. In fact, on average, for each additional year of college and graduate education, religious service attendance increases by 15%. The strength of religious belief also seems to increase through college and is not reduced by  exposure to various types of diversity (Lee 2002), although education reduces “biblical literalism” and makes people more attracted to mainline denominations (Schwadel 2011; Uecker et al. 2007). Conversely, a number of studies suggest that in North America, CPs (especially “biblical literalists”) get less education than other religious groups (Darnell and Sherkat 1997; Lehrer 1999). Some suggests this is caused by anti‐intellectualism (Darnell and Sherkat 1997), but other studies qualify this. First, education seems to reduce biblical literalism and promote switching from CP to mainline denominations (Schwadel 2011, 2014). Second, there is variation between CP groups: fundamentalists and Pentecostals have less education, while (neo)‐evangelicals get as much or more education than other religious and nonreligious groups – except for Jews (Beyerlein 2004). Third, the positive association between religiosity and education is as strong among CPs as among mainline Protestants and Catholics. If anti‐intellectualism causes CPs educational deficit, it seems odd that those most exposed to and committed to CP beliefs would get more education than their less devout co‐religionists (also see Horwitz 2018). Finally, the negative association between CPs and educational attainment seems to operate primarily through women. On average, CPs get married and have kids earlier than other groups and on average CPs have higher expectations of women staying home to take care of young children. Thus, CP women get less postgraduate education. After this is statistically controlled, the difference between CPs and other religious respondents becomes insignificant (Fitzgerald and Glass 2008; Glass and Jacobs 2005; Uecker and Pearce 2017). Still, CP children disproportionately attend religious colleges and colleges close to where their parents live and thus are less likely to graduate from the most prestigious universities (Uecker and Pearce 2017). The same studies typically find higher educational attainment among Jews. Outside of Europe and North America, Jews and Christians tend to be disproportionately educated. The high education rate among Christians (particularly Protestants) seems to be from an emphasis on reading the Bible in the vernacular and the role of missionaries in pioneering the spread of mass education and printing around the world (Cogneau and Moradi 2014; Gallego and Woodberry 2010; Hackett et  al. 2016; Manglos‐Weber 2017; Woodberry 2004; Zhai and Woodberry 2011). In North America and Europe, the positive association between religiosity and education does not translate into a higher prevalence of devout people in academia. This may create the perception of a negative association between education and religiosity. Although many academics are devout (at least in private), in North America academics are significantly less devout than the general public. One plausible explanation could be that academics are more exposed to the scientific method and that this undermines their religiosity. However, several things undermine this idea. First, extant data suggests that academics were disproportionately secular in their childhood, which suggests a selection process rather than a secularization process (Ecklund and Scheitle 2007; Finkelstein 1984; Gross and Simmons 2009). Similarly,



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Scheitle (2011) found that compared to other students, natural sciences students did not differ in the trajectory of their religiosity during college. Second, there is substantial variation in the religiosity of professors in different disciplines – with English, communication studies, biology, psychology, history and sociology being among the most secular, and chemistry, the health sciences, and applied fields like accounting and finance being the most devout. It is hard to argue that English and communication professors are more exposed to the scientific method than chemists and nursing professors. This disciplinary variation has led some scholars to argue that some intellectuals use secularity as a symbolic marker to signal that they are intellectuals (Gross and Simmons 2009; Stark and Finke 2000; Wuthnow 1985). Third, the disproportionate secularity of academia may be a Western phenomenon: in the Asian countries where we have comparable data (India, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Taiwan), scientists attend religious services as much or more than the general population (Ecklund et al. 2016).

Altruism and Helping Behavior There is a vast literature on religion and helping behavior. This literature suggests that in North America and Europe, highly religious people give more time and money to support both religion and nonreligious organizations. They also help ­people more informally (Putnam and Campbell 2012; Woodberry 2008). This relationship between religiosity and prosocial behavior is not limited to self‐report – even external observers report that the religiously devout are more helpful and cooperative (Aghababaei et al. 2014; Woodberry 1997b, 2015). The relationship is weaker and less consistent in laboratory‐based experiments and games than in survey and observational data. However, it is not clear how much laboratory‐based games ­generalize to natural behavior in the broader society (Woodberry 2015). Religious traditions vary in the amount of voluntarism they foster, which influences the prevalence of voluntary organizations in society (Anheier and Salamon 1998; Ecklund and Park 2005; Woodberry 2008, 2012b).

Crime and Delinquency In the most extensive meta‐analyses of the relationship between religion, crime, and delinquency (Johnson and Jang 2011), 90.4% of studies found an inverse r­ elationship between religiosity and criminal or delinquent behavior. Virtually all the remaining studies found either a mixed or null relationship between religiosity and crime. Only 0.7% of studies found religion associated with greater delinquency. Other meta‐ analyses have make similar conclusions (Baier and Wright 2001; Kelly et al. 2015). Studies that find no effect, a negative effect, or mixed effects disproportionately have inferior samples (small conveniences samples of subpopulations instead of large, random, nationally representative samples) and use less‐sophisticated methodologies (Baier and Wright 2001; Johnson and Jang 2011). The association between religion and reduced delinquency is generally stronger for drug‐ and alcohol‐related offenses. Living in a highly religious context also reduces criminal and delinquent behavior (Adamczyk 2012; Regnerus 2003).

238 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle Longitudinal research that simultaneously measures the impact of religiosity on delinquency and delinquency on religiosity suggests that earlier religiosity reduces later delinquency, but early alcohol abuse, drug use, and criminal activity have either no effect or a weaker effect on later religiosity (Benda 1997; Desmond et al. 2010; Mason and Windle 2002; Pirutinsky 2014). Most of the literature about religiosity and crime focuses on the United States, but some looks cross‐nationally as well. For instance, Shariff and Rhemtulla (2012) showed that crime is higher in countries where more people believe in heaven than in hell. Other cross‐national research suggests that both religiosity and Protestantism reduces people’s acceptance of criminal behavior such as tax fraud, white‐collar crime, and corruption (Corcoran et  al. 2012; Nieuwbeerta et  al. 2003; Stack and Kposowa 2006; Treisman 2000).

Family, Marriage, and Childrearing Religion influences both who and when people marry. Most people marry someone of the same faith, although religious intermarriage is increasing. The religiously devout tend to marry at younger ages. Catholics, Mormons, moderate and CPs also tend to marry earlier than Jews, liberal Protestants, and the unaffiliated (Xu et al. 2005). Religion also influences fertility. Devout women tend to have more children and to have children more quickly after they get married than the less religiously devout (Pearce and Davis 2016). Interestingly, women who are raised as CPs are at higher risk of conceiving a child before marriage than those raised in a mainline Protestant tradition, although much of this is explained by differences in educational attainment. In turn, religiosity increases the likelihood that an unmarried woman who becomes pregnant will get married before the child is born (Adamczyk and Felson 2008). People who are more religiously active have greater marital stability and report higher levels of marital satisfaction (Call and Heaton 1997; Woodberry and Smith 1998). Marriage partners who share religious affiliations, beliefs, and practices also tend to report higher levels of relationship happiness and have a lower risk of divorce (Ellison et al. 2010). CPs tend to have more traditional views of gender roles, but also have greater internal diversity in gender roles than other groups (Woodberry and Smith 1998). The religiously devout are also less likely to use domestic violence (Ellison and Anderson 2001; Ellison et al. 2007; Woodberry and Smith 1998). Still, some scholars worry that abusers can use religious restrictions on divorce to coerce and control their partner (Sharp 2014). Religion also influences childrearing styles and attachment. For example, CP fathers are more likely to hug and praise their kids, and less likely to yell at them (Wilcox 1998; 2004). They are also more likely to support corporal punishment – although support has declined over time, especially among more highly educated CPs (Hoffmann et al. 2017). At high levels, physical punishment is associated with negative cognitive and social outcomes in children, although at low levels, among younger children, scholars still debate its effect (Gershoff and Grogan‐Kaylor 2016; Larzelere and Baumrind 2010; Larzelere and Cox 2013). Among other problems, most studies are correlational and bad behavior can lead to spanking, as well as spanking leading to bad behavior. A meta‐analysis of longitudinal studies – some



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of which attempt to control for previous behavior – suggests the impact of moderate spanking is minimal (Ferguson 2013).

Tolerance and Prejudice Despite the intolerance visible in recent news report, in North America tolerance of other groups continues to expand  –  including among less wealthy and educated groups, and in the large religious traditions studied (Eisenstein et al. 2017; Schwadel and Garneau 2017). Most research suggests that CPs are less tolerant than other North Americans. However, a number of scholars suggest that most tolerance scales (e.g. on the GSS) are biased against conservative religionists because they primarily test tolerance for left‐wing and secular groups (atheists, feminists, communists, homosexuals) and exclude most right‐wing and religious groups (fundamentalists, anti‐ abortion protesters, gender‐role traditionalists, “creationists”). Some evidence supports this claim. There seems to be strong intolerance of CPs by groups that rate well on standard tolerance scales. Intolerance of CPs seems especially strong in elites groups like academics and the wealthy (Bolce and De Maio 2008; Tobin and Weinberg 2007; Yancey 2010, 2011, 2018). Moreover, when respondents are asked which outgroups they most dislike and then are asked about tolerance for that group, CPs are as tolerant as other religious and nonreligious groups (Busch 1998; Eisenstein 2006). However, while the extent of intolerance does not seem to vary by religious group, perhaps the breadth of intolerance does, or at least CP intolerance seems to work against not only liberal and secular groups such as atheists, feminists, and homosexuals, but also some right‐wing groups such as militarists and racists. Generally CPs are not less tolerant of Jews, blacks, Asians, Catholics, Hispanics, or immigrants than other North Americans (Woodberry and Smith 1998).

Economic Outcomes The relationship between religion and economic uplift is complex. In Africa, Asia, and Latin American, both religiosity and Protestantism seems to foster economic uplift among the poor (Potter et al. 2014; Woodberry 2008; Woodberry et al. 2014). Attempts to isolate causality through natural experiments and randomized control trials also suggest an association between both religiosity and Protestant religious instruction and economic uplift (Bryan et al. 2018; Gruber and Hungerman 2008; Wydick et al. 2013). However, this positive association may operate primarily among the poor and middle class. Research in North America suggests that because CPs get married earlier and have children earlier, they take fewer financial risks, and thus are underrepresented among those with the highest incomes and greatest wealth (Keister 2008).

Conclusion Social scientists increasingly realize that religion is not disappearing with the advance of modernity. Nor will it be confined to a privatized existence without public influence. Traditional forms of religious belief and practice remain resilient, and new

240 Robert D. Woodberry, Christian Smith, and Chris Scheitle religions continue to emerge and spread with regularity. Religious factors have influenced and continue to influence many things social scientists care about. The field remains wide open for development in ways that will enhance our understanding of the world around us.

Note 1 In the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest of central Asia, Greek rulers like Menander became patrons of Buddhism; Kanishka  –  who convened the Fourth Buddhist Counsel – used the Greek alphabet; and the first images of the Buddha (second and third centuries CE) used Greek sculptural techniques.

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15 Medicine and Health William C. Cockerham

The study of medicine and health is among the largest and most theoretically active specialties in sociology. This could be considered surprising, given the field’s aberrant beginning. The classical theorists who founded sociology in the nineteenth century had ignored medicine and health altogether. Medicine was not an institution determining the basic characteristics of a society; moreover, its close relationship with biology was suspect because biological theories of behavior at the time were strongly condemned by sociologists such as Emile Durkheim (Fournier 2012). It was not until the late 1940s that “health” or “medical” sociology materialized in the United States and parts of Western Europe in direct response to government efforts to improve the health of its populations after World War II. Medical sociology is an example of how Western governments attempted to utilize the social sciences to help solve the problems of the welfare state in the post–World War II era. Although this seemed a good idea about how to use medical sociology, there was not much in medical sociology to use. The field barely existed. It was nurtured ­primarily by medicine, not sociology. A few studies on the patient–physician relationship and the social ecology of mental illness, along with early essays and books written about medical sociology, had been produced largely by physicians. This body of work had not provided the critical mass needed to establish a sociological subdiscipline (Bloom 2002). Nevertheless, public awareness that socially and economically disadvantaged people had shorter life spans and more health problems than their affluent counterparts, stimulated interest in the field as Western governments turned their attention from fighting a world war to rebuilding society. A field like medical sociology seemed to be a potentially promising ally. Postwar government and private foundation funding for research and job positions thus provided the catalyst for the emergence of a new sociological specialty intended to inform medical practice and

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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policy about relevant social issues and conditions. It was primarily through the ­stimulus of this external funding that sociologists and health professionals embraced medical sociology. At its inception, however, medical sociology lacked trained practitioners. Moreover, some participants were not even sociologists; they had changed their affiliations to secure positions in a new field with funding and interesting challenges (Claus 1982). Others were sociologists but virtually none of them had formal training in the study of health, illness, or the medical profession (Bloom 2002, p. 131). Much of the research in medical sociology at this time was atheoretical, focused mostly on patient care, and open to criticisms that it was limited as an academic and policy science by a subordinate relationship with medicine (Gold 1977). As will be seen in this chapter, however, this situation no longer exists since medical sociology today is nothing like what has just been described. The field today has a robust theoretical orientation, an extensive research ­literature on a variety of health‐related topics, and a demonstrated professional independence from medicine. Rather than subservience, medical sociologists in the United States made the medical profession itself an object of study, focusing objectively on its core relationships with patients and other health care providers, the organizational structure of health‐care delivery systems, medicalization, and other topics (Bloom 2002; Cockerham 2017). The medical profession’s efforts to maintain the fee‐for‐service system that discriminated against the poor, the weak professional sanctions for medical mistakes and malpractice, and opposition to national health insurance were all documented (Bosk 1979; Freidson 1970a, b, 1975; Starr 1982; Stevens 1971). Medical sociologists also brought their own topics to the study of health, such as social stress, health‐related lifestyles, social capital, and the social determinants of disease. This chapter will provide an overview of their work by reviewing medical sociology’s evolution from the past to the present with an emphasis on current directions in research.

Parsons and the Role of Theory A major factor in medical sociology’s evolution was the expanded utilization of sociological theory within an area of study initiated to produce knowledge that could be applied to solving health problems. The key figure in this development is Talcott Parsons, one of the twentieth century’s leading theorists. Theory is critical to any academic discipline because it provides a systematic framework for conceptualizing, analyzing, and verifying knowledge. It is the use of sociological theory that binds medical sociology to the larger discipline of sociology more than any other feature of sociological work. Whereas seminal sociological contributions in quantitative and qualitative research methods, along with many fundamental concepts of social behavior, have been adopted by several fields, sociological theory allows medical sociology to remain unique among the various health‐related disciplines (Cockerham and Scambler 2016). Medical sociology’s early deficit in theory was due to its origin in the late 1940s and 1950s in an intellectual climate far different from sociology’s traditional ­specialties. Funding agencies that provided the field with its early support were not

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interested in theoretical work and generally sponsored only research that had some practical utility for policy or clinical practice. Sociological specialties like theory, social stratification, urbanization, social change, and religion, in contrast, had direct roots in nineteenth‐century European social thought. Sociology’s early theorists had ignored medicine presumably because, as noted, it was not an institution structuring society like religion, the rise of cities and industry, the distribution of wealth and power, and patterns of class divisions. An exception is sometimes claimed for Emile Durkheim’s classic work Suicide ([1897] 1951) when it is cited as the first major work in the field. But this is perhaps reaching back too far, as there is no evidence that Durkheim saw any connection to something called “medical sociology.” Better candidates for the first major studies in medical sociology include the publication in 1957 of The Student Physician edited by Robert Merton, George Reader, and Patricia Kendall and the 1958 book Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study by August Hollingshead (a sociologist) and Frederick Redlich (a psychiatrist). Merton and his colleagues extended structural‐functionalist theory to the socialization of medical students, with Renée Fox’s paper on training for uncertainty ranking as a major contribution. The Hollingshead and Redlich study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, was a landmark investigation. It produced lasting and important evidence that social class position was correlated with different types of mental disorders and the way people received psychiatric care. The book remains the seminal study of the relationship between mental illness and social class. This study also played a key role in the debate during the 1960s leading to the establishment of community mental health centers in the United States. The critical event bringing sociological theory into medical sociology and deflecting its orientation from purely applied studies was the publication in 1951 of Parsons’s The Social System. Parsons had a long‐standing interest in medicine as seen in his training in psychoanalysis and as a student of Lawrence Henderson, a physician, who taught sociology at Harvard in the 1930s. Henderson espoused structural‐ functionalist theory and published a 1935 work on the patient–physician relationship as a social system (Bloom 2002). Parsons’s book, The Social System, written to explain a complex structural‐functionalist model of society, contained his concept of the sick role. Parsons was the leading figure in sociology at the time, and having a theorist of his stature provide a major theory to medical sociology called considerable attention to theoretical opportunities in the new field. Parsons may not have intended to have had such an important influence on medical sociology, but anything he published attracted interest among academic sociologists. Not only was his concept of the sick role a distinctly sociological analysis of sickness, but it was widely believed by many at the time that he was charting a future course for all of sociology through his theoretical approach. This did not happen because of subsequent criticisms by his detractors. Nevertheless, Parsons brought medical sociology intellectual recognition that it needed in its early development by endowing it with theory. Moreover, following Parsons, other leading sociologists of the day, such as Merton and Erving Goffman, published work in medical sociology that further promoted the academic legitimacy of the field. The merit of Parsons’s theory was that it described a patterned set of expectations explaining the norms, values, and roles appropriate for being sick for the ill person and others who interact with that person. Additionally, the concept was grounded in



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the theories of Durkheim on moral authority and Max Weber on social values, thereby linking it to classical sociological theory. The sick role concept stimulated considerable debate and research, and was ­criticized for not applying uniformly to all sick persons or all patient–physician relationships, and for being more applicable to communicable than chronic diseases and to the middle class rather than the lower class. But despite these criticisms, the theory has had lasting influence as an “ideal type” of sickness behavior that applies in many situations.

The Post‐Parsons Era (1952–1969) The next major area of research after Parsons introduced his sick role concept was medical education. First, Merton and his colleagues (1957) published their study of student physicians that was followed by Howard Becker and his associates, whose research was reported in Boys in White (1961). The latter was a study of medical school socialization conducted from a symbolic interactionist perspective that became a sociological classic. Becker and his research team spent one year at the University of Kansas Medical School and produced a detailed sociological account of their observations. Their book was important not only for its findings concerning medical training but also for its theoretical and methodological content. The techniques in participant observation used in this study, for example, provided a basis for the work on death and dying and subsequent innovations in theory and methods by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1965, 1967). With the introduction of symbolic interaction into a field that had been dominated for a short time by structural‐functionalism, medical sociology became a major arena of conflict and debate between two of sociology’s leading theoretical schools. This debate stimulated a virtual flood of publications in medical sociology in the 1960s. Also, the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) was formed in 1959 and grew to become one of the largest and most active ASA ­sections. American influence was also important in founding Research Committee 15 (Health Sociology) of the International Sociological Association in 1967 (Bloom 2002). The Medical Sociology Group of the British Sociological Association was organized in 1964 and became the largest specialty group in the BSA, with its own annual conference. In 1966 the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, founded in 1960, became an official ASA publication, making medical sociology one of the few sociological subdisciplines publishing its own journal under ASA auspices. In the meantime, in the United Kingdom, another journal, Social Science and Medicine, was founded in 1967. The growing literature in medical sociology also led to the publication of textbooks. The first textbook was Norman Hawkins’s Medical Sociology (1958), but the early leaders were the first editions of books by David Mechanic (1968) and Rodney Coe (1970). Howard Freeman, Sol Levine, and Leo Reeder likewise made an important contribution by publishing the Handbook of Medical Sociology (1963) that contained summary essays on major topics by leading medical sociologists. During the 1960s, the symbolic interactionist perspective temporarily dominated much of medical sociology’s literature. One feature of this domination was the

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numerous studies conducted with reference to labeling theory and the mental patient experience. Sociologists expanded their work on mental health to also include studies of stigma, stress, families coping with mental disorder, and other areas of practical and theoretical relevance. For example, Goffman’s Asylums (1961), a study of life in  a mental hospital, presented his concept of “total institutions” that stands as an  important concept about social life in an externally controlled environment. An abundant literature emerged at this time that established the sociology of mental disorder as a major subfield within medical sociology that eventually led to the formation of its own ASA section with its own journal, Mental Health and Society, appearing in 2011.

The Period of Maturity (1970–2000) Between 1970 and 2000 medical sociology emerged as a mature sociological subdiscipline. This period was marked by the publication of two especially important books, Eliot Freidson’s Professional Dominance (1970a) and Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982). Freidson formulated his influential “professional dominance” theory to account for an unprecedented level of professional control by physicians over health‐care delivery that was true at the time but no longer exists. Starr’s book won the Pulitzer Prize and countered Freidson’s thesis by examining the decline in status and professional power of the medical profession as large corporate health‐care delivery systems oriented toward profit effectively entered an unregulated medical market. Donald Light (1993) subsequently used the term countervailing power to show how the medical profession was but one of many powerful groups in society – including federal and state governments, employers, health insurance companies, patients, and pharmaceutical and other companies providing medical products – all maneuvering to fulfill its interests in health care. Another major work was Bryan Turner’s Body and Society (1984) that initiated the sociological debate on this topic. Theoretical developments concerning the sociological understanding of the control, use, and phenomenological experience of the body, including emotions, followed. Much of this work has been carried out in the United Kingdom and features social constructionism as its theoretical foundation. Social constructionism has its origins in the work of the French social theorist Michel Foucault and takes the view that knowledge about the body, health, and illness reflects subjective, historically specific human concerns and is subject to change and reinterpretation. Other areas in which British medical sociologists have excelled include studies of medical practice, emotions, and the experience of illness. Medical sociology also became a major sociological specialty in Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Israel, and began to emerge in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s after the collapse of communism. In the meantime, the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology was formed in 1983 that hosts a biannual conference for European medical sociologists. In Japan, the Japanese Society for Medical Sociology was established in 1974 and since 1990 has published an annual review of work in the field. Elsewhere in Asia, medical sociology is especially active in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, and India,



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and is beginning to appear in China. In Africa, medical sociology is in an early stage of development in many countries and currently strongest in South Africa (Amzat and Razum 2014). Medical sociology is also an important field in Latin America and because of its special Latin character many practitioners prefer to publish their work in books and journals in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile (Castro 2005). From the 1970s through the 1990s, medical sociology flourished as it attracted large numbers of practitioners in both academic and applied settings and its research literature literally exploded with publications. Major areas of investigation included stress, the medicalization of deviance, mental health, inequality and class differences in health, health‐care utilization, managed care and other organizational changes, AIDS, and women’s health and gender. Several books, edited collections of readings, and textbooks appeared. A new textbook was William Cockerham’s Medical Sociology that was first published in 1978 with its 14th edition appearing in 2017. Another major medical sociology journal, the Sociology of Health & Illness, was started in Britain in 1978, as was a new journal Health in 1999. However, the success of medical sociology also brought problems in the 1980s. Research funding opportunities lessened and the field faced serious competition for existing resources with health economics, health psychology, medical anthropology, health services research, and public health. These fields not only adopted sociological research methods in the forms of social surveys, participation observation, and focus groups, but some employed medical sociologists in large numbers. While these developments were positive in many ways, the distinctiveness of medical ­sociology as a unique subdiscipline was nevertheless challenged as other fields moved into similar areas of research. Furthermore, some of the medical sociology programs at leading American universities had declined or disappeared over time as practitioners retired or were hired away. Yet the overall situation for medical sociology was positive as the job market remained good, almost all graduate programs in sociology offered a specialization in medical sociology, and sociologists were on the faculties of most medical schools in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe (Bloom 2002). The 1990s saw medical sociology move closer to its parent discipline of sociology. This was seen in a number of areas with medical sociological work appearing more frequently in general sociology journals and the increasing application of sociological theory to the analysis of health problems. While medical sociology drew closer to sociology, sociology, in turn, moved closer to medical sociology as the field remains one of the largest sociological specialties.

The Present (2000–2020) The beginning of the twenty‐first century witnessed further developments as would be expected with the beginning of a new era. Postmodern theory faltered, while medicalization and various types of social determinants of health, such as health lifestyles, social capital, neighborhood disadvantage, social networks, and perceived discrimination emerged as important areas of research. The remainder of this chapter will discuss these current directions in medical sociology.

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Postmodern Theory Postmodern theory seemed to be a promising approach for explaining the social changes accompanying the new century. There is considerable disagreement about the nature and definition of postmodernism, but a common theme was the ­disintegration of modernity and its postindustrial social system leading to new social conditions. Postmodernism was generally ignored by sociologists until the mid‐1980s, when a few social scientists decided it was worthy of serious attention. Postmodernism emerged out of poststructuralism as a more inclusive critique of modern sociological theory and grand narratives making sweeping generalizations about society as a whole; it rejected notions of order and continuity with the past, calling for new concepts explaining the disruptions of late modern social change. Postmodern theory itself posited that there was no single coherent rationality and the framework for social life had become fragmented, diversified, and decentralized (Turner 1990). Its sociological relevance rested in its depiction of the destabilization of society and the requirement to adjust theory to new social realities. The advantage of postmodern theory is that modern society is undergoing a transition with social conditions different from the recent past (the latter part of the twentieth century) and the perspective provides a theoretical framework, despite its diffuse literature, for examining some of these changes. The theory reached its highest level of popularity in sociology during the early 1990s and momentarily seemed poised to have an important future. But this did not occur. Use of the theory abruptly declined in the late 1990s and a strong foothold in medical sociology has yet to be achieved in the twenty‐first century (Cockerham 2007). Why? Postmodern theory turned out to have a number of shortfalls, including its failure to explain social conditions after the rupture with modernity is complete, the lack of an adequate theory of agency, being too abstract and ambiguous, not providing clear conceptualizations, an inability to account for social causation, not having empirical confirmation, and invariably featuring an obtuse jargon that only its dedicated adherents found meaningful and others came to regard as nonsense (Cockerham 2007, 2013; Pescosolido and Rubin 2000; Ritzer and Stepinsky 2018). Its influence has waned considerably in recent years. At present, there is no dominant theoretical approach in medical sociology, nor has there been a leading theory since the early days of Parsons and structural‐­functionalism in the 1950s. Generally, the field has been and remains eclectic in its use of theory. Although certain theories and theorists have remained important (Durkheim, Weber), fallen into disfavor (structural‐functionalism, postmodernism), had limited impact (conflict theory, rational choice, feminist theory, critical realism), started to fade (classical Marxism), or become static (symbolic interaction, labeling theory), others are currently popular (fundamental cause, life course, social constructionism) or are rising (Bourdieu, health lifestyles). Some current theories are associated with substantive topics such as social capital, stress‐process, the life course, fundamental cause theory, health lifestyles, medicalization, and attribution. It is clear that for a theory to be a success in medical sociology, it must meet two obvious and fundamental questions: the theory must (i) relate to health matters and (ii) be applicable to the empirical world. That is, the theory must specify a connection to the realm of health and disease that has some practical relevance for understanding the effects of these biological



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phenomena on the human social condition or, conversely, the effects of social factors on these phenomena (Cockerham 2007).

Medicalization Medicalization was an earlier development that continued to gain influence in the twenty‐first century. Some medical sociologists expressed concern that the medical profession was taking responsibility for an increasingly greater proportion of deviant behaviors and bodily conditions by defining them as medical problems (Clarke et al. 2003; Conrad 2007). As Freidson (1970a) put it decades ago, medicine had established a jurisdiction over problems in living far wider than justified by its demonstrable capacity to “cure” those problems. Nevertheless, the medical profession has been successful in gaining authority to define aberrant behaviors and even naturally occurring physical conditions as illness, and thus problems best handled by physicians. We see this when hyperactivity at school by children is defined as attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and requires Ritalin; menopause is treated with estrogen replacement therapy, whose side effects were determined a few years later to promote even greater risk from blood clots, stroke, heart disease, and breast cancer; being short in stature necessitates growth hormones for the person afflicted with below‐average height; and male baldness is slowed or prevented by using Propecia and lost hair is restored by surgical transplants (Conrad 2007). There was a time when hyperactivity, menopause, shortness, and baldness were not medical conditions, but they are today. For some people, new medical treatments for previously untreated conditions were positive, such as the development of Viagra and similar drugs for erectile dysfunction. Success for some problems and hopeful expectations for others apparently stimulated an even greater expansion of the medicalization process. Whereas medicalization has traditionally been a means by which professional medicine acquired more problems to treat, Clarke et al. (2003) find that major technological and scientific advances in biomedicine are taking this capability even further and producing what she and her colleagues refer to as biomedicalization. Biomedicalization consists of the capability of computer information and new technologies to extend medical surveillance and treatment interventions well beyond past boundaries through the use of genetics, bioengineering, chemoprevention, individualized drugs, patient data banks, digitized patient records, and other innovations. Also important in this process is the internet, advertising, consumerism, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in marketing their products to doctors and patients alike. The increasing commercialization of health products and services in the expansion of the medical marketplace has been observed by other medical sociologists. Conrad (2007), for instance, argues that the forces pushing medicalization have changed, with biotechnology, consumers, and managed care now promoting the process. Conrad notes that biotechnology has long been associated with medicalization, with the pharmaceutical industry playing an increasingly central role; however, in the future the impact of genetics may be substantial. Managed care, in turn, has become the dominant form of health care delivery in the United States, which makes insurance companies as third‐party payers important in both enabling medicalization through their coverage of health services and placing limitations on those services.

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While medicalization is prevalent in the United States, observes Conrad, it is increasingly an international phenomenon with multinational drug companies leading the way in expanding its development. In the meantime, consumers have become major players in the health marketplace through their purchase of health insurance plans and health products. According to Conrad, consumer demand for these products fuels medicalization. “The Internet,” says Conrad (2007, p. 9), “has become an important consumer vehicle” as people search health‐related websites for medical information and products. Public and professional medical concern about medicalization may be growing, but the process it represents remains a powerful influence on behavior and an important area of study.

Health Lifestyles Health lifestyles have become a relatively new area of research, as the concept of what it means to be healthy has changed. Part of this change stems from the epidemiological transition in mortality from acute to chronic diseases that allow people to live longer but have their mortality more affected by their lifestyle. That is, what they eat and drink, whether they exercise or smoke, and the like can affect their health. In the distant past, a person was either healthy or unhealthy, and this situation was typically taken for granted. Now, with the increasing evidence that health‐related behavior either promotes longevity or causes mortality, health has come to be regarded as something a person needs to work on in order to achieve (Clarke et al. 2003). This means that individuals (not physicians) are ultimately responsible for their own health, and the best option they have is a health‐promoting lifestyle. Consequently, the study of health lifestyles is increasing in importance. Health lifestyles are collective patterns of health‐related behavior based on choices from options available to people according to their life chances (Cockerham 2005). A person’s life chances are largely determined by his or her class position that either enables or constrains health lifestyle choices. The behaviors that are generated from these choices can have either positive or negative consequences for body and mind, but nonetheless form an overall pattern of health practices that constitute a lifestyle. Health lifestyles include contact with medical professionals for checkups and preventive care, but the majority of activities take place outside the health‐care delivery system. These activities typically consist of choices and practices, influenced by the individual’s probabilities for realizing them, that range from brushing one’s teeth and using automobile seat belts to relaxing at health spas. For most people, health lifestyles involve decisions about food, exercise, relaxation, personal hygiene, risk of accidents, coping with stress, smoking, alcohol and drug use, as well as having medical checkups. Drawing on the work of Weber (1978) and Pierre Bourdieu (1984), Cockerham (2005, 2007, 2013) formulated an initial theory of health lifestyles that states (i) four categories of social structural variables, especially (a) class circumstances but also (b) age, gender, and race/ethnicity, (c) collectivities (i.e. families, groups, organizations), and (d) living conditions, provide the social context for (ii) socialization and experience that influence (iii) life choices (agency). These structural categories also collectively constitute (iv) life chances (structure). Choices and chances interact to commission the formation of dispositions to act (habitus) leading to (v) practices



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(action) involving (vi) alcohol use, smoking, diet, and other health‐related activities. Health practices constitute patterns of (vii) health lifestyles whose reenactment results in their reproduction (or modification) through feedback. Consistent with Weber’s thesis, this model views a person’s life chances as socially determined and an individual’s social structure as the arrangement of those chances. Choices and chances thus interact to determine a person’s health lifestyle, as life chances either enable or constrain the choices made. Overall, this theory is an initial representation of the health lifestyle phenomenon and is intended to display how social structures influence individual participation in such lifestyles.

Social Capital Another area of research experiencing considerable attention is concerned with social capital. Turner (2004, p. 13) defines social capital as “the social investments of individuals in society in terms of their membership in formal and informal groups, networks, and institutions.” He explains that the degree to which an individual is socially integrated in networks of family, neighborhood, community groups, churches and other places of worship, clubs, voluntary service organizations, and other social institutions provides an objective measure of that person’s social capital. Nan Lin (2001) depicted social capital as an investment in social relations that people can use as a buffer against stress and depression, while Bourdieu (1993) viewed it as a resource that people obtain through their memberships in social groups. Yet social capital is not just a property of individuals, it is also a characteristic of social networks from which individuals draw psychological and material benefits. According to Bourdieu (1993, p. 2), one can get an intuitive idea of social capital by saying that it is what ordinary language calls “connections.” People have connections to other people and groups and can draw on the resources they represent to help them be healthy. While Bourdieu emphasizes the resources of networks, Robert Putnam (2000) emphasizes the cohesion of networks. Putnam defines social capital as a community‐level resource reflected in social relationships involving not only networks but also norms and levels of trust. He maintains that the positive influences of social capital on health are derived from enhanced self‐esteem, sense of support, access to group and organizational resources, and its buffering qualities in stressful situations. Social connectedness, in Putnam’s view, is one of the most powerful determinants of health. After reviewing several studies, he found that people who are socially disconnected are between two to five times more likely to die from all causes when compared with similar individuals having close ties to family and friends. The importance of social capital in health outcomes is seen in studies showing that people embedded in supportive social relationships providing high levels of social capital have better health and longevity (Song 2013). However, findings on the relationship between social capital and health outcomes have not always been consistent and are affected by the difficulty in measuring a variable with multiple – individual, group, community, and so on – conceptual levels. But the concept has grown in popularity and is a promising area of research in medical sociology.

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Neighborhood Disadvantage And yet another new area of research emerging in medical sociology is that of “neighborhood disadvantage,” which focuses on unhealthy urban living conditions. Cities contain the best that human society has to offer in terms of jobs, arts, entertainment, and other forms of culture and amenities, but also include pockets of the worst social environments. Neighborhoods have resources needed to produce good health or, conversely, harm it. Examples of neighborhood characteristics that can be either health‐promoting or health‐damaging are found in the work of Macintyre and her colleagues (2002) in the west of Scotland. They determined there are five features of neighborhoods that can affect health: 1. Physical environment 2. Surroundings at home, work, and play 3. Services provided to support people (e.g., schools, street cleaning and garbage pickup, police, hospitals, and health and welfare services) 4. Socio‐cultural aspects of the neighborhood (e.g., its norms and values, economic, political, and religious features, level of civility and public safety, and networks of support) 5. Reputation of an area that signifies its esteem, quality of material infrastructure, level of morale, and how it is perceived by residents and nonresidents Ross (2000) observes that neighborhoods can be rated on a continuum in terms of order and disorder that are visible to its residents. Orderly neighborhoods are clean and safe, houses and buildings are well maintained, and residents are respectful of each other and each other’s property. Disorderly neighborhoods reflect a breakdown in social order, as there is noise, litter, poorly maintained houses and buildings, vandalism, graffiti, fear, and crime. Many families with children in such neighborhoods are single‐parent families headed by females. Ross asked whether people who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods suffer psychologically as a result of their environment and found the answer to be yes. Several studies find that the structural effects of neighborhoods promote ill health through long‐term exposure to stress, depression, and unhealthy lifestyles and living conditions (Hill et al. 2005; Walton 2014; Wen and Christakis 2006). Conversely, residents of affluent neighborhoods rate their health significantly better than people in disadvantaged neighborhoods (Browning and Cagney 2002). This is not surprising because these neighborhoods have healthier living conditions and significantly better access to quality health care. Research on this topic illustrates the effects of the structural characteristics of neighborhoods on the physical and mental health of the people who live in them.

Socioeconomic Status as a Fundamental Cause of Sickness and Mortality Studies of neighborhood disadvantage join with other research on the powerful effects of social class on health to illustrate the importance of social structural factors in disease causation. The enduring association of low socioeconomic status (SES)



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with illness, disability, and death has led Link and Phelan (Link and Phelan 1995, 2000; Phelan and Link 2013; Phelan et al. 2004) to propose that SES is a “fundamental cause” of mortality. This is an important proposition because most researchers in the past viewed SES as a factor contributing to poor health and mortality, not as a direct cause. However, the persistent association of SES with a variety of disease patterns during changing historical periods increasingly identified SES as having a causal role. In order for a social variable to qualify as a cause of mortality, Link and Phelan (1995, p. 87) hypothesize that it must: (i) influence multiple diseases, (ii) affect these diseases through multiple pathways of risks, (iii) be reproduced over time, and (iv) involve access to resources that can be used to avoid risks or minimize the consequences of disease if it occurs. SES or social class meets all four of these criteria because a person’s class position influences multiple diseases in multiple ways, the association has endured for ­centuries, and higher SES persons have the resources to better avoid health problems or minimize them when they occur. Consequently, the degree of socioeconomic resources a person has or does not have, such as money, knowledge, status, power, and social connections, either protects health or causes premature mortality. According to Phelan and Link (2013), these resources directly shape individual health behaviors by influencing whether people know about, have access to, can afford and are motivated to engage in health‐enhancing behaviors. In addition, such resources shape access to neighborhoods, occupations, and social networks that vary dramatically in relation to risk and protective factors. Furthermore, living in a social context where neighbors, friends, family members, and co‐workers generally look forward to a long and healthy life contributes to an individual’s motivation to engage in health‐enhancing behaviors. In short, Phelan and her associates conclude that there is a long and detailed list of mechanisms linking SES with mortality. Included is a sense of personal “control” over one’s life because people with such control typically feel good about themselves, handle stress better, and have the capability and living situations to adopt healthy lifestyles. This situation may especially apply to people in powerful social positions. “Social power,” states Link and Phelan (2000, p. 37), “allows one to feel in control, and feeling in control provides a sense of security and well being that is health‐­promoting.” Persons at the bottom of society are less able to control their lives, have fewer resources to cope with stress, live in more unhealthy situations, face powerful constraints in choosing a healthy way of life, and die earlier from diseases whose onset could have been p ­ revented or delayed until old age (Phelan and Link 2013; Phelan et al. 2004). Given that the profile of socioeconomic inequalities in sickness and mortality over the course of the twentieth century has been virtually unchanged, class has emerged has a leading causal factor in relation to poor health. This is particularly evident when social gradients in mortality universally display a hierarchical gradient from low to high in death rates along class lines. The enduring outcome of good health at the top of society and worse health in descending order toward the bottom marks class as a fundamental social cause of health, disease, and death (Cockerham 2013). Widespread recognition of the causal properties of social ­variables in health has been slow in coming, but there is growing evidence that this is indeed the case.

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Social Networks There is also evidence that social networks influence an individual’s health. A social network refers to the social relationships a person has that routinely involve the exchange of opinion, information, and affection. Typically, a social network is composed of family, relatives, friends, and co‐workers that comprise the individual’s immediate social world, although the concept of a social network can be expanded to include increasingly larger units of society. The influence of the social network on health can be either good or bad, depending on the network’s norms, habits, values, and cultural background. That is, social networks can be protective toward an individual’s health or, conversely, influence individuals to engage in risk behavior. Social networks typically advise, influence, or coerce an individual into taking or not taking courses of action. This is seen in studies of obesity and smoking by Christakis and Fowler (2007, 2008) based on data from the Framingham Heart Study. They found that obese people were highly likely to have social networks of family and friends who were similarly obese people with shared outlooks. Smokers likewise socialized within groups of interconnected people who similarly smoked. Individuals who stopped smoking successfully were embedded in social networks that stopped smoking together. Those who still smoked and remained in the network were more likely to be at the periphery of the group, rather than the center. The findings suggested that decisions to cease smoking were not made solely by isolated individuals but reflected collective choices made by groups of people connected to each other.

Perceived Discrimination Research on perceived discrimination refers to the effects of discrimination on the health of individuals who experience it. Most often, the form of discrimination researched by medical sociologists is racial, but it can include other types of discrimination, such as age, gender, nationality, and the like. There is growing ­evidence that levels of discrimination are associated with a number of negative health  outcomes, including increased hypertension and heart disease, poor self‐ reported health, and other chronic health conditions (Sims et al. 2012; Williams and Mohammed 2009, 2013). These adverse outcomes have been attributed to two types of mechanisms. The first is chronically elevated stress (i.e. allostatic load) stemming from long‐term exposure to discrimination, which compromises the ability of the body to fight disease. The second is the reduced ability of individuals who experience discrimination to engage with institutions that provide health resources and utilize these resources to protect and improve their own health and that of their family members. People who report discrimination in health care are more likely to postpone medical tests and treatment, underutilize health services, and forgo preventive care and health screenings (Trivedi and Ayanian 2006). They have higher levels of medical mistrust, are less likely to follow physicians’ recommendations, and report poorer communication with healthcare providers and less satisfaction with care. Findings relying on measures beyond patient reports, such as chart reviews, administrative data, and clinical vignettes, generally corroborate that the quality of care delivered to patients



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from minority and underrepresented groups tends to be lower, regardless of the measure used, the setting in which care takes place, or the patient’s health, insurance status, and socioeconomic background (Trivedi and Ayanian 2006). Perceived discrimination is an under‐researched area that is attracting attention from investigators trying to reach a deeper understanding of the causes of health disparities.

Life‐Course Theory Finally, life‐course theory is an additional sociological perspective often utilized in medical sociology. There is no single definitive work on life‐course theory, but generally the theory advances the proposition that people go through a sequence of age‐ based stages (middle age, old age, etc.) and social roles (child, student, worker, parent, etc.) within specific social structures or classes over the course of their lives (Mortimer and Shanahan 2003). Socioeconomic disadvantages originating in childhood accumulate over the life course to disadvantage health in old age, whereas socioeconomic advantages over a person’s lifetime result in relatively good health when elderly. Life‐course theory considers both the early origins of diseases whose symptoms are not obvious until later in life and the social processes that promote susceptibility to illness or avoidance of such afflictions. This approach helps explain why the affluent live longer and the less affluent die sooner. Life‐course theory takes the social and material environment, income inequality, stress, nutrition, lifestyles, gene–­ environment interaction, public safety, and various other factors into account as flexible pathways determining health outcomes for different social classes over time.

Future Directions Current studies of the relationship between health and medicalization, and various social determinants of health such as health lifestyles, social capital, neighborhood disadvantage, social networks, and discrimination, along with the increasing evidence of SES as a fundamental cause of disease, are all part of the growing focus on the role of structure in health matters. This does not mean that micro‐level methods and agent‐oriented theories like symbolic interaction are obsolete. To the contrary, qualitative research provides some of the most insightful data available on social relationships. However, sociology, from its inception, has been oriented toward investigating the effects of structures – such as groups, communities, classes, institutions, or societies  –  on human social behavior. The ultimate goal of medical sociology, as with all of sociology, is an accurate assessment of social life at all levels, which is only possible by fully accounting for the effects of structure on individuals and their health. Recent developments in statistics currently make it possible to more accurately measure the effects of structure and assess its causal qualities. Hierarchical linear models now exist that provide efficient estimations for a wider range of applications than previously possible. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) makes it feasible to test hypotheses about relationships occurring at different social levels and assess the amount of variation explained at each level (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002). Briefly

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stated, HLM tests the strength of the interaction between variables that describe individuals at level one, structural entities like households or families at level two, and sequentially higher levels such as communities, social classes, and nations, depending on the variable’s conceptual position in a structural hierarchy. By comparing changes in the regression equations, the relative effects of each level of variables on health outcomes can be simultaneously determined. What this forecasts is an emphasis on more fully investigating the effects of structural conditions on health, which is increasingly appearing in medical sociology as the next methodological focus for the field. It is apparent that society can make one sick, and the ways in which it does this require analyses of the social processes that produce health disparities.

Conclusion Ultimately, what allows medical sociology to retain its unique character is (i) its utilization and mastery of sociological theory in the study of health and (ii) the sociological perspective that accounts for collective causes and outcomes of health problems and issues. No other field is able to bring these skills to health‐related research and analysis. Today, it can be said that medical sociology produces literature intended to inform medicine and policy‐makers, but research in the field is also grounded in examining health‐related situations that inform sociology. Health sociology no longer functions as a field whose ties to the mother discipline are lax, nor has it evolved as an enterprise subject to medical control. It now works most often with medicine in the form of a partnership and, in some cases, an objective critic. Moreover, medical sociology owes more to medicine than sociology for its origin and initial financial support, so the relationship that has evolved is essentially ­supportive. As medical sociology continues its present course, it is emerging as one of sociology’s core specialties, as the pursuit of health is an important feature of everyday social life.

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Christakis, N.A. and Fowler, J.H. (2007). The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. New England Journal of Medicine 357: 370–379. Christakis, N.A. and Fowler, J.H. (2008). The collective dynamics of smoking in a large social network. New England Journal of Medicine 358: 2249–2258. Clarke, A.E., Shim, J.K., Mamo, L. et al. (2003). Biomedicalization: technoscientific transformation of health, illness, and U. S. biomedicine. American Sociological Review 68: 161–194. Claus, L. (1982). The Growth of a Sociological Discipline: On the Development of Medical Sociology in Europe, vol. I and II. Leuven, Belgium: Katholieke Universiteit. Cockerham, W.C. (2005). Health lifestyle theory and the convergence of agency and structure. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46: 51–67. Cockerham, W.C. (2007). A note on the fate of postmodern theory and its failure to meet the basic requirements for success in medical sociology. Social Theory and Health 5: 285–296. Cockerham, W.C. (2013). Social Causes of Health and Disease, 2e. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Cockerham, W.C. (2017). Medical Sociology, 14e. New York: Routledge. Cockerham, W.C. and Scambler, G. (2016). Medical sociology and sociological theory. In: The New Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology (ed. W. Cockerham), 3–26. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Coe, R. (1970). Sociology of Medicine. New York: McGraw‐Hill. Conrad, P. (2007). The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions Into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fournier, M. (2012). Emile Durkheim: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Freidson, E. (1970a). Professional Dominance. New York: Dodd & Mead. Freidson, E. (1970b). Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge. Chicago: Aldine. Freidson, E. (1975). Doctoring Together. New York: Elsevier‐North Holland. Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.M. (1965). Awareness of Dying. New York: Dodd, Mead. Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.M. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. New York: Anchor. Gold, M. (1977). A crisis of identity: the case of medical sociology. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 18: 160–168. Hawkins, N. (1958). Medical Sociology. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Hill, T.D., Ross, C.E., and Angel, R.J. (2005). Neighborhood disorder, psychophysiological distress, and health. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46: 170–186. Hollingshead, A.B. and Redlich, F.C. (1958). Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study. New York: Wiley. Light, D. (1993). Countervailing power: the changing character of the medical profession in the United States. In: The Changing Medical Profession: An International Perspective (ed. F. Hafferty and J. McKinley), 69–79. New York: Oxford University Press. Lin, N. (2001). Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Link, B.G. and Phelan, J. (1995). Social conditions as fundamental causes of disease. Journal of Health and Social Behavior (Extra Issue) 80–94. Link, B.G. and Phelan, J. (2000). Evaluating the fundamental cause explanation for social ­disparities in health. In: Handbook of Medical Sociology, 5e (ed. C. Bird, P. Conrad and A. Fremont), 33–47. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall. Macintyre, S., Ellaway, A., and Steven Cummins, S. (2002). Place effects on health: how can we conceptualise, operationalise, and measure them? Social Science and Medicine 60: 313–317.

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16 Urbanization Kevin Fox Gotham and Arianna J. King

Urbanization refers to the physical, demographic, and economic growth of cities. The term also implies the concentration of people and social activities into settlement patterns characterized by high‐density land development. Urbanization results in part from population increase, due to both natural causes and immigration, as well as economic, social, and technological changes that spur people to move to areas of job growth and expanded opportunities. Generally, market forces and government policies drive urbanization processes and associated changes in livelihoods, land use, health, and natural resources management including water, soil, minerals, and ­forests. Employer location decisions, transformations in urban agriculture and production systems, and government development policies and budget allocations can encourage urban in‐migration and concentrate socioeconomic activities in cities. A fundamental source of potential confusion in the study of urbanization and city growth is the conceptualization and measurement of “urban” itself. There are no clear answers to what defines an urban area. In the United States, government agencies have been central in defining cities, city boundaries, and urbanization trends. In 1910, the Census Bureau devised the term metropolitan district to describe and measure urban growth occurring beyond the city. As originally defined, a metropolitan district consisted of a central city with a population of at least 200 000, plus adjacent townships with a density of at least 150 persons per square mile. As the US population continued to grow outside central cities and economic relations increasingly shifted over established administrative boundaries, the idea of a metropolitan district became less useful. In 1949, the Census Bureau introduced a new measure, the standard ­metropolitan statistical area (SMSA), consisting of the whole county containing a city of at least 50 000 plus surrounding counties that had a high degree of economic and social integration with the population nucleus (Bogue 1953).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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By the 1970s, the US federal government had formulated three types of ­ etropolitan area to measure urbanization trends and processes. Metropolitan m Statistical Areas (MSAs) are metropolitan areas with populations of less than 1 million, regardless of the number of counties they may contain. If the metropolitan area exceeds 1 million, it is designated a Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA). Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas (PMSAs) are multi‐centered constellations of CMSAs that spread across hundreds of square miles. These new designations suggest a fundamental transformation of cities from a dense, bounded, single‐core city to extended multinucleated urban regions containing many centers of work, residence, and shopping encompassing an enormous population and crossing multiple administrative boundaries. Urbanization is increasing in both developed and developing countries. In the United States, for example, about 80% of the nation’s population lives in metropolitan areas. From 1945 to 2002, urban land area in the United States increased from around 15 million acres to roughly 60 million acres, almost twice the rate of US population growth. Urban growth during just the last 10 years of this period was 7.8 million acres, or 13% (Brown et al. 2005). Yet urbanization trends are slower in the United States than in the developing world. Rapid urbanization, particularly the growth of large cities, poses a formidable sustainability challenge in developing countries. In many developing cities, urbanization is associated with the problems of chronic unemployment, intense poverty, poor access to quality health care, poor sanitation, urban slums, and environmental degradation. In 2008, the United Nations announced that 50% of the world’s population now live in urban areas, a milestone in human history since human societies and communities have in the past been rural‐based. The UN projects that the world’s urban population will grow by 1.8% per year and by 2.3% per year in developing countries from 2007 to 2025. By 2020, the world’s rural population will cease growing altogether and begin to decline (United Nations Population Division 2009). In part, the world’s urban population will continue to increase because towns and villages not considered urban today will grow over time. Importantly, researchers and scholars expect migration to urban areas to increase as people migrate to areas of job growth, and prospects for higher income and higher standards of living. In addition, one of the most important features of rapid urbanization is the massive population growth and development in coastal cities. Globally, more than 1 billion of the world’s population live within 100 km of the coast and current trends suggest that roughly half of the world’s population will do so by 2030 (Cohen 2003). The implications of urbanization are broad and span the natural, physical, and social sciences. While scholars recognize that urbanization is a global trend, they disagree over the causes and impacts of urbanization, the development trajectories of urbanization, and the implications of urbanization for environmental sustainability.

Theories of Urbanization The study of cities and urbanization has a rich tradition in the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences. To Lewis Mumford, the city is “primarily a storehouse, a conservator and accumulator” (1961, p. 97) of culture and human creativity. Diverse

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groups and organizations, along with a heterogeneity of abstract designs, scripts, and verbal signs contribute to the notion of the city as a container of human culture and a magnet for attracting people and ideas. One important concern in Mumford’s work was to understand the reflexive relationship between cemeteries and cultural creation. The “necropolis,” the “city of the dead,” Mumford argued, “is the forerunner, almost to the core, of every living city” (1961, p. 7). Every culture’s respect for the dead is a cultural expression of the human desire for a “fixed meeting place and eventually a continuous settlement” (1961, pp. 6–7). Cemeteries, sacred caves, and shrines gave people their first conception of architectural space and their first glimpse of the power of a territory and space to intensify spiritual receptivity and emotional exaltation, a view closely shared by sociologist Emile Durkheim in his studies of the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. More broadly, Mumford’s insight on the evolution of cities drew attention to the formative role of cemeteries and other sacred places in the development of Western culture. As he put it, “in the earliest gathering about a grave or a painted symbol, a great stone or sacred grove, one has the beginning of a succession of civic institutions that range from the temple to the astronomical observatory, from the theatre to the university” (1961, p. 9). Modern theories of urbanization emerged in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the industrial revolution transformed working, settlement, and lifestyle patterns throughout the continent. As hundreds of thousands of agrarian peasants and serfs left the countryside and flocked to work in the urban factories, a new breed of social observers sought to analyze the altered forms of social organization. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described the contrasting elements of urban and rural life. His concept of Gemeinschaft (community) characterized the small country village and its surrounding area in which people – united by close ties of family and neighborhood – shared similar traditional values and worked together for the common good. In contrast to this “we‐ness,” Gesellschaft (association or society) denoted the “me‐ness” found in the city, where a future‐looking orientation among a heterogeneous population replaced tradition, leading Tönnies to a pessimistic view of the city as characterized by atomized disunity, rampant individualism, and selfishness. Other Europeans such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel devoted much thought to the importance of the city, for example, as a seat of the emerging capitalist economy, a site of political and economic power, and a force of cultural change that affects mental life. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were among the first to describe the excesses of industrialization and the appalling lifestyle of exploited urban workers. Marx and Engels depicted the modern metropolis as expressing most vividly the peculiarities of capitalism including, for example, the antithesis between wage labor and capital, the valorization/realization of exchange‐ value, and the proletarianization of the populace. For Max Weber (1958), the European medieval city and its institutions were crucial links in the development of economic rationality and modern capitalism. The city, as Weber notes, expresses in concentrated form the peculiarities of formal rationality including the emphasis on calculation, efficiency, and predictability in the conduct of social relations and activity. In his famous essay, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” Georg Simmel (1950 [1903]) drew attention to the intensity of nervous stimuli and the pervasiveness of money relations in forming an urban personality that is reserved, detached, and

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blasé. In other general writings, Simmel attempted to move theorizing away from viewing cities as containers or contexts of action to examining cities as forms and products of meaningful sociation. In the beginning of the twentieth century, in United States, the Chicago School urban sociologists focused their empirical attention on the spatial distribution of people and organizations, the causes and consequences of neighborhood racial succession, and ethnic and racial group adaptation to the urban environment. Robert Park, Ernst Burgess, Lewis Wirth, all commented on the impact of the immense size, density, and diversity of cities on society. From their writings emerged a theory of urbanization as following a series of evolutionary stages based on changes in population, organization, environment, and technology. Ernest Burgess presented a map of Chicago (1925), known as the “concentric zone model,” which offered insight into the socio‐spatial relationships of citizens from the center to the periphery. By the 1930s, social scientists around the nation were employing the insights and models developed by Chicago School scholar to examine urbanization and identify the processes of urban growth and development. Burgess’s model depicted urban land use in concentric rings – the central business district (or CBD) was in the middle of the model, and the city expanded in rings with different land uses. In 1939, Homer Hoyt developed the sector model showing zones expanding outward from the city center along railroads, highways, and other transportation arteries. Later, in 1945, Chancy Harris and Edward Ullman put forward the multiple nuclei model which posited that urbanization can occur without a clear CBD. In this model, the number and kinds of nuclei characterize a city’s urbanization pattern. In the 1970s, several Marxian social scientists, including Manuel Castells (1977), David Harvey (1973), and Henri Lefebvre (1991, 2003 [1970]), popularized the concept of uneven development to direct theoretical and analytical attention to the impact of the political economy on urbanization trends. Uneven development refers to the inequitable spatial distribution of wealth and/or economic growth within a city or metropolitan area. The term also refers to the simultaneous occurrence of economic and wealth expansion in one area accompanied by disinvestment and/or expanding poverty in another area. Castells proposed that urban scholars focus on the collective consumption characteristic of urbanized nations and the way in which political and economic conflicts within cities generate urban social movements for change. David Harvey, in contrast, argued that the central issue in understanding urbanization was not collective consumption but the more basic Marxist concern with capital accumulation. Influenced by Lefebvre, Harvey (1973) argued that investment in land and real estate is an important means of accumulating wealth and a crucial activity that pushes the growth of cities in specific ways. Urbanization and related processes reflect the continuous reshaping of the built environment to create a more efficient arena for profit making. For Lefebvre (1991), urbanization reflects a basic conflict and struggle between abstract space and social space. “Abstract space” is constituted by the intersection of knowledge and power. It is the use of space by capitalists and technocratic state actors who are interested in the abstract qualities of space, including size, width, area, location, and profit. Abstract space is characterized by both fragmentation and homogenization of space, and both processes are the result of the commodification

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of space. In contrast, “social space” is the location of everyday lived experience, an environment as a place to live and to call home. For Lefebvre, the uses proposed by government and business for abstract space, such as planning a new highway or redeveloping older areas of the city, often conflict with existing social space, especially the way residents think about and use space. This conflict between abstract and social space is a basic one in modern society, according to Lefebvre, and involves spatial practices (externalized, material environments), representations of space (conceptual models used to direct social practice and land‐use planning), and spaces of representation (the lived social relation of users to the built environment) (1991, pp. 33, 38–39). Lefebvre maintains that space is not a mere container, but rather, a medium through which society both enacts its social stratifications, as well as develops the strategies to cope with them. According to Harvey (1973), powerful real estate actors invest, disinvest, and reshape land uses in a process of “creative destruction” that is continually accelerating, destroying communities and producing intense social conflicts and struggles over meanings and uses of urban space. Despite their different emphases, the work  of Castells, Harvey, and Lefebvre helped focus scholarly attention on the capitalist system of for‐profit production generally, and class struggle and capital accumulation specifically, as analytical starting points for understanding the nature of urbanization. By the late 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, a new critical approach to the study of cities and urbanization had developed in Europe and the United States. Usually called the critical political economy or socio‐spatial approach, this perspective emphasized several major dimensions of cities: (i) the importance of class and racial domination (and, more recently, gender) in shaping urbanization; (ii) the primary role of powerful economic actors, especially those in the real estate industry, in building and redeveloping cities; (iii) the role of growth‐assisted government actors in urban development; (iv) the importance of symbols, meanings, and culture to the shaping of cities; (v) attention to the global context of urbanization (for overviews see Gottdiener and Feagin 1988; Feagin 1998). Gottdiener (1994) prefers the term sociospatial perspective to describe the critical political economy paradigm, a term that accents the society/space synergy, and emphasizes that cities are multifaceted expressions of local actions and macrostructural processes. Influenced by the critical political economy paradigm, John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987) have developed their own growth machine theory to explain urbanization. The growth machine approach argues that a powerful political coalition made up of an array of real estate and banking interests dominates and controls the urban redevelopment process. The desire for “growth” creates a consensus among a wide array of actors and elite groups, no matter how divided they may be on a specific issue or policy. Proponents of the growth machine approach suggest that growth coalitions are prevalent throughout local government because (i) city leaders seek to sustain growth to maintain governmental services and fiscal health, and (ii) local businesses become involved in local policies to maintain and increase their profitability by influencing and shaping the city’s regulation of land use, tax and employment policy, and provision of services. The formation of coalitions in pursuit of growth permeates all facets of the urbanization process, including the political system, as well as local utility companies, unions, media, and cultural institutions

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such as professional sports teams, theaters, symphony orchestras, and universities. (For an overview, see Jonas and Wilson 1999).

Urbanization and Suburbanization One major point of debate in urban scholarship focuses on issues of conceptualization and addresses questions about when, where, why, and how urbanization developed. Early work by Childe (1950) located the beginnings of urbanization in early communities in Mesopotamia. The first cities were dense human agglomerations with up to 20 000 residents and dominated by the production of an agricultural surplus. A surplus of food and resources generated several other changes including the establishment of specialized groups including craftsmen, transport workers, merchants, officials, and priests. Over time, a system of taxation developed to support government activity, raise money for public works and standing armies, regulate marketplaces, and define a system of cultural relations. The production of an agricultural surplus created problems over the allocation and control of wealth, leading to the emergence of social stratification. Priests, military leaders, and other elites formed a “ruling class” who exempted themselves from physical labor and pursued “intellectual tasks.” To control and regulate the growth of surplus, the ruling classes invented systems of recording, numerical calculation, and writing. In addition, Childe’s thesis suggests that the first cities were the birthplaces of modern science as the invention of writing allowed early clerks, bureaucrats, and political officers to develop rational systems of knowledge to control investment. The concentration of surplus also provided a cultural foundation for artists and craftspeople to cultivate sophisticated styles and traditions, a development that led to the specialization of art and culture. Finally, for Childe, the rise of the first cities helped encourage and expand trade, a development that transformed relatively culturally homogeneous and isolated towns into cosmopolitan metropolises. As different kinds of people came into contact with one another, the increasing frequency of contact catalyzed the growth of new forms of cultural exchange and reciprocity. This is echoed in the work of Redfield and Singer (1954) in their proposed continuum spanning from the folk society to the city and in their definition of the processes of primary and secondary urbanization. The Industrial Revolution transformed Europe, generating rapid urban growth, destabilizing agrarian economies and setting in motion major social and spatial changes. The economy, physical form, and culture of cities changed dramatically as feudal power broke down and trade and travel increased. The increasing size, density, and diversity of cities, combined with the growth of commerce, made urban life more rational, anonymous, and depersonalized. During the nineteenth century, London’s population grew to 6 million, making it then the largest city ever known, and confounding all notions that there was a natural upper limit to the size of even the richest cities. In the United States, industrialization not only brought about a fundamental transformation in the nature of work, but also in systems of transportation, the structure and operations of city government, the experience of poverty, and the demographic movement of racial and ethnic groups on an unprecedented scale. In the first half of the twentieth century, the fastest urban growth around the

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world was in Europe and the United States. New York, London, and other First World capitals were magnets for immigration and job opportunity. In 1950, New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris boasted of having the world’s largest metropolitan populations. In the United States, during the early period of industrial expansion and national growth, the pace of urbanization accelerated to a mid‐nineteenth‐century peak. By the late nineteenth century, urban, rural, and national growth rates had stabilized. Cyclical downturns reduced the tempo to zero in the decades 1810–1820 and 1830– 1840 and halved it in the period 1870–1880, but in each case these perturbations were followed by post‐recession recoveries under still‐urbanizing conditions (Berry 1980). By the 1920s, however, the population of US central cities essentially stopped growing and the collapse of the economy during the Great Depression spotlighted a  series of intense social problems facing cities, including increasing physical ­deterioration of core neighborhoods and commercial districts, forced concentration of inner‐city blacks into crowded areas, and loss of industry (Gotham 2001). In the 1930s and later, US cities began to experience population and industrial deconcentration as people, industries, and jobs moved away from cities toward the suburbs, a process that accelerated after World War II. The main factor pulling people out of central cities was a series of federal housing policies passed during the 1930s and later that provided mortgage insurance guarantees to encourage banks to make loans for single‐family homes for middle‐income people. Federal housing policies transformed the home‐building and loan‐lending industries by promoting economies of scale through suburban housing construction, a development related to federal efforts to promote suburbanization (Gotham 2014 [2002]). The federal government’s home‐building subsidies, underwriting standards, and land‐planning policies encouraged large builders to expand their scope of operations and market share by enhancing the financial feasibility of single‐family homes. Community developers and large builders whose housing plans conformed to federal standards were able to get a government‐insured mortgage for all homes they built (Weiss 1987). Once the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) subsidy was obtained, builders rapidly increased the size of their operations, producing a high volume of quality, moderately priced dwellings in suburban areas. In Long Island, New York, the William Levitt and Son Company was able to get federal subsidies to finance 4000 houses before clearing the land to build Levittown (Checkoway 1984, pp. 158–159). Overall, the level of suburban housing production rose significantly after World War II, from 209 000 units in 1945, to more than 1 million units by the end of the decade, to as many as 2 379 000 units by the early 1970s. On an annual basis, production levels during the 1950s, 1960s, and the early 1970s were equally impressive, remaining above 7 dwelling units per 1000 population during these years, reaching a peak of 11.4 in 1972 (Rowe 1995, p. 184). In Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, Gotham (2014 [2002]) draws attention to the central impact of real estate activities and federal housing policies on  the pace and development of urbanization and suburbanization during the ­twentieth century. Racially discriminatory government actions and real estate practices ­promulgated racial residential segregation that contributed to racialized urban development. The FHA, for example, recommended that private banks only make loans in racially homogeneous areas, thus severely limiting the housing opportunities

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of blacks, other minorities, and the poor. These segregative practices served to exacerbate existing racial and class polarization in cities and metropolitan areas, and contributed to disinvestment in many inner‐city neighborhoods, through restrictive covenants and bank redlining (e.g. the refusal of banks to loan money in certain urban neighborhoods because of the racial composition of these areas). The totality of these events dramatically heightened inter‐racial animosity in the 1960s, especially in the industrial North. Violent demonstrations in many cities accelerated central‐city white flight during the next decade (Harris and Wilkins 1988). By the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of middle‐class jobs had also left for suburban areas thereby exacerbating class and racial inequalities within and across US metropolitan areas. Since the 1960s, urban areas in the United States have been subjected to a series of unprecedented socio‐spatial changes, including a decrease of population and employment in the “rustbelt,” gentrification and redevelopment of the inner core of some older metropolitan areas, an increase in minority populations in central cities, rapid growth of “edge cities” on the metropolitan fringe, and the economic decline of older suburban communities. Moreover, urban politics has moved away from the days of generous federal funding through fiscal austerity to the present period of limited resources, federal retrenchment, privatization of services, and combined public/private partnerships in pursuit of growth. Since 1970, employers and firms have been creating more jobs in the suburbs than in the central cities, and employment growth has been greater for the areas outside central cities than for the inner cities in metropolitan areas. Detroit lost 800 000 people between 1950 and 1996, and its population declined by 33.9% between 1970 and 1996. Midwestern cities were particularly hard‐hit by the twin problems of population decline and deindustrialization. St. Louis, for instance, lost more than half its population in the same period, as  did Pittsburgh. Cleveland precipitously declined, as did Buffalo, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and many other large US cities. After shedding residents for decades, many US cities revived in the 1990s, with population trends stabilizing due to immigration and revitalization of downtown cores. By the 2000s, however, US Census Bureau figures revealed that suburbs had eclipsed central cities as the main locus of population growth. The collapse of the high‐tech industry, eroding wealth and income, and the lack of urban job growth, combined with more affordable suburban housing and employment opportunities, attracted tens of thousands of foreign‐born residents and others to the suburbs during the 2000s. Among the nation’s 251 cities with at least 100 000 people, 68 lost population between 2000 and 2004. As Frey et  al. (2009) have found, racial and ethnic minorities are driving the nation’s population growth and increasing diversity among its younger residents. In addition, the US exhibits wide regional and racial/ ethnic disparities. While 56% and 38% of Asian and white adults, respectively, held post‐secondary degrees in 2007, only 25% and 18% of blacks and Hispanics did so. These deep divides by race and ethnicity coincide with growing disparities across metropolitan areas owing to economic and demographic change. Both urban and suburban poverty rates rose during the 2000s. Today, working‐age Americans account for a larger share of the poor than at any other point in the last 30 years. The number of suburban poor surpassed the number of central‐city poor during this decade, and now outnumber them by more than 1.5 million. Yet even as poverty

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spreads throughout the metropolis, the concentration of poverty in highly distressed communities – after dropping in the 1990s – has been rising once again in the first decades of the twenty‐first century. Today, in virtually all US cities, policy‐makers and elites have perceived their economic base as endangered by competition from other cities and have struggled to develop various programs, fiscal policies, and other subsidies to attract businesses. In this context of escalating competition for capital, cities have become important spatial targets and arenas for a variety of consumption‐based economic development strategies to enhance the “fun factor” of cities – e.g. place marketing, tourism spectacles, sports mega‐events, urban entertainment districts, and other attractions. Hannigan’s (1998) work on the rise of fantasy cities, Chatterton and Hollands’ (2003) investigation of urban nightscapes, Gotham’s (2007) historical examination of the rise of urban tourism in New Orleans, Gottdiener’s (2001) analysis of the ubiquity of theming, and Greenberg’s (2007) examination of urban branding suggest that entertaining attractions and spectacles now dominate the political economy of urbanization. Throughout the United States, local governments and elites thus view entertainment spectacles as playing an important role in recasting cities as sites for leisure activities and consumption, typically through the development of sports stadiums, hotels, and tourist attractions (for an overview, see Hoffman et al. 2003).

Megalopolis, Exurbia, Multinucleated Metropolitan Region, Crisis Driven Urbanization In the early 1950s, Jean Gottmann coined the term megalopolis to describe continuous zones of urbanization spreading along the Boston–Washington corridor in the United States, which he more positively characterized as the new “Main Street of the nation” (Gottmann 1961). Gottmann urged researchers to view the megalopolis as a novel urban form that is multinucleated and multifunctional. Population growth fueled suburbanization and suburbs later became their own independent and autonomous regions that merged with the central city to form an extensive metropolitan region on the United States East Coast. In 1950, the megalopolis had a population of 32 million inhabitants. Today, the megalopolis includes more than 44 million people, 16% of the entire United States population. Four of the largest CMSAs in the United States overlap with the megalopolis and account for over 38 million of the megalopolis population. The four CMSAs are New York–Northern New Jersey– Long Island, Washington–Baltimore, Philadelphia–Wilmington–Atlantic City, and Boston– Worcester–Lawrence. The implication of Gottmann’s study of the megalopolis was that [w]e must abandon the idea of the city as a tightly settled and organized unit in which people, activities, and riches are crowded into a very small area clearly separated from its nonurban surroundings. Every city in this region spreads out far and wide around its original nucleus; it grows amidst an irregularly colloidal mixture of rural and suburban landscapes; it melts on broad fronts with other mixtures, of somewhat similar though different texture, belonging to the suburban neighborhoods of other cities. (Gottmann 1961, p. 5)

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Today, central cities and rural areas continue to lose population while metropolitan areas continue to grow and expand. Urban deconcentration and rural population loss signify the rise of the multinucleated metropolitan region characterized by the massive, regional scale of sprawl and the presence of multiple, specialized activity centers outside the downtown CBD (Gottdiener 1994). Traditionally, scholars have portrayed the city as a magnet that attracted people and activities within its boundary and a center that dominated its surrounding urbanized areas. This image is no longer relevant to urbanization in the United States. Whereas the CBD or downtown was the focal point of urban life and the center of dominance in the past, there are now many separate and specialized centers dispersed across the entire metropolitan region. The notion of the multinucleated metropolitan region is useful for understanding changes in metropolitan spatial structure and dynamics of metropolitan life. The concept suggests a networked, interactive character of the metropolitan region tied together by the complex webs of communications and traffic flows. More recently, scholars have used the concept exurbanization to refer to a form of residential development that straddles an often ill‐defined zone between densely packed suburbs and rural and small town locations. Although its boundaries are usually indistinct, exurban development begins somewhere beyond the sprawling suburbs and lies outside easy commuting distance to the central city. At its far reaches, exurbia does not so much end as blend into the surrounding agricultural countryside. Residents of exurbia occupy an uneasy middle ground between the perceived ills of the city and adjoining suburbs and rural places where it is believed that people live in harmony with the bucolic rural landscape. In her book Building Suburbia, Dolores Hayden (2003) develops a three‐way classification of exurban development: reluctant suburbs, hot towns, and Valhallas. Reluctant suburbs are rural towns that often find themselves overwhelmed by population growth. Hot towns are affluent locations that attract telecommuters, sometimes termed lone eagles. In Valhallas, places that are located in environmentally attractive areas become exclusive communities with access to nature’s bounty restricted to those with the income needed to breach the gates of closed, high‐security enclaves. Joel Garreau’s (1991) fashionable term edge cities draws attention to the proliferation of satellite business and retail centers that now characterize the freeway interchanges on the fringes of metropolitan areas. Recently, Gotham and Greenberg (2014) have developed the concept of crisis‐ driven urbanization to refer to a contested and conflictual process of urban redevelopment and socio‐spatial restructuring characterized by the formulation and implementation of various crisis management strategies to support recovery and rebuilding in the aftermath of urban disaster. Comparing post‐9/11 New York with post‐Katrina New Orleans, Gotham and Greenberg point to the creative and destructive aspects of the implementation of neoliberalized policies to encourage post‐disaster redevelopment. While some neoliberal policies may support and ­reinforce particular post‐disaster growth agendas, other policies may challenge and contest these growth agendas, and still others may perpetuate unequal growth patterns, amplify uneven development, and create new geographies of disaster vulnerability. The notion of crisis‐driven urbanization draws attention to market‐oriented strategies and policies as major elements of a volatile urban restructuring process that is always unpredictable and deeply contested. The incessant drive to transform

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t­erritories and spaces into sites of profit accumulation destabilizes social relations, generates pervasive crisis tendencies, and breeds a host of intense socio‐spatial ­conflicts, contestations, and patterns of socio‐spatial inequality and polarization. The creative aspect of crisis‐driven urbanization suggests that crises and conflicts can be motivating forces for renewal and regeneration as people transform catastrophes into lucrative opportunities and sources of invention and innovation. The concept of crisis driven urbanization refers to the increasing vulnerability of urban populations to disasters, hazards, and other crises including fiscal crises, poverty‐ related crises, financial crises, and environmental crises, among others.

Urbanization in Less‐Developed Countries One dominant trend in less developed countries is the formation of gigantic cities or primate cities that are disproportionately large in terms of population size relative to other cities contained within a given geographically bounded area, such as a region or a nation. Many scholars define urban primacy at the national level. Studies have shown that, in general, higher‐income countries tend to have city‐size distributions that are closer to the rank‐size rule than lower‐income countries, and in many of the latter, abnormally large primate cities are not unusual (Timberlake 1985). For example, Bangkok in Thailand is many times larger than the second largest city in the country, and Mexico City is nearly nine times more populous than Guadalajara. London and Paris, however, are also significantly larger than the rank‐size rule would predict. Nevertheless, most cases of extreme urban primacy are in less developed countries rather than in wealthy, core countries. While cities such as Mexico City, Seoul, Jakarta, and Bangkok have grown recently to rival or exceed those in the developed world, interior regions remain relatively under‐ urbanized. China is an exception: Its 12 largest cities have a combined population of over 111 million. As a result of rapid growth, many such cities face formidable economic, social, and ­ecological problems. In Mumbai (Bombay), where population density often exceeds 1 million people per square mile, people cluster in very compact living quarters without adequate food, water, health care, or education. São Paulo has been described as a “colossus” (its population approaches 20 million) where “every notion about planning and architecture evaporates” and “every municipal organization is powerless against the proliferation of the city” (Nijenhuis and De Vriers 2000). Overall, scholars view abnormally large primate cities as symptomatic of a poorly integrated national or regional economy, one in which developmental advances in the primate city lack mechanisms to benefit the country or region. Interestingly, while early work by Hawley (1981) argued that primate cities perform “key functions” for the reproduction of society, other scholars argued that primate cities are “parasites” that siphon socioeconomic resources from the rest of the country and generate little benefit in return (for an overview, see Timberlake 1985). Scholars have suggested several explanations for the emergence and development of primate cities. One theory argues that urban primate growth is due to state policies that encourage disinvestment in rural areas and promote investment in cities, especially the largest and fastest‐growing city in the country. Thus, the largest city

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in  the country, often the capital city, receives a disproportionate share of central government expenditures for social and economic infrastructure. Investment results in greater opportunities for employment, housing, education, and health care, thereby making these cities more attractive destinations for rural migrants. This understanding emphasizes the role of demographic factors in sustaining the primate city, and relates urban primacy to the broader phenomenon of hyperurbanization or overurbanization. Other scholars have suggested that the primate city is often a socio‐spatial outcome of internal social and political inequality, particularly in countries in which geographically distinct ethnic groups compete for economic opportunity and access to political power. The dominant ethnic groups typically implement policies that favor “their” region and the leading city therein. A third explanation identifies the primate city as a historical vestige of past colonialism that exploited the people and natural resources of the country and region. Many scholars note that primate cities have often been the administrative headquarters of a former colonial power, maintaining, after independence, stronger ties with the former imperial country than with their own national hinterland. A fourth explanation, popular among dependency theorists, contends that primate cities are structural linchpins in a global network whereby asymmetrical forms of wealth flow out of former colonies or neocolonies back to the “metropole,” thus contributing to the “development of ­underdevelopment” (Frank 1967; Timberlake 1985; Cohen 2003).

Contemporary Urbanization Trends: Mega‐Cities and Global Cities Today, over half the world’s population live in urban areas and the number of megacities – metropolitan areas with a population of more than 10 million people – has grown from only 1 in 1950 to more than 25 today. The huge scale of mega‐cities presents us with new complexities, new dynamics, new opportunities, and new socioeconomic, physical, and environmental problems. On the one hand, megacities express intense and complex interactions between different demographic, social, political, economic, and ecological processes. On the other hand, inadequate education and health‐care systems, inefficient transportation systems, high concentrations of industrial production, ecological devastation, unregulated land development, lack of affordable housing development, and low wages and high poverty are a few of the many social problems that face mega‐cities (Davis 2006). Mega‐cities are also major sites and expressions of global risk and disaster vulnerability. Much research has documented the increasing frequency and destructive tendencies of disasters, a development that correlates with increased urbanization thus making mega‐cities “crucibles of hazard” (Mitchell 1999). As the United Nations (UNISDR 2009) has recently pointed out, more people than ever live in harm’s way, at risk from earthquakes, droughts, floods, and other disasters, largely because of a surge in urban populations in both developing and developed nations. Thus, the pervasiveness and ubiquity of disaster reflects urbanization processes including growing urban poverty and rapid, uneven development that can concentrate poverty and increase vulnerability to hazards and catastrophe. In addition, spreading urban

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development expands the target of vulnerability for hurricanes, earthquakes, and other catastrophes, thus making disasters a major urban problem. The rise of mega‐cities and the attendant socio‐spatial transformations have caused researchers to focus attention on the development of global cities – i.e. cities that perform commanding roles in a globalizing economic system (Brenner and Keil 2006). Global cities are those urban areas consisting of a disproportionate number of major economic headquarters and services including corporate management, banking, finance, legal services, accounting, technical consulting, telecommunications, computing, international transportation, research, and higher education (Friedmann and Wolff 1982, p. 320). These cities express the growing extension, intensification, and velocity of global flows and networks of activity through economic globalization. The emergence of global cities signals the shift in the organization of capital accumulation and economic production since the late 1970s and a corresponding shift in the articulation functions of some cities away from local, regional, or national contexts to more varied and uneven connections to other cities and regions in the world. Extending Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems approach to the study of cities, the global city concept suggests that the continued globalization of economic functions has created an international division of labor among cities and metropolitan areas. According to this view, expounded by John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, and others, this international division of labor reflects and expresses inequities between core and periphery areas, between transnational elites and low‐skilled workers, and between dominant groups and racial minorities. In addition, the international division of labor has led to an expansion of inner‐city ghettos, to the development of a dual labor market within world cities, and to excessive rural–urban migration, and periphery–core immigration. In contrast to global city theorists, Richard Child Hill, Kuniko Fujita, and other proponents of the “nested city” hypothesis have asserted that national and local political‐economic contexts, rather than global capitalism, remain the decisive factors determining spatial configurations. Saskia Sassen’s (2001) work has provided key empirical data corroborating some of the assertions about an emergent series of pre‐eminent global cities as sites of concentrated global economic activity. Friedmann, Sassen, and other proponents of the global cities thesis argue that the emergent urban order is hierarchical and polarized. A small number of elite cities have become concentrated sites of global capital accumulation and control while inequalities within these cities have become very polarized. This polarization reflects the command‐and‐control function of global cities. On the one hand, these cities serve as a major locus for those elite organizations and institutions that have been able to attract an “elite” professional class who are well‐educated, footloose, and cosmopolitan in origin and outlook. The concentration of global finance, insurance, and real estate activities in the downtowns of global cities becomes a key driving force in the formation of a corresponding economy of low‐waged and low‐skilled employment which inadequately fills the void of lost manufacturing and other forms of economic activity. Or as Sassen’s work (2001) argues in the cases of London, Tokyo, and New York, the growth in elite professions and services creates the need for a vast supply of low‐skilled workers. The formation of this floating mass of migrants, the contemporary “industrial reserve army,” in Karl Marx’s famous thesis, expresses massive displacements and

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accelerated flows of people, capital, commodities, and technologies caused by the decline of manufacturing employment and global economic restructuring. Sassen also argues that this global domination is spatialized in the built environment, as cities compete to give home to global capital firms. The massive restructurings associated with the rise of mega‐cities, global cities, and other urban forms have generated much scholarly interest in theorizing and examining the growing significance of urbanization on the health and well‐being of human populations and ecosystems. Scholars have long portrayed urbanization as a major threat to global ecology and biodiversity, causing the elimination of the large majority of native species and impoverishing natural ecosystems (Czech 2005). In their examination of the biodiversity of urban habitats in Birmingham (England), Angold (2006) and colleagues found that cities provide habitats for a rich and diverse range of plants and animals, which sometimes occur in unlikely recombinant communities. Pickett and colleagues’ (Pickett et al. 2001) work in Baltimore and other urban areas suggests that cities can support important pools of biodiversity, representing surprisingly large fractions of the regional fauna. Indeed, Wania and colleagues (Wania et  al. 2004) found that native plant diversity was greater in urban than in nearby rural areas in central Germany. In short, scholars disagree over whether urbanization destroys the ecosystems, creates new habitats for diverse species, or can have simultaneous negative and positive effects on the natural environment. In sum, urbanization is a global trend that is taking place at different speeds on different continents. The pace and degree of urbanization vary by geographic region, level of development, and size of country. Cities face many environmental and ecological problems associated with urbanization including substandard housing, pollution, crime, and overcrowding. At the same time, urbanization offers immense opportunities for economic and institutional innovation and cultural development. Thus, identifying the positive effects and negative consequences of urbanization is contested terrain. Particularly for mega‐cities, urbanization anticipates trends with regional and global consequences that are difficult to predict. Large cities are the world’s most important consumers of resources and generators of waste. At the same time, they are more and more the engines of national and regional economic growth. Thus, while urban areas present fundamental and pressing challenges to the foundations of ecological, social, and economic development, they carry the promise and the potential to overcome them.

References Angold, B. (2006). Biodiversity in urban habitat patches. Science of the Total Environment 360: 196–204. Berry, B.J.L. (1980). Urbanization and counterurbanization in the United States. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 451: 13–20. Bogue, D. (1953). Population Growth in Standard Metropolitan Areas, 1900–1950. Washington, DC: Housing and Home Finance Agency. Brenner, N. and Keil, R. (eds.) (2006). Global Cities Reader. New York: Routledge. Brown, D.G., Johnson, K.M., Loveland, T.R., and Theobald, D.M. (2005). Rural land‐use trends in the conterminous United States. Ecological Applications 15: 1851–1863.

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Castells, M. (1977). The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chatterton, P. and Hollands, R. (2003). Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces, and Corporate Power. London: Routledge. Checkoway, B. (1984). Large builders, federal housing programs and postwar suburbanization. In: Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, 2e (ed. W.K. Tabb and L. Sawyers), 152–173. New York: Oxford University Press. Childe, V.G. (1950). The urban revolution. Town Planning Review 21: 3–17. Cohen, B. (2003). Urban growth in developing countries: a review of current trends and a caution regarding existing forecasts. World Development 32 (1): 23–51. Czech, B. (2005). Urbanization as a threat to biodiversity: trophic theory, economic geography, and implications for conservation land acquisition. In: Policies for Managing Urban Growth and Landscape Change: A Key to Conservation in the 21st Century (ed. D.N. Bengston). St. Paul, MN: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, North Central Research Station. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of Slums. New York: Verso. Feagin, J. (1998). The New Urban Paradigm. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Frank, A.G. (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Frey, William H., Alan Berube, Audrey Singer and Jill H. Wilson (2009) “Getting Current: Recent Demographic Trends in Metropolitan America.” Brookings Research Report, March, Washington, DC. Friedmann, J. and Wolff, G. (1982). World city formation: an agenda for research and action. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6: 309–344. Garreau, J. (1991). Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday. Gotham, K.F. (ed.) (2001). Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment. New York: Elsevier Press. Gotham, K.F. (2007). Authentic New Orleans: Race, Culture, and Tourism in the Big Easy. New York, NY: New York University Press. Gotham, K.F. (2014 [2002]). Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000, 2e. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gotham, K.F. and Greenberg, M. (2014). Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gottdiener, M. (1994). The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Gottdiener, M. (2001). Theming of America: Dreams, Visions, and Commercial Spaces, 2e. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gottdiener, M. and Feagin, J. (1988). The paradigm shift in urban sociology. Urban Affairs Review 24 (2): 163–187. Gottmann, J. (1961). Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. Greenberg, M. (2007). Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World. New York: Routledge. Hannigan, J. (1998). Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. New York: Routledge. Harris, F.R. and Wilkins, R.W. (eds.) (1988). Quiet Riots: Race and Poverty in the United States. The Kerner Report Twenty Years Later. New York: Pantheon. Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold. Hawley, A. (1981). Urban Society: An Ecological Approach, 2e. New York: Ronald. Hayden, D. (2003). Building Suburbia. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Hoffman, L.M., Fainstein, S.S., and Judd, D.R. (eds.) (2003). Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space. New York: Blackwell. Jonas, A. and Wilson, D. (eds.) (1999). The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, H. (2003 [1970]). The Urban Revolution (trans. R. Bononno). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Logan, J. and Molotch, H. (1987). Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mitchell, J. (ed.) (1999). Crucibles of Hazard: Mega‐Cities and Disasters in Transition. New York: United Nations University Press. Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Random House. Nijenhuis, W. and De Vriers, N. (2000). Eating Brazil. Rotterdam: 010 Uitgeverij Publishers. Pickett, S.T.A., Cadenasso, M.L., Grove, J.M. et al. (2001). Urban ecological systems: linking terrestrial, ecological, physical, and socioeconomic components of metropolitan areas. Annual Review of Ecological Systems 32: 127–157. Redfield, R. and Singer, M.B. (1954). The cultural role of cities. Economic Development and Cultural Change 3 (1): 53–73. Rowe, P. (1995). Modernity and Housing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sassen, S. (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simmel, G. (1950 [1903]). Metropolis and mental life.” (trans. and ed. D. Weinstein). In: The Sociology of Georg Simmel (ed. K. Wolff), 409–442. New York: Free Press. Timberlake, M. (ed.) (1985). Urbanization in the World‐Economy. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) (2009). Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. Geneva: United Nations. United Nations Population Division (2009) World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision Population Database. https://lternet.edu/wp‐content/uploads/2016/07/2007WUP_ Highlights_web.pdf. Wania, A., Kühn, I., and Klotz, S. (2004). Plant richness patterns in agricultural and urban landscapes in central Germany  –  spatial gradients of species richness. Landscape and Urban Planning 75: 97–110. Weber, M. (1958). The City. (trans. and ed. D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth). New York: Free Press. Weiss, M.A. (1987). Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning. New York: Columbia University Press.

17 Environmental Sociology Richard York and Riley E. Dunlap

Introduction All human societies are part of and dependent on local and global ecosystems. Following the Industrial Revolution, human societies came to be dominant forces shaping ecological processes, leading to our current era, which is being referred to with growing frequency as the Anthropocene to acknowledge the extraordinary scope and scale of human influences on the earth (Steffen et al. 2007). The major alteration of global ecology has dramatic implications for the millions of other species with whom humans share the Earth and for human well‐being. Despite the ontological threats stemming from ecological disruption, throughout much of the twentieth century there was pervasive exuberance in the United States that led the general public, politicians, and scholars alike to believe that modern societies had overcome natural constraints and that societies would “progress” into a continually brighter future free from the scarcity that had beset societies in the past (Catton and Dunlap 1980). The discipline of sociology suffered from the same ecological blinders that charac­ terized society in general. Early sociologists commonly made efforts to distance soci­ ology from the natural sciences, insisting that social facts were principally explained by other social facts rather than by biological and physical phenomena. Over the course of the twentieth century, most sociologists largely ignored the natural environ­ ment, embracing a “human exemptionalism” viewpoint that ­implicitly (and some­ times explicitly) denied that modern societies were substantially influenced by their biophysical context. This began to change in the 1970s, following rising concern among natural scientists, policy‐makers, and the general public about pollution and other environmental problems, and particularly after the 1973 energy crisis, which highlighted societies’ dependence on natural resources (Catton and Dunlap 1980).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The Section on Environmental Sociology of the American Sociological Association (ASA) was founded in 1976, marking the field’s formal debut in the discipline. However, what some consider the field’s founding statement came two years later with Catton and Dunlap’s (1978) argument that environmental sociology repre­ sented a new paradigm in that it challenged the larger discipline’s anthropocentric orientation by recognizing that all societies are fundamentally embedded in and dependent on the natural environment. Not only was environmental sociology defined as the study of societal‐environmental interactions, but it was portrayed as having the potential to transform the larger discipline by infusing it with insights from ecology (Catton and Dunlap 1980; Dunlap and Catton 1979). While sociology has shed its exemptionalist orientation to a considerable degree,1 it continues to give environmental problems relatively modest attention. Nonetheless, due in part to widespread acceptance of the reality of human‐caused climate change (Dunlap and Brulle 2015), environmental sociology is increasingly recognized as an important field of inquiry within the discipline, the empirical examination of societal‐­ environmental interactions is commonplace and this research is being published in core disciplinary journals (Scott and Johnson 2016). Environmental sociology has come to be sufficiently large and diverse, particu­ larly as it has taken root internationally, that its contents cannot be easily summa­ rized (Bohr and Dunlap 2018). In this chapter we cover some of the main research emphases and related theoretical debates that have been and are currently central to the field. We begin by examining the divide between realist and constructivist per­ spectives on environmental problems and how they have evolved. Then we examine debates over the causes of environmental problems, the social impacts of these prob­ lems, and potential solutions to them.

From Constructivism and Realism to Agnosticism and Pragmatism Historically, the divide between social‐constructivist and realist perspectives toward environmental problems has been a fundamental schism within environmental soci­ ology. Although this divide is common in many fields of sociology, it has been par­ ticularly prominent in environmental sociology. This is because a strong constructivist position essentially denies the materialistic foundation of the field – environmental problems are real and pose challenges for human societies – and replaces it with the view that such “problems” are contingent upon human knowledge and beliefs that are constructed through social processes, rather than reflecting objective biophysical conditions (Dunlap and Catton 1994; Murphy 1997). However, although some advocates of social constructivism seemed to question the reality of environmental problems (Macnaghten and Urry 1998), most constructivists have come to adopt moderate forms that do not deny the material existence of environmental problems but simply emphasize the processes by which they are socially constructed and con­ tested (Hannigan 2006; Yearly 2009). In addition, after early constructivist analyses of issues like global warming came under criticism for emphasizing that such problems remained “highly contested” while ignoring the powerful interests behind such contestation (Dunlap and Catton 1994),



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a body of realist‐constructivist work has begun to emerge that analyzes the efforts of corporations and the conservative movement to manipulate societal perceptions and deny the severity of environmental problems by manufacturing uncertainty and skepticism regarding scientific evidence documenting such problems (Jacques et  al. 2008). This work seeks to reveal the efforts of those attempting to “deconstruct” envi­ ronmental problems (Bell and York 2010; Brulle and Roberts 2017; Dunlap and McCright 2015; Farrell 2016; McCright and Dunlap 2010), an effort made more urgent by the Trump administration’s adoption of environmental skepticism and ­climate change denial.2 Currently, most environmental sociologists appear to appre­ ciate the importance of both constructivist and realist perspectives and possibilities for integrating them (Carolan and Stuart 2016; Foster and Clark 2008; Hannigan 2006; Malm 2018; White et al. 2016; York and Clark 2010). More recently, the constructivist/realist divide in environmental sociology has evolved into a related but broader pair of stances termed agnosticism and pragmatism based on analysts’ treatment of environmental conditions in their research (Dunlap 2010). Specifically, those adopting an agnostic stance (somewhat more prevalent among European scholars) toward environmental problems are reluctant to employ scientific indicators of these phenomena, preferring instead to problema­ tize, contextualize, and sometimes deconstruct scientific evidence regarding issues such as anthropogenic climate change (Wynne 2010). Their analyses offer valuable insights into the complexities and contingencies of climate science, but because they are hesitant about granting ontological standing to the claims of climate scientists they avoid examining the causes and likely impacts of rising greenhouse gas emis­ sions (Yearly 2009). In contrast, the pragmatic approach, which is popular with American scholars, employs scientific data on a wide range of environmental conditions (carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, fisheries’ yields, toxic wastes, etc.) in empirical analyses to investigate their relationships with an array of social phenomena. While many of these analyses of societal‐environmental interactions involve rigorous statistical analyses of large, quantitative data sets (see Dunlap 2010 and references in the next section), pragmatists also perform more qualitative, in‐ depth case studies that provide rich insights into the evolution of such interactions over long periods of time (Bell and York 2010; Freudenburg and Gramling 1994; Freudenburg et al. 2009; Murphy 2009). The agnosticism about the state of environmental conditions that has roots in the postmodernist turn of the larger discipline and the popularity of constructivist analyses within environmental sociology so prevalent in the 1990s continues to have pervasive effects on sociological theorizing about societal‐environmental interac­ tions (Malm 2018; White et al. 2016). This seems particularly true among European scholars, where even theorists of an ostensibly realist bent have taken agnostic ­positions toward the utility of scientific epistemology for the study of environmental phenomena. Most notably, proponents of ecological modernization theory (the ­substance of which is discussed in a subsequent section) have come to advocate skep­ ticism toward rigorous empirical analyses of environmental conditions in favor of methods that are more interpretive and subjective. Leading ecological modernization theorists Mol and Spaargaren (2005, pp. 94–95), for example, declare “the limita­ tions of empirical studies in closing larger theoretical debates” and largely reject the

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use of empirical methods and hypothesis testing in analyses of the environmental consequences of modernization. They further question the validity of using “natural science ‘empirical facts’” and mathematics to assess socially generated environmental problems (Mol and Spaargaren 2004 , p. 262). This ambivalence toward scientific data has even led Mol and Spaargaren (2004, p. 261) to declare, “the irrelevance of ‘more’ or ‘less’” regarding the scale of production and consumption, countering the eminently realist recognition of ecological limits. Such a stance (by no means unique to Mol and Spaargaren) is at odds with the large and growing body of research that analyzes in empirically rigorous fashion alternative theoretical explanations of the driving forces of environmental degrada­ tion (e.g. Jorgenson and Clark 2012; McGee and Greiner 2018; McGee et al. 2015; York et  al. 2003) and obstacles to environmental reform (e.g. Ciplet et  al. 2015). While empirically oriented pragmatists within environmental sociology can benefit from the cautions raised by agnostics concerning the pitfalls of employing imperfect data on environmental conditions, the broader gulf between the two camps concerning the utility of empirical evidence for adjudicating debates between theo­ retical perspectives clearly poses a challenge for the field.

Anthropogenic Causes of Environmental Problems Perhaps the most fundamental and important justification for environmental soci­ ology is that, at base, environmental problems are social problems in that they are caused by humans and have effects on humans (Dunlap 2015). Clearly the natural sciences are essential for understanding what is happening in the biophysical world, but they have limited utility for explaining the social processes that lead to resource consumption and environmental pollution. When we discuss environmental prob­ lems, it is typically implicit that we mean anthropogenic conditions. Thus, it is clear that we need to understand the social processes affecting the types and scale of ­environmental problems that societies create. A major focus of environmental soci­ ology, particularly in the United States, has been to assess the driving forces behind environmental degradation. Although there is a considerable diversity of views about the forces that lead to degradation of the environment, two major perspectives stand out: human ecology and Marxian political economy. The human ecological perspective was at the heart of the founding of environ­ mental sociology, as exemplified in the works of Catton and Dunlap (1978, 1980) and Catton (1980).3 This perspective represented a new version of human ecology by breaking from the human exemptionalism and neglect of the biophysical environ­ ment that had come to characterize mainstream sociological human ecology in the 1970s (Dunlap and Catton 1979, 1983). The “new human ecologists,” as Buttel (1987) termed them, drew upon the work of ecologists in the natural sciences to emphasize the importance of environmental problems and identify the basic material conditions of societies – particularly their demographic features (e.g. population size and growth), scale of production and consumption, and mode of production (e.g. technology) – as the fundamental forces creating them. This tradition has evolved into an extensive literature of quantitative cross‐ national research examining the effects of population, affluence and technology on



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the environment, most notably based on the STIRPAT model developed by Dietz and Rosa (1994, 1997). STIRPAT (stochastic impacts by regression on population, ­affluence, and technology) is a stochastic version of the venerable I = PAT model (environmental Impacts are a multiplicative function of Population size, Affluence [per capita consumption or production], and Technology [the impact per unit of pro­ duction or consumption]) that allows for hypothesis testing and is amenable to the addition of other causal forces and nonlinear specification. STIRPAT has been used to analyze a variety of environmental impacts, including ecological footprints, carbon dioxide emissions, methane emissions, sulfur dioxide emissions, and chloro­ fluorocarbon (CFC) emissions  –  typically in cross‐national analyses (McGee and Greiner 2018; McGee et al. 2015; Rosa et al. 2004, 2015; York 2008b; York et al. 2003). The findings from this research program have consistently provided support for the fundamental arguments of human ecologists, showing that population and affluence (as typically measured by GDP per capita) are the primary driving forces behind environmental degradation, at least at the national level. The Marxian political economy perspective was also represented in environ­ mental sociology early on, and in many ways is complementary to the human eco­ logical perspective (York and Mancus 2009). Schnaiberg’s (1980) foundational book, The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity, laid out the argument that there was a “treadmill of production” that drove modern industrialized economies, partic­ ularly capitalist ones, to endlessly expand production, so as to generate more profits for producers (see also Schnaiberg and Gould 1994).4 The “treadmill” refers to the pattern whereby the profit‐seeking actions of producers create job losses due to ­technological innovation, as mechanization means that fewer workers are needed per unit of production, but these innovations entail higher levels of resource con­ sumption and pollution, generating environmental degradation as well as unemployment. The “solution” to these problems in treadmill‐dominated societies is typically to further expand production so as to create jobs and provide more money for government (via taxes on both workers and employers) to clean up the escalating environmental problems, as well as provide necessary social services for workers. But this further expansion, in turn, generates another round of mechanization, unemployment, and environmental degradation – hence the analogy of the treadmill, where one keeps moving yet stays in place. While “treadmill theory” has become a staple of environmental sociology, Buttel (2004) notes that Schnaiberg and his students largely used it to analyze the limits of localized opposition to treadmill processes such as recycling programs, and that many scholars simply cite it to posit an inextricable link between economic growth and environmental degradation. Over time, however, environmental sociologists have begun to conduct finer‐grained analyses of the linkages between corporate actions, government interests, and environmental degradation, beginning with exam­ ination of how corporate characteristics (e.g. size and ownership) influence levels of pollution (Grant et al. 2002). Freudenburg (2005) advanced such analyses by finding that tiny fractions of the industrial economy, often single plants within an industry, account for hugely disproportionate shares of pollution. His concept of “dispropor­ tionality” is being extended by others (e.g. Jorgenson et al. 2016; Prechel and Istvan 2016) in ways that clarify and qualify the operation of the treadmill of production while offering insights into how its effects might be alleviated to some degree.

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O’Connor’s (1988, 1991) second contradiction of capitalism thesis makes an argument similar to that of Schnaiberg’s treadmill of production, in that it stresses the problems and contradictions inherent in the escalation of production in capitalist systems. The second contradiction thesis argues that increasing the scale of produc­ tion increases the costs of production and expands environmental problems. This happens because initially natural resources are extracted that are of the highest quality and closest to the sites of production, but as these are depleted, further expansion of production requires accessing lower‐quality resources (e.g. shifting from old‐growth timber to new‐growth, or high‐concentration mineral ores to low‐ concentration ones) and/or those farther from the sites of production (e.g. extracting resources from “less‐developed” countries, or drilling for oil in the Arctic or deep seas) (Davidson and Andrews 2013). Thus, both the treadmill and second contradic­ tion emphasize the fundamentally unsustainable nature of economic growth. One of the more active areas of theorizing in Marxian analyses of environmental problems over the past two decades has centered on developing the implications of Marx’s own theory of “metabolic rift,” as explicated and elaborated by Foster (1999, 2000) and Foster et al. (2010). As Foster has explained, a central feature of Marx’s materialism was his recognition that all societies are part of a metabolic interaction with the natural world. Marx saw an emerging ecological crisis stemming from the degradation of soil driven by the exploitative practices of capitalist agriculture, which served to rob the soil as it did the workers in order to maximize profits. In particular, Marx argued that rapid urbanization driven by capitalist‐industrial development sep­ arated people from the land, creating a rift in the metabolic exchange between people and nature that had typically sustained the soils in preindustrial times. Whereas in preurbanized societies nutrients taken from the land in agricultural production were recycled back into the soil, in urbanized societies these nutrients were shipped to the city, in the form of food and fiber, where they became a waste problem. Instead of enriching the soil, waste in cities went into sewers or to dumps, subsequently pollut­ ing rivers and streams. Thus, Marx saw the emerging capitalist urban‐industrial society as fundamentally unsustainable, which is one of the reasons he advocated a more even distribution of people across the landscape. One important aspect of what Foster (1999, 2000) and Foster et al. (2010), in developing the theory of metabolic rift, brings to Marxian political economy is an appreciation for the qualitative aspects of the environmental crisis. Whereas Schnaiberg’s treadmill of production and O’Connor’s second contradiction thesis emphasized the quantitative aspect of environmental impacts – the scale of produc­ tion and consumption and the attendant quantity of withdrawals from and addi­ tions to the environment – Foster’s metabolic rift emphasizes qualitative aspects of how the system of production and consumption is organized with respect to ecolog­ ical processes. Metabolic rift theory highlights how societal‐environmental relation­ ships can be unsustainable even before they push up against limits of scale. Metabolic rift and the treadmill of production are complementary perspectives, each high­ lighting different ways in which modern societies contribute to environmental deg­ radation. Along with O’Connor’s second contradiction thesis, they emphasize that capitalism has inherently unsustainable features. Foster’s work has inspired others to generalize the metabolic rift thesis, using its  conceptual apparatus to examine the global carbon cycle and climate change



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(Clark and York 2005), the oceanic crisis stemming from degradation of fisheries (Longo et al. 2015), and the nitrogen cycle (Mancus 2007), among other applica­ tions (e.g. Dickens 2004). Salleh (2010) adds further to the metabolic rift tradition by emphasizing the roles played by grassroots movements and people marginalized in the capitalist world‐system, such as peasants, indigenous people, and unpaid care­ givers in generating metabolic value and countering the rift created by capitalism. While Moore (2015) has criticized the work of Foster and colleagues as assuming a dualism between humans and nature, his critique is principally about linguistic inter­ pretation rather than scientific claims (Foster 2016; Malm 2018). Researchers examining the political economy of the world‐system have also made important contributions to analyses of environmental problems, producing a sub­ stantial and growing literature using increasingly sophisticated quantitative methods to assess the effects of various world‐system factors on environmental conditions. A central part of this research tradition examines how the legacy of colonialism puts nations on different developmental pathways that limit options for the least powerful nations. As Greiner and McGee (2018) have shown, core nations have the power to extract resources from less‐powerful nations and to offshore polluting industries. Thus, affluent nations can to some degree curtail their own direct contributions to environmental problems by locking semi‐peripheral nations into pollution‐intensive development trajectories. This, in part, happens through processes of ecologically unequal exchange – structurally unequal trade relations where natural resources flow to core nations and pollution to semi‐peripheral and peripheral nations (Jorgenson 2016). There is also a qualitative strand to world‐systems research that assesses how historical and ongoing processes of colonialism impose ecological regimes around the world that are unsustainable, which have contributed to desertification (Holleman 2017) and trapped many areas of the world into environmentally damaging extrac­ tive economies (Bunker 1984).

Social Impacts of Environmental Problems Changes in environmental conditions become identified as “problems” typically because of their impacts on human societies, and these impacts are another major focus of environmental sociology (Dunlap 2015). A particular interest of environ­ mental sociologists has been in assessing how social impacts are distributed unequally across various sectors of society (Scott and Johnson 2017), especially in terms of race and class (Brulle and Pellow 2006; Mohai et  al. 2009; Pellow and Brehm 2013). Research in this area was spurred by a famous report by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice (1987), which found pervasive evidence of minorities being disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. Following this report, an extensive literature on environmental justice developed, and case studies of envi­ ronmental inequities have been an important part of this literature. A foundational work in this tradition is Bullard’s (1990) Dumping in Dixie, which documented how waste storage and hazardous facilities are frequently located in areas where there are a high proportion of low‐income and minority residents. Likewise, Roberts and Toffolon‐Weiss (2001) and Pellow (2002) found minorities and the poor to be more likely to live in proximity to hazardous sites. Taylor (2009, 2014) has shown a long

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history of environmental injustice in American cities, where minorities and the poor frequently experience the worst aspects of environmental problems. There has also been a great deal of quantitative research aimed at assessing the extent to which hazardous or other undesirable facilities are likely to be spatially associated with minority and low‐income neighborhoods. Although some early work suggested that the location of hazardous facilities was not race or class based (Anderton et al. 1994), a substantial body of subsequent work has found that the racial and class characteristics of neighborhoods are associated with the likelihood of close proximity to hazardous facilities – although the relative importance of the two characteristics has yet to be fully settled (Brulle and Pellow 2006; Mohai et al. 2009; Pais et al. 2014). This area of research has long been characterized by debates over methodology, particularly regarding how proximity to hazardous facilities should be measured, but has become increasingly refined with the application of geographic information systems (GIS) data. Researchers using GIS data have shown that, in addition to the location of hazardous facilities (Downey 2006), vulnerability to heat exposure, stemming in part from the urban heat island effect, is also connected with race and class (Harlan et al. 2006, 2008). Continuing methodological developments, including longitudinal studies, are shedding further light on key issues such as the relative roles of intentional location of hazardous facilities versus the operation of the housing market in generating disproportionate exposure to hazards among poor and minority populations (Mohai and Saha 2015). Work on environmental justice/inequalities has taken many forms, and there is no single theoretical perspective uniting it. However, there are some important efforts to give unity to this field. Taylor’s (2000) environmental justice paradigm represents a noteworthy effort to give a larger framing to research in this area, recognizing the ecological embeddedness of societies as well as the social inequality that is rife in the modern world. Thus, Taylor argues that environmental justice is not simply a topic of research or a distinct area of theorization, but, rather, represents novel paradig­ matic elements. Focusing of theory rather than paradigms, Pellow’s (2000) theory of environmental inequality formation explains how environmental inequities have multiple sources that play out over time and in diverse dimensions. This important work helps move beyond some of the simpler debates over whether race or class is “more” important, helping clarify how different forces operating at differing places and times have led to a variety of inequalities in the present. Related to research on inequalities, sociologists have shown how environmentally destructive practices undermine overall community cohesion and generate an array of social problems (Freudenburg 1997). For example, a longstanding research project following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1989 has shown dramatic impacts to communities in the area, stemming in part from the high levels of stress generated by the accident, the subsequent economic decline, and the drawn‐out litigation process (Gill and Picou 1998; Picou et al. 2004). Similarly, Bell’s (2016) research on coal‐mining communities in southern West Virginia found that the coal industry, by generating conflicts over environmental degradation and union loyalties and by cutting jobs (all of which are connected to the shift to the more mechanized and more environmentally destructive practice of mountain top removal mining), undermined social capital in the region, creating widespread emotional ­distress among residents and breaking down social ties.



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The Way Forward: Solutions How to address environmental problems and transform societies so that they do not consume resources and degrade the environment at unsustainable levels is a central question of our times. Based on the theories and research discussed earlier on causes of environmental problems, certain major issues stand out. Curtailing both economic and population growth and addressing the power concentrated in the corporate class appears to be the combined prescription of human ecologists and Marxian‐oriented political economists. It is clear that capitalist‐industrialization over the past two centuries has generated environmental problems on a scale and of a kind not previously seen in human history (Antonio 2009). Political economists suggest that in order to overcome the modern environmental crisis, societies need to halt the treadmill of production and the demand for endless growth of private profits and move to an economy that provides for human needs. This would require a fundamental change in the structure of the global economy and a move to something along the lines of Daly’s (1991) vision of a steady‐state economy, one not based on endless growth (see also Schor 2010). However, efforts to achieve such a change face extraordinary political barriers, and many believe that it is simply not possible to so fundamentally alter the structure of the modern world (but see Wallerstein et al. 2013). Offering an alternative perspective to the founding traditions in the field, ecolog­ ical modernization theory – which aimed to study environmental reform rather than the causes of environmental degradation per se – emerged in environmental ­sociology in the 1990s (Spaargaren and Mol 1992) as a counter to many of the arguments made by human ecologists and those in the political economy tradition. Ecological modernization theorists claim that it is neither possible nor desirable to abandon the capitalist‐driven modernization project, and that further modernization holds the  potential to overcome the ecological challenges created in its earlier phases (Mol 1995, 2001). They argue that a central feature of modernity is a percolation of ­rationality into all aspects of life, and that in the contemporary world an ecological rationality is emerging that will reform the institutions of modernity from within, without requiring radical social or economic change. Mol (1996, p. 313) notes that “ecological modernization theory identifies modern science and technology as central institutions for ecological reform (and not in the first place as the culprits of ecological and social disruption).”5 Despite the bold claims of ecological modernization theorists, systematic analyses have generally failed to confirm their assertion that the modernization process yields an overall amelioration of environmental problems. As York and Rosa (2003) have noted, evidence of ecological modernization relies heavily on case studies (Mol 1995, 2001; Mol et  al. 2009), which are prone to highlighting particular instances of reform, but which do not address the general claim that improvement in environ­ mental conditions is a consequence of modernization. Rigorous quantitative empirical work finds that societal modernization, as typically measured by GDP per capita, urbanization, and measures of connectedness to the global economy, consistently escalates a substantial variety of environmental problems such as greenhouse gas emissions and total resource consumption (Jorgenson and Clark 2012; Rosa et al. 2004; York 2008b; York et al. 2003). Yet, as noted earlier, proponents of ecological

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modernization question the “empirical facts” produced by these studies, and more generally are so dismissive of evidence of ecological degradation that they lapse back into human exemptionalism (Foster 2012). In fact, apparent cases of ecological reform in affluent nations often occur because polluting industries and resource extraction are shifted to poor nations through unequal exchange relationships, not because affluent nations actually reduce the demands they place on the environment (Greiner and McGee 2018; Jorgenson 2016). The focus of ecological modernization theory on the production process in modernized nations has often made it blind to the overall scale of resource consump­ tion and the environmental impacts that are spread around the world to meet the demands of the affluent (Carolan 2004; York and Rosa 2003). There is a growing body of research that assesses the extent to which the development of “green” technologies  –  central to the ecological modernization program – actually help to curtail environmental problems. A substantial literature examines whether improvements in efficiency – variously at the level of specific tech­ nologies (e.g. cars), factories, industries, or nations – in practice lead to reduction in resource consumption. Although a wide range of outcomes has been observed, it is common to find that rising efficiency is associated with rising resource consumption, a phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox (York and McGee 2016). There are likely multiple reasons for this, but several of them stem from the structure of market economies, where the goal of industries is to increase profits so that improvements in efficiency are converted into more production and consumption rather than resource conservation (York and McGee 2016). Similarly, research examining “green” substitutes  –  such as renewable energy sources as substitutes for fossil fuels – have found that they do not necessarily lead to environmental improvements. For example, York (2012) found that in nations around the world since the middle of the twentieth century, rising production of non–fossil‐fuel energy sources has done little to suppress the consumption of fossil fuels, and York and McGee (2017) found that the expansion of renewable energy sources has not contributed to a decoupling of economic growth from carbon emis­ sions. Similarly, Greiner et al. (2018) found that national‐level growth in natural gas consumption has not been associated with suppression of coal use. As with the Jevons paradox, these results are likely due to the nature of market economies, which have an inherent drive to expand production and consumption, so that new energy sources contribute to overall growth rather than conservation (York 2017). Thus, the evidence to date does not suggest that the development of “green” technologies in market economies and further modernization is likely to lead to improved envi­ ronmental conditions, particularly at the global level. One of the emerging areas in environmental sociology is an assessment of the effects of women’s status and gender inequality on environmental policy. Even though there is a body of theorizing and research about connections between envi­ ronmental crises and gender relationships outside of environmental sociology (Merchant 1980; Rocheleau et al. 1996; Shiva 1989), there is only a limited amount of work in the field (Dunaway and Macabuac 2007; Salleh 2009), pointing to an important lacuna to be addressed by future research (Kennedy and Dzialo 2015). Recently, cross‐national research has begun to assess the extent to which women’s status affects national support for environmental policies, with initial indications



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being that support for environmental protection is higher in nations where women have greater political status than in nations where they have low status, even controlling for a variety of indicators of “development” and “modernization” (Ergas and York 2012; Norgaard and York 2005; Nugent and Shandra 2009). There is also a growing body of research finding that women express more concern over environ­ mental problems and risks than do men (Davidson and Freudenberg 1996; McCright and Xiao 2014). Taken together, these studies suggest that improving the status of women may benefit efforts to address environmental problems. There has been a gradual rise of research on anti‐consumerism and voluntary sim­ plicity movements that explores how people are making efforts to move away from environmentally destructive lifestyles (Hinton and Goodman 2010; Schor 2010). For example, Ergas (2010) has studied the ecovillage movement and examined how the members of one ecovillage work to live in a way that does not contribute to the eco­ logical destruction associated with the larger global economy. More micro‐level research such as this is an important complement to the macro‐level focus of the Marxian political economy theories, which examine the larger contradictions of capitalism but which do not investigate in detail the changes in the everyday lives of people that will be necessitated by a transformation of the treadmill of production. There are compelling arguments that the best way to address environmental prob­ lems is to transform societies so that they focus on providing for human well‐being, rather than economic growth per se (Foster et al. 2010). Such a change will require efforts to bring about greater social equality in all dimensions – race, class, gender, etc. – and unify social justice and environmental movements (McGee and Greiner 2018; Pellow 2014). Indeed, Pellow (2014) convincingly shows how exploitation of people is intimately connected with exploitation of the environment, and how addressing environmental problems can be part of efforts to improve human quality of life.

Conclusion In the 40‐plus years since its formal birth via the ASA Section, environmental soci­ ology has come a long way. The Section is prospering, as is the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Environment and Society (for­ mally established in 1994), reflecting the rapid and successful internationalization of the field. Numerous environmental sociology texts have been published in several nations, and in the United States courses in the field have become commonplace, and a growing number of positions are advertised for faculty who can teach them. But perhaps most importantly, the field has made considerable progress intellectually, as work by environmental sociologists is regularly published (and cited) in core, and increasingly in elite, journals in the discipline (Scott and Johnson 2016). The growth and internationalization of environmental sociology, along with trends in the larger discipline, have generated differing approaches and major debates within the field, reflecting both its growing diversity and intellectual vitality. One finds within environmental sociology not only constructivism and realism, but agnostic versus pragmatic approaches to the use of environmental data – which, in turn, is related to the employment of qualitative and quantitative methods. Add in

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micro‐level and macro‐level (up to the world‐system) foci and differing approaches stemming from the varying sociological traditions in different regions of the world, and it becomes clear why the field is now far more diverse than in its early days (Bohr and Dunlap 2018). Yet, the key concerns of understanding the causes, impacts, and potential solutions of environmental problems remain central to the field, and our review has highlighted major research trends and methodological/theoretical divides on these core topics. The two most significant divisions occur over the utility of scientific data on environmental phenomena in empirical analyses and the (in)ability of ecological modernization processes to halt mounting ecological degradation at the global level. Debates over these two fundamental and interrelated issues will likely continue for some time. It is apparent that environmental challenges such as climate change raise funda­ mental questions for the entire discipline of sociology (Dunlap and Brulle 2015), such as the necessity of and potential for altering the trajectory of economic growth endemic to industrialized capitalism and the possibilities of creating alternative forms of social and economic organization that are both economically and ecologically ­sustainable. If environmental sociology can help lead the way in addressing such questions, it will continue to enhance its standing in the larger discipline, and more importantly, in society at large.

Notes 1  For a retrospective examination and clarification of Catton and Dunlap’s plea for soci­ ology to replace its “human exemptionalism paradigm” with a more ecologically sound one, and an assessment of disciplinary progress in overcoming exemptionalist thinking, see Dunlap (2002). 2 This effort has been given a boost by US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has employed sociological work on climate change denial in his longstanding attempts to shed light on what he terms the “web of denial” – the set of interests that questions the seriousness of climate change and the necessity of reducing carbon emissions (Brulle and Roberts 2017). 3 See the symposium on the foundational work of Catton and Dunlap in the journal Organization & Environment (York 2008a). 4 See the two special issues of the journal Organization & Environment focusing on the treadmill of production (Foster and York 2004; York and Foster 2005). 5 This is somewhat ironic, since, as noted above, ecological modernization theorists are criti­ cal of scientific methods when applied to analyses of the social drivers of environmentally negative consequences of modernity. Thus, ecological modernization theorists contradicto­ rily question whether scientific methodology should be used for analyzing the causes and severity of environmental problems while claiming that techno‐science can help us over­ come the modern environmental crisis.

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18 Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change Kevin Gillan

Do protests change things? This question often appears in public debate in reaction to large demonstrations. One response is to begin by assuming that protests are indicative of more fundamental social movements and then reel off historic social changes resulting from movements: women’s suffrage in Britain (Rosen 2013), for instance; crucial black civil rights legislation in the United States (McAdam 1982); the decriminalization of homosexuality in many countries (Ayoub and Paternotte 2014); the abolition of slavery (Oldfield 2013; Sinha 2016); the fall of the Berlin wall (della Porta 2016), or the end of apartheid in South Africa (Thörn 2006). None of these momentous socio‐political changes resulted from a single protest, of course, although social movements have had a pivotal role in each of them. More generally still, Laurence Cox is surely right to claim, “Most people on the planet live, today, in states that have been fundamentally remade by social movements within living memory” (2018, p. 22). If social movement scholarship has any collective mission, then it is to understand this triumvirate: social movements, ­protest, and social change. It should be immediately clear that there can be no deterministic, uni‐causal relationships between movements, protests, and change. Many protests fail to effect change, or else may produce unintended consequences that have little to do with movement agendas (Giugni 1998). And in any significant change process there are many different actors involved (Jasper 2015). With that complexity acknowledged, we can ask what social movement scholarship has taught us about the wider social processes in which movements are embedded. This chapter offers a necessarily partial answer rather than a wide‐ranging review of the field as a whole (for that, see Edwards 2014; Johnston 2014; Snow et  al. 2018). The first section addresses the issue of definition of “social movement,” which reveals how different theoretical

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traditions conceptualize our object of study. We then move from actor to action: What do movements do? I begin by setting out the movement activity that constitutes the movement as such. Developing interpretative frames, collective identities, and coordination mechanisms are key ways in which movements bootstrap themselves into existence. The largest section of the chapter then moves on to consider the ways in which movements attempt to generate social change. The classic forms of protest (typically described as repertoires of contention) are collective actions and thus dovetail neatly with the conception of a social movement as a collective actor. But more individualized forms of change‐oriented have also become frequent subjects of research. We will see a variety of more individualized strategies for social change: from “lifestyle movements” (Haenfler et al. 2012) to Bayat’s (2013) “quiet encroachment of the ordinary.” Taking them seriously would broaden the field in a number of worthwhile ways, although it will require, as I set out, a clearer acknowledgment of the theoretical limitations that have been imposed by some of our central categories.

The Actor: What Is a Social Movement? Dieter Rucht (2017, pp. 39–46) reminds us that the French term mouvement social originally referred to periods of significant social change. That meaning was retained in translations to the English social movement and German Soziale Bewegung and only later were these terms used to refer to social groups attempting to bring about such changes. This later meaning is dominant in academic discourse today. Thus, the study of social movements often begins with the identification of a collective actor defined by its attempt to create a mouvement social in its older sense. Identifying the actor means finding specific cultural content: a vision of a preferable future society to be established; a demand for the end of some existing socio‐political structure or practice; or perhaps a defense of some existing arrangements that are under threat. Our labels for movements tend to indicate that content by naming either the social group in whose interest the movement is active (e.g. workers’ or women’s movements), or the ideological preferences of the movement (e.g. anarchist or nationalist movements). Sometimes the label might identify a broader issue area (e.g. environmental movement) or a specific conflict (e.g. anti‐abortion). Occasionally, labels refer to characteristic tactics (e.g. direct action, Occupy), although in such cases the tactical choice is usually a signal of a broader ideological grounding (Doherty et al. 2003). This labelling variation is suggestive that even if we can agree that a social movement is a collective actor of some sort, what defines the nature of the collective is quite variable: It could be an identity, adherence to an ideological vision, a position in a specific conflict, or all of these. How, then, do we identify our object of study? One approach is to prioritize demands, or the claims made by movements on societies. In a seminal paper that began the hugely influential “resource mobilization theory,” John McCarthy and Mayer Zald defined movements as a “set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure and/ or reward distribution of a society” (1977, pp. 1217–1218). Rucht (2017, p. 40)

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 303 argues that this may draw the boundaries too widely, including people who may share the preferences but who do not act on them. Extending this point, such definitions are problematic because the existence of a demand does not automatically give rise to movement action. Charles Tilly has sometimes expressed a (more robust) movement‐as‐demand approach, with movements as “a series of demands or challenges to power‐holders in the name of a social category that lacks an established political position… the interaction among actors constitutes the identity and unity of the movement” (Tilly 1985, pp. 735–736). At other moments, Tilly (1979, p. 12) has stressed that the movement is a “sustained interaction” by which such demands are made. Still, reading a movement‐as‐demand may run into problems where movements seem to contain multiple conflicting demands or change their demands over time – a problem reflected in the fact that it is not always easy to work out what would constitute “success” for a movement (Giugni 1998). Even if a programmatic set of explicit demands from a movement is unavailable, it may still be possible to analytically construct the central grounds of conflict. Indeed, for Alain Touraine, a social movement is defined by “a clear interrelation between conflicting actors and the stakes of their conflict. These three components … the definition of the identity (i) of the actor, the definition of the opponent (o), and the stakes, that is the cultural totality (t) which defines the field of conflict” (Touraine 1985, p. 761). Touraine’s i‐o‐t formulation is actor‐centered in the sense that ontologically, the movement is the actor, whereas the preceding definitions tend to read the movement as the making of a specific set of demands. More important for Touraine was to insist on a scale of conflict: A social movement exists only when the conflict has raised the stakes to historicity itself; that is, the socio‐cultural reproduction of the patterns of social life. Perhaps inevitably, this led to disappointment when movements that Touraine saw as promising somehow failed to ascend to the level of social totality (Touraine 2002). Alberto Melucci was also interested in the scale of movement action, specifying a similar three‐part definition of movements as a collective phenomenon involving “solidarity, that is, actors’ mutual recognition that they are part of a single social unit … engagement in conflict, and thus in opposition to an adversary who lays claim to the same goods or values … [and] a social movement breaks the limits of compatibility of a system” (1989, p. 29, italics in original). Both authors thus produced a demanding limitation on what counts as a social movement, and one that is not generally utilized in the empirical literature on movements today. It is problematic for analysis because it is difficult to identify an appropriate theory of totality or system against which to measure movements against. Even if we were to accept one account of a system of domination (such as capitalism, patriarchy, or colonialism), it is difficult to know in advance which claims would truly “break the limits of ­compatibility,” since such systems appear to be variable and flexible. But a movement‐ as‐actor definition need not assume that all movements must be historic actors on the world stage; we can instead take from both Touraine and Melucci a valuable focus on solidarity and identity within movements. While Tilly, as we saw above, considered identity constituted by interaction around some pre‐given demands, Melucci in particular offered a more nuanced image of collective identity as existing in a continual process of negotiation and creation and the central dimension of analysis of social movements (to which we return below).

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An alternative definitional emphasis comes from a network analysis perspective in which a movement is “a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organisations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity” (Diani 1992, p. 13). Rucht (2017, p. 45) also settles for a network‐based definition of social movement as “a network of individuals, groups, and organizations that, based on a sense of collective identity, seek to bring about social change (or resist social change) primarily by means of collective public protest.” The movement‐as‐network approach emphasizes connectivity within a movement, but without specifying the nature of that connectivity, it becomes very difficult to draw boundaries. The collective identity specified in these definitions may be part of the solution, but rather than seeing identity as an open, continual process, defining a movement this way seems to require a rather more solidified identity, which poses difficulties where scholars find multiple distinct identities within larger movement networks (as in the contemporary environmental movement: Saunders 2008). All social groups are networks of some sort, and while Rucht does imply some importance to flatter, more horizontal network structures, from a network analysis perspective a military hierarchy is a social network too (and one for which it is easier to define the boundaries). Military organizations are also involved in political conflict, and it is reasonable to posit a sense of collective identity resulting from patriotic rituals and training. So, Rucht’s inclusion of the means of collective public protest is an important addition to the movement‐as‐network definition, although, as we shall soon see, what counts as a “public protest” is itself contestable. These varying definitions help us to grasp the nature of collectivism. The movement can be considered a collective actor, rather than a set of patterned individual actions, on the basis of a collective identity. That identity includes a definition of “us,” but also of “them,” against whom claims and demands are made, generating a conflict in which the movement is active. The network identifies the fact that action must be coordinated to register as a collective phenomenon. If we wish to exclude related phenomena such as paid lobbying campaigns, astroturfing (i.e. the production of a false or exaggerated image of a grassroots campaign), or coerced demonstrations of popular power by autocrats, then the fact that action is voluntary is also important. Coordination within a movement may need to be understood rather loosely – rather than the practical communications and transactions concretely identifiable within a bounded network, it may rather be that we can see a broad similarity in the direction of travel provided by movement identity and action. Thus, my own preference is a composite definition in which a social movement is defined as a collective actor – comprising individuals, informal groups and (often) formal organizations – coordinating voluntarily to pursue a range of values or interests that bring it into conflict with perceived systems of power (Gillan forthcoming).

The Action: What Do Movements Do? The definitional debates over social movements presented above are not mere semantic wrangling, but allow us to understand the nature of our object of study.

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 305 As a result, we can generate a list of features that we might examine to understand any particular movement: • We need to know their demands and their targets, thus identifying the stakes of the conflict in which they are involved. • We should be able to understand how coordination and collaboration generates a collective identity. • We should be able to understand how the resulting conflict is pursued, that is, the change‐oriented action in which the actor is involved. All these elements may be empirically variable, but recognizing these underlying characteristics enables identification and, in principle, comparison of movements as different as the (sometimes revolutionary) movements in the Middle East and North Africa from 2010 onward and, say, the temperance movement opposing alcohol consumption in Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century. Empirical variability across different movements consists, essentially, in two things: the socio‐political environment or context of movement activity and what movements themselves actually do. This chapter focuses on the latter. An evaluation of the context in which movements operate is undoubtedly an essential element of any account of the characteristics, dynamics, and impacts of any particular movement. Elsewhere I have set out a critique of some of the main approaches to context, alongside an alternative framework centered on an appreciation of the way in which patterned interactions and surprising contingencies play out within dynamic but bounded spatio‐temporal regions (Gillan 2018). Here I mostly bracket such concerns in order to center a general account of social movements as collectives that generate their own action. Movement action can be approximately divided into: first, the actions through which movements constitute themselves – the organizing, mobilization, solidarity work, and so on that often happens away from the public gaze (this section); and second, the more frequently public actions through which movements attempt to achieve social change (next section). Much activity turns out to have both functions, but as a heuristic, this distinction will serve to structure the following discussion. There is a common narrative of the field of social movement studies, which starts with the “collective behavior tradition.” This was really composed of several theories seminally represented in Blumer (1939) and Smelser (1962), but brought together by McAdam (1982) into a target of critique (cf. Crossley 2002). The common element that McAdam critiqued was the idea that social movements were primarily understood as a set of individual reactions to a structurally shared grievance. This would cast a social injustice as an objective fact against which people would respond with protest, much as physical discomfort might stimulate an automatic reflex. McAdam’s seminal contribution was to explore the problematic, highly political processes through which a grievance could be first articulated and subsequently pursued. McAdam’s political process theory has been most influential through the notion of “political opportunity structures,” which encourages researchers to understand the ways in which changes in the socio‐political environment impact on the likelihood, character, and potential for success of movement action. But he also recognized that a process of social construction of a grievance (conceptualized as “cognitive

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liberation”) that defined it as both “unjust and subject to change through group action” (1982, p. 51) was a necessary first step, before the mobilization of a movement was conceivable (cf. Piven and Cloward 1979, pp. 3–4). Movements do cognitive liberation. A further seminal publication exposed the process by which movement groups generate “interpretive frames” in an attempt to align the interests of movement participants with those of potentially supportive bystanders (Snow et al. 1986; surprisingly few scholars have connected cognitive liberation and interpretive frames, but see Nepstad 1997; Ryan 2015). The importance of frames is not just what they communicate to bystanders, but that they are developed in the first place as an expression of the movement. Gamson’s similar notion of “collective action frame” included three components: (i) a social injustice to mobilize around; (ii) an identity (the definition of both “we” and “them”); and (iii) a claim about how movement action might be effective (Gamson 1992, pp. 7–8). So, movements create cognitive liberation by identifying social injustices as such – one might see them as enacting the sociological imagination in C. Wright Mills’ (1959) terms of turning private troubles into public issues  –  and by identifying the actors in a conflict. As Gamson hinted, movements do collective identity. The generation and negotiation of collective identity was at the heart of Melucci’s (1989, 1996) accounts of the “new social movements” of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Melucci, like McAdam, recognized that movements could not be understood as a simple response to an objectively given grievance. But he went further in exploring the cultural (or subcultural) processes through which grievances could be identified as such. While the interpretive frames approach tends to emphasize the cognitive elements of the construction of a social problem, with the concept of “resonance” being deployed to explain how participation was mobilized (Snow and Benford 1988), it has little explanation for the level of normative commitment show by movement participants. Indeed, there is an agency problem at the heart of this theoretical approach because it tends to present movements as capable of varying the presentation of their beliefs and values strategically in the service of mobilization, while those who are being mobilized seem to hold interpretative frames that are not so mutable (Gillan 2008). Explorations of collective identity demonstrate that the moral positions taken in movement struggles are meaningful, not only cognitively, but through the development of intersubjective connections productive of affective attachment. Melucci (1989, p. 35) described collective identity as an ongoing process, involving: first, formulating cognitive frameworks concerning the goals, means, and environment of action; second, activating relationships among the actors, who communicate, negotiate and make decisions; and third, making emotional investments, which enable individuals to recognize themselves in each other.

The construction and maintenance of collective identity as a process is often seen as a constitutive feature of social movements, which is why it appears in most of the social movement definitions quoted above: it “regulates membership of individuals, and defines the requisites for joining the movement” (Flesher Fominaya 2018, p. 443). Collective identity need not take the form of a “given” categorical membership, or even an especially demanding set of subcultural markers. Identity processes

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 307 are crucial even in determinedly autonomous movements that reject the use of categorical markers and formal organizations for the representation of demands; in the alter‐globalization movement this can be seen in positive evaluations of diversity and particular processes intended to maintain inclusivity (Flesher Fominaya 2010, 2018). No matter how fluid or “horizontal,” however, movements need modes of coordination in order to make decisions and plan events. Sometimes, “collective identity may crystallize into organizational forms, a system of formal rules and patterns of leadership” (Melucci 1989, pp. 34–35), and in less institutionalized settings coordination has taken on the form of a “cultural logic of networking” (Juris 2008). Either way, and as a great deal of social movement scholarship has established, movements do coordination. For much of the movement literature that flowed out of resource mobilization theory, the central question of explaining the emergence of movements rested on mobilization itself. As a result, a movement was seen as near identical with the organization of resources for mobilization. Beyond the potential persuasiveness of collective action frames, this requires forms of coordination; now often called “mobilization structures” (McAdam et al. 2001). Often, this turned on particular solutions to the “free rider problem,” understood as an outcome of rational actors analyzing the potential costs and benefits of participating in a movement pursuing collective benefits. In short: If the movement wins, everyone benefits whether or not they have taken the risk of participation; so why participate? (Olson 1965) What movements do, from this perspective, is to use resources to change the balance of costs and ­benefits and thereby generate protest. Much of this literature focused on formal organizations familiar in the US social movement scene of the period, but less central to the more informally coordinated new social movements in Europe. Today, movements are often found to be de‐centralized, horizontal networks, and there is much focus on the use of technology to solve coordination problems while attempting to avoid hierarchical power structures (for a review: Flesher Fominaya & Gillan 2017; see also: Juris 2008; Pleyers 2011; Glasius and Pleyers 2013; Castells 2015). Coordination through mobilization structures is successful if it generates protest and, subsequently, protests are seen as successful when they produce some clearly identifiable social change. That is, protest can be understood as the central strategic hinge in a movement  –  the point at which movement agency is turned from the constitution of the movement itself, to be oriented to changing wider society.

Strategic Practices: How Do Movements Seek Social Change? If the ultimate purpose of movements is to create social change, the more immediate purpose of mobilization, coordination, framing, and so on may be to create successful protest. For Verta Taylor and Nella Van Dyke (2007, p. 263), “If there is a single element that distinguishes social movements from other political actors … it is the strategic use of novel, dramatic, unorthodox, and noninstitutionalized forms of political expression to try to shape public opinion and put pressure on those in positions of authority.” This quotation reflects a quite common view of the centrality of certain forms of protest, as seen through the eyes of the dominant scholarly approaches to social movements and rooted in Tilly’s notion of “repertoires of

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c­ontention,” described below. There are, however, several challenges here that, ­suitably confronted, may improve our understanding of social movement action. Certainly, the emphasis on the strategic nature of movement actions would be widely upheld (even if there may be differences over what counts as “strategic”), but the inclusion here of shaping public opinion and pressuring authorities may forestall consideration of alternative approaches to social change (e.g. direct action aimed at forcing change in the here‐and‐now; Graeber 2009). We might also question how much protest is really noninstitutionalized: strikes would seem an obvious example of institutionalized protest in many countries, and if we really live in “social movement societies,” then it is because both the form and actions of movements have become recognized as a social institution with a quasi‐legitimate role in liberal democracies (Rucht and Neidhardt 2002). The remainder of this chapter will attempt to make sense of the breadth of change‐oriented actions of social movements. Bringing classic work on repertoires together with more recent scholarship on direct action, prefiguration, and lifestyle movements demonstrates that protests are not the only strategic forms of action that movements generate. A new typology of strategic practices will be presented that might inform a broadened research agenda on movement action. Tilly’s (1995, 2008) influential notion of “repertoires of contention” requires a brief explanation. The conceptual work here is, today, well known: Tilly saw that the forms of activity that are socially performed and recognized as protest are culturally specific and have undergone occasional historic change. A repertoire of contention contains a wide variety of scripts to be enacted (and which may well be improvised on); similarities in form make it possible for a movement to make demands on an authority and have them recognized as demands. Tilly’s historical research carefully traced a shift in repertoires of contention in advanced democracies in the late ­eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was not coincidentally tied up with developments in the democratic nation state that gave movements publically accountable figures on whom to make demands. For Tilly (2008, chapter 5) this is the birth of the modern social movement and is firmly linked with a repertoire of action ­composed of demonstrations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (often abbreviated WUNC). The massed march, proceeding toward a physical center of power with various symbolic displays of its demands, and then dispersing peacefully, is now the classic example of the form. Change is pursued indirectly, because it depends on the policies of political authorities, and demonstrations are, by‐and‐large, orderly, expressive affairs. Matteo Tiratelli’s (2018b) recent meticulous historical research demonstrates that, for Britain at least, this periodization is problematic: the unruly (and usually direct) practice of rioting not only continued much later than previously estimated, but also evolved over that period alongside, and in response to, the rise of the new repertoire of contention. Moreover, it is clearly the case that for many movements today, preferred forms of action are a difficult fit for a repertoire focused on WUNC displays. These will be explored in the following paragraphs, but first it is necessary to consider the central notions of strategy and tactics. While largely following the central idea that movement repertoires aim at social change indirectly, via public opinion and persuasion of authorities, Taylor and Van Dyke (2007, pp. 266–267) do recognize the potentially wide variability of movement

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 309 tactics oriented to social change, defining “tactical repertoires” broadly as involving contention, intention, and collective identity. The latter criterion enters as recognition that many movement actions have both an externally facing strategic intent and an internal movement‐building purpose. They further note that tactics can be distinguished “on the basis of the type of interaction taking place between the movement and its target.” Among the various classificatory schemas, Sidney Tarrow’s (1998) categorization of protest as either conventional, disruptive, or violent (in which “conventional” can be understood broadly as WUNC displays) is among the best known. Such schemas rarely relate to the intentions of movement actors, however, perhaps following Tilly, “who argued that – given the impossibility of getting inside the heads of the subjects of study – it was better to focus on the observable relations of interaction between different groups” (Doherty and Hayes 2018, p. 280). But even this approach runs into practical problems when deciding which is more disruptive between, say, a direct action intended to be disruptive (as when two activists “disarm” a war plane with hammers) or when hundreds of thousands of people disrupt the traffic of a capital city as a byproduct of an orderly march (both examples were seen in movement opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and are detailed in Gillan et al. 2008). Both are disruptive, of course, but in different ways and with different intents, and how one chooses to claim that one is more disruptive than the other seems arbitrary. Categorizing protests by levels of violence may be possible from reportage, arrest records and so on, but will only be illuminating of strategy if it is possible to answer the classic playground question: Who started it? Brian Doherty and Graeme Hayes note that “strategy denotes longer‐term thinking connecting action with overall goals, while tactics are the particular means chosen to advance them” (2018, p. 280). Tilly’s WUNC displays may be read as containing a strategy of persuasion of political authorities (perhaps via public opinion), which has been attempted through tactics such as massed marches, sit‐ins, collective hunger strikes, petitions, occupations, and much else besides. Tactics generate interactions, then, as part of an instrumental attempt to win concessions from a known interactant, and may well be adapted in response to other actors’ behaviors (McCammon et al. 2008; Williams 2016). Tracing strategic interactions between discrete “players” in bounded “arenas” has allowed the identification of a series of common dilemmas and trade‐offs faced by social movements in making action decisions (Duyvendak and Jasper 2015). Jasper’s classificatory schema is intended to fit all strategic players, who can use either coercion, persuasion, or monetary payment: “social movements rely heavily on persuasion to accomplish their goals. To the extent they rely more on coercion, they become a rebel army or a band of criminals. To the extent they rely more on paid staff, they shade into the status of interest groups” (2013, p. 1263). But Doherty and Hayes argue that approaching strategy only as instrumental decisions about achieving goals is too narrow, no matter how sophisticated our approach to the arenas or fields in which they do so. To follow their call for an actor‐centered approach to strategy demands, we should pay attention to a wider range of movement actions and examine them for their ideational content, since they represent “the process through which social movement actors define their world, including asymmetries of power and the potential means to change them” (Doherty and Hayes 2018, p. 281). WUNC displays carry an assumption that democratic politics are open to political persuasion, and that in a

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democracy a public and urgent call for change that shares the values of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment can carry significant persuasive weight. (Tilly 2008, p. 123). In the following paragraphs I will describe three alternative strategic forms that appear also to have significant contemporary relevance and signal different understandings of the relation between action and change that are embedded in movement thought and practice: direct action, prefiguration, and lifestyle action. I suggested previously that not all action forms are clearly WUNC displays, and direct action offers the most obvious alternative form. Direct action carries many meanings among activist groups, some of which are certainly primarily oriented to generating media coverage and, through that, persuading political authorities to enact some change. However, to take one key example, the British environmental direct action movement shows a distinct set of strategic preferences, which were themselves developed out of the development of Earth First! in protecting American wilderness and a longer tradition of anti‐nuclear movements in the United Kingdom (Doherty et al. 2003; Gillan 2006, chapter 4; Wall 1999; Welsh 2001). At its boldest, confrontational direct action is a “rejection of a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behavior in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative” (Graeber 2002, p. 62). Doherty and Hayes’ empirical studies of direct action “crop trashing” protests against experiments in growing genetically modified foods in Britain and France demonstrate a richer understanding of tactics. British protesters mostly chose to carry out such actions in a covert manner, often at night in small groups, and attempted wherever possible to evade arrest. French protesters chose instead to publicize their actions in advance to police and farmers, and to carry out actions during the day as civic disobedience with the aim to generate as many arrests as possible. This could not be explained by contextual factors or strategic interaction because, as the participants well knew, the judicial treatment of crop trashers was much harsher in France than in Britain. Tactical preferences, then, were explained by debates over values attached to action in the different locations, and both sets of activists were drawing on different longer traditions of direct action. These traditions included long‐standing debates on both the effectiveness and the moral valence of different ways of carrying out direct action (Doherty and Hayes 2012, 2014). The French approach to direct action illustrated here may well fit in a wider repertoire defined by WUNC displays, as the courtroom is subsequently used as a public space in which to articulate demands. But the British model simply does not fit: Direct action really was intended to have an unmediated impact on its target by destroying the very object of critique, regardless of the actions of authorities of any kind. As the Graeber quotation illustrates, direct action is sometimes said to be prefigurative. That is, actions in the present somehow embody or exemplify those that would form the basis of a preferable future society. This may apply to confrontational disruptive action where the fact people take action, “without going to the authorities to please do the thing for them” (De Cleyre 1912, n.p.), is seen to prefigure an anarchic form of social organization. Prefiguration is more often seen in less directly confrontational movement practices, however, as when movements develop “free spaces” for dialog, learning, identity development, and action planning (Futrell and Simi 2004). In her detailed ethnography of the alter‐globalization

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 311 movement, Marianne Maeckelbergh (2011, p. 3) argues that “the alterglobalization movement rests upon a practice of social change that takes prefiguration as the most strategic means for bringing about the social change they desire.” Maeckelbergh’s argument that such actions are strategic is partly directed to a vision of strategy within revolutionary socialism that stresses the importance of hierarchical organization and leadership, against which an “internal” conflict within the alter‐globalization movement had been unfolding for some years. The “horizontals” within these debates stressed the importance of constructing alternatives in the here‐and‐now, “removing the temporal distinction between the struggle in the present and a goal in the future; instead, the struggle and the goal, the real and the ideal, become one in the present” (Maeckelbergh 2011, p. 5). Much of this activity would be described as “internal” because it focused on the processes through which the alter‐globalization movement constructed its forms of organization rather than making claims on public authorities, but Maeckelbergh is right to insist that such action was strategic: If the goal is to create more inclusive political structures, and power is assumed to always exist and to perpetually centralize and lead to hierarchy, then any strategy for achieving the goal of more horizontality has to be aimed at creating structures that continuously limit this centralization. The aim can no longer be to create a moment in the future after which power and inequality will disappear. (Maeckelbergh 2011, p. 11; cf. Juris 2008; Graeber 2009)

The relationship between movement goals and the methods used to bring them about is central to claims to prefiguration as a strategic practice, although as Luke Yates (2015b) has shown, more complicated than a simplistic “means‐ends equivalence” might imply. In fact, the correspondence between means and ends is only ever partial, and prefiguration involves a larger set of interlinked micropolitical practices: experimentation with social forms, the generation of alternative perspectives, the governance of conduct, the intervention in socio‐political environments to establish and consolidate alternatives, and the demonstration and diffusion of preferred ways of life (Yates 2015b, pp. 15–17). There is limited fit here with narrower definitions of strategy (“efforts to get others to do what you want them to,” in Jasper 2015, p. 19), and prefiguration does not fit the Tillian repertoire centered on WUNC displays. And yet such practices are indubitably collective attempts to generate social change which are embedded in larger social movements. A final form of action is raised by the recent scholarly focus on political consumerism and lifestyle movements, in which individuals choose ways to conduct their lives that are shaped by values that bear on much larger socio‐political arrangements. Some political consumerism is organized in much the same way as other movement activities are, with lead organizations developing a critique of existing structures and mobilizing consumers to take action. This is not a new form of action, as Wendy Wiedenhoft’s (2008) study of the National Consumers’ League in late nineteenth‐century America demonstrates. The NCL politicized consumption and constructed a role for middle‐class women to transform their consumption practices to acts of citizenship aimed to advance the working conditions of first sales clerks and then garment manufacturers. Today, however, a more diffuse practice of ethical consumption appears to be on the rise in which a strategy for change might be summed up in

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Kevin Gillan Table 18.1  A basic typology of strategic practices in social movements. Purpose: Persuasion Domain: Exceptional Everyday

WUNC displays Lifestyle action

Enactment Direct action Prefiguration

the idea of “voting with your wallet” (Micheletti 2003; Mukherjee and Banet‐Weiser 2012). Sometimes this may be embedded in lifestyle movements such as veganism or the anti‐sweatshop movement. While not all lifestyle movements centrally concern consumption (e.g. Simmons 2018), they do all involve the development of practices in which people may engage primarily as individuals but with a motivation concerning broader social change. For Haenfler et al. (2012, p. 3) people who share politicized lifestyle practices may be understood as “groups that profess to change the world but focus more energy on cultivating a morally coherent, personally gratifying lifestyle and identity than issuing direct challenges to the state/social structure … [they are] worthy of consideration as movements – they are explicitly social change‐oriented, often extrainstitutional, and persist over time – but are more individualistic rather than collective, personal rather than social, and tend to emphasize cultural targets rather than the state.” Again, older forms of this phenomenon certainly exists, and at times lifestyle practices may be deliberately mobilized by movement organizations (e.g., concerning food: Haydu and Skotnicki 2016). Nevertheless, there exists here a set of everyday social practices that are, in the eyes of participants, politicized and strategically oriented to changing the world. The preceding discussion is summarized as four ideal types of action in Table 18.1. Each type implies beliefs concerning the efficacy of different kinds of action and in different domains. WUNC displays and direct actions are key action forms that are widely understood as protest. In both cases, targets for action are defined in a relatively straightforward way, but they differ in their strategic assumptions concerning the relationship of movements to their targets. From an actor‐centered viewpoint, this is a difference in character that is about interaction but exists in intention: it is logically prior to how the action in fact unfolds in its spatio‐temporal setting. Both action forms exist in the temporal domain of the exceptional: neither can be truly embedded in an individual’s day‐to‐day life but must be pursued according to the availability of opportunities for action, organizational resources and individual commitments to participate. Conversely, prefiguration, and lifestyle action exist in the domain of the everyday and are therefore difficult to recognize as “protest” as such. Nevertheless, they are practices oriented to the generation of social change, often are located in wider social movements, and carry strategic assumptions drawn from participants’ worldviews. Prefiguration is closely aligned with direct action in signaling a belief in the necessity of unmediated social change, but instead of taking a conflictual and exceptional strategic route, participants in prefiguration take on long‐term collective projects to enact changes in the routines of everyday life that in themselves are intended to be generative of better worlds. Lifestyle actions are harder to contain in a simplified typology (and have been less studied for their strategic orientation). They do,

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 313 however, clearly share with p ­ refiguration an emphasis on making change stick through routinized behavior at a local level. The discussion of protest strategies and tactics above has also revealed an important theoretical development in the literature. We began with repertoires of contention as a set of culturally recognized forms of interaction that allow the making and receiving of claims between movements and authorities, and by the end we have social practices that describe a combination of material and normative features underlying politicized actions that may be as oriented to maintaining the requirements of everyday life as making claims on authorities. Conceptualizing action as practices may offer benefits in studying movements. Following Andreas Reckwitz, Yates defines “practices” as “routinized way[s] in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood” (Reckwitz, quoted in Yates 2015a, p. 3). Like Tillian repertoires, then, the concept of practices recognizes that action forms may be performed because they are habitual or routine, and this helps to explain why expressive action is patterned. The habitual features of practices may also help to explained patterned variance in action forms across different socio‐political environments, as recent applications of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus reveal (Ivanou and Flores 2018; Shoshan 2018). But Tilly’s repertoire shifts are epochal and encourage a focus on sets of markedly different action forms on the basis of their characteristics in interaction. By focusing on more specific practices that admit of greater variety across time and space, we can gain, as Yates argues, “a better understanding of how ideas and politics inhere in the activities – tactical or everyday – carried out by movements” (2015a, p. 8; cf. Tiratelli 2018a, b).

Conclusions This chapter began with three approaches to understanding the nature of collectivity in social movements: movements as demands, actors, or networks. At the level of definition, these approaches share at least as much as divides them. When it comes to understanding the constitution of movements, however, I prioritized the movement‐as‐actor model, presenting cognitive liberation, interpretative framing, collective identity, and coordination as processes through which movements ­bootstrap themselves into existence. Such processes are, of course, shaped by the socio‐political environments in which they occur, but the purpose of this chapter has been to reveal the characteristics of movements that unfold from their self‐directed action. The remainder of the chapter then focused on a variety of forms of strategic action pursued by social movements: that is, what movements do to produce the social changes they demand. For many movements, the classic display of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment – premised on a reasonably democratic polity in which publically making demands of a political authority stands at least some chance of success – remains the mainstay of change action. The specific actions taken within this repertoire may be highly varied, and could equally be conceptualized as tactics or strategic practices. However, attendance to a number of other ways in which movements attempt to create social change reveals a need to broaden our conception of strategic action.

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I distinguished four ideal types on the basis of two dimensions: the strategic orientation to either persuasion of others or direct enactment of change, on the one hand; the location of action in the temporal domains of the exceptional or the everyday, on the other. I also followed those scholars who have been conceptualizing such activity through the concept of practices. Practices may well become habitual preferences, which seems an ill fit for the “strategic action” of the game theoretic kind; but analysis of practices reveals too the ideational content of action, which may well lie below the surface yet still contain the resolutions of old debates on how to achieve change. Analysis of strategic practices can encourage the unearthing of strategic impulses alongside the recognition that some activity is patterned simply by the cognitive convenience of not having to treat every situation as a strategic cost–benefit calculation. The growing focus on strategic practices in social movement studies opens a very promising research agenda in making sense of movements as both actors and actions. If this makes the boundaries of what counts as a social movement appear fuzzy, this is simply a reflection of the essentially contested nature of “social movement” as a concept (Gillan forthcoming) and the difficulty of confronting the “Meluccian challenge” of analyzing movements without starting with an assumption of their unity (Gillan 2008). The solution to this may not lie in the ever‐narrower specification of what might count as a social movement but instead, as has already been suggested (Maeckelbergh 2011; Yates 2015a; Tiratelli 2018b), switching our unit of analysis to strategic practices instead of movements. Finally, the dominant theoretical frameworks in social movement scholarship are sometimes criticized as Eurocentric because they have been primarily developed in case studies based in Europe and North America (although more recent work in the contentious politics tradition has deliberately looked further afield, e.g. Tilly and Tarrow 2007). There is now an important research agenda opening up to examine both the degree to which “Western” frameworks are applicable in Asia, Africa, and South America, and to examine what can be gained from alternative theoretical resources rooted in “epistemologies of the south” (Santos 2014; Cox et  al. 2017; Fadaee 2018). The depiction of strategic practices developed here may also seem Eurocentric, especially as the focus on lifestyle movements and political consumerism appears to place us firmly in the realm of “rich world problems.” But a broadened focus on how people conduct their lives with an eye on improving their socio‐political environment need not exactly take this form. For instance, Asef Bayat’s (2013) depiction of “social non‐movements” is rich with details of how the poor in the Middle East find everyday strategies to make life more livable that end up transforming the urban environment and generating latent networks that formed a base for the uprisings of the Arab Spring. James Scott’s (1987) classic account of “weapons of the weak” also suggests potential for the exploration of a wide variety of strategic practices existing outside “the West.” As in the strategic practices previously discussed, what we find here may trouble our usual notions of “protest” or “movement” but remains firmly attached to the study of purposive efforts at social change embedded in values and interests that generate conflict with systems of power. This final step in broadening the research agendas associated with social movement studies may also vitally contribute to understanding the urgent questions of social transformation that confront many areas of the social sciences today.

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 315 References Ayoub, P. and Paternotte, D. (2014). LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe: A Rainbow Europe? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bayat, A. (2013). Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, 2e. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Blumer, H. (1939). Collective behavior. In: Principles of Sociology (ed. R.E. Park), 219–288. New York: Barnes and Noble. Castells, M. (2015). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Second Edition. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cox, L. (2018). Why Social Movements Matter: An Introduction. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International. Cox, L., Nilsen, A.G., and Pleyers, G. (2017). Social movement thinking beyond the core: theories and research in post‐colonial and post‐socialist societies. Interface 9 (2): 1–36. Crossley, N. (2002). Making Sense of Social Movements. Buckingham: Open University Press. De Cleyre, Voltarine. 1912. “Direct Action.” Spunk Library. http://www.spunk.org/texts/ writers/decleyre/sp001334.html. della Porta, D. (2016). Where Did the Revolution Go? Contentious Politics and the Quality of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diani, M. (1992). The concept of social movement. The Sociological Review 40 (1): 1–25. Doherty, B. and Hayes, G. (2012). Tactics, traditions and opportunities: British and French crop‐trashing actions in comparative perspective. European Journal of Political Research 51 (4): 540–562. Doherty, B. and Hayes, G. (2014). Having your day in court: judicial opportunity and tactical choice in anti‐GMO campaigns in France and the United Kingdom. Comparative Political Studies 47 (1): 3–29. Doherty, B. and Hayes, G. (2018). Tactics and strategic action. In: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (ed. D.A. Snow, S.A. Soule, H. Kriesi and H.J. McCammon), 269–288. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Doherty, B., Plows, A., and Wall, D. (2003). The preferred way of doing things’: the British direct action movement. Parliamentary Affairs 56 (4): 669–686. Duyvendak, J.W. and Jasper, J.M. (eds.) (2015). Players and Arenas: The Interactive Dynamics of Protest. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Edwards, G. (2014). Social Movements and Protest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fadaee, S. (ed.) (2018). Understanding Southern Social Movements. Routledge. Flesher Fominaya, C. (2010). Creating cohesion from diversity: the challenge of collective identity formation in the global justice movement. Sociological Inquiry 80 (3): 377–404. Flesher Fominaya, C. (2018). Collective identity in social movements. In: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (ed. D.A. Snow, S.A. Soule, H. Kriesi and H.J. McCammon), 429–445. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Flesher Fominaya, C. and Gillan, K. (2017). Navigating the technology‐media‐movements complex. Social Movement Studies 16 (4): 383–402. Futrell, R. and Simi, P. (2004). Free spaces, collective identity, and the persistence of U.S. white power activism. Social Problems 51 (1): 16–42. Gamson, W.A. (1992). The social psychology of collective action. In: Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (ed. A.D. Morris and K.M. Mueller), 53–76. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gillan, Kevin. (2006). “Meaning in Movement. An Ideational Analysis of Sheffield‐Based Protest Networks Contesting Globalisation and War.” PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield. http://kevingillan.info/tag/thesis.

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Gillan, K. (2008). Understanding meaning in movements: a hermeneutic approach to frames and ideologies. Social Movement Studies 7 (3): 247–263. Gillan, K. (2018). Temporality in social movement theory: vectors and events in the neoliberal Timescape. Social Movement Studies https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1548965. Gillan, K. (forthcoming). Social movements: sequences vs. fuzzy temporality. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory, vol. 2 (ed. P. Kivisto). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillan, K., Pickerill, J., and Webster, F. (2008). Anti‐War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age, New Security Challenges. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Giugni, M. (1998). Was it worth the effort? The outcomes and consequences of social ­movements. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 371–393. Glasius, M. and Pleyers, G. (2013). The global moment of 2011: democracy, social justice and dignity. Development and Change 44 (3): 547–567. Graeber, D. (2002). The new anarchists. New Left Review 13: 61–73. Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh: AK Press. Haenfler, R., Johnson, B., and Jones, E. (2012). Lifestyle movements: exploring the ­intersection of lifestyle and social movements. Social Movement Studies 11 (1): 1–20. Haydu, J. and Skotnicki, T. (2016). Three layers of history in recurrent social movements: the case of food reform. Social Movement Studies 15 (4): 345–360. Ivanou, A. and Flores, R. (2018). Routes into activism in post‐soviet Russia: habitus, homology, hysteresis. Social Movement Studies 17 (2): 159–174. Jasper, J.M. (2013). Strategy. In: The Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements (ed. D.A. Snow, D.d. Porta, B. Klandermans and D. McAdam). Malden, MA: Wiley. Jasper, J.M. (2015). Playing the game. In: Players and Arenas: The Interactive Dynamics of Protest (ed. J.M. Jasper and J.W. Duyvendak), 1–21. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Johnston, H. (2014). What Is a Social Movement? Cambridge: Policy Press. Juris, J.S. (2008). Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maeckelbergh, M. (2011). Doing is believing: prefiguration as strategic practice in the Alterglobalization movement. Social Movement Studies 10 (1): 1–20. McAdam, D. (1982). Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., and Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCammon, H.J., Chaudhuri, S., Hewitt, L. et  al. (2008). Becoming full citizens: the U.S. Women’s jury rights campaigns, the pace of reform, and strategic adaptation. American Journal of Sociology 113 (4): 1104–1147. McCarthy, J.D. and Zald, M.N. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: a partial theory. American Journal of Sociology 82 (6): 1212–1241. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present. Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. London: Century Hutchinson. Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Micheletti, M. (2003). Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, C.W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. London: Oxford University Press. Mukherjee, R. and Banet‐Weiser, S. (eds.) (2012). Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times. New York: NYU Press.

Social Movements, Protest, and Practices of Social Change 317 Nepstad, S.E. (1997). The process of cognitive liberation: cultural synapses, links, and frame contradictions in the U.S.‐Central America peace movement. Sociological Inquiry 67 (4): 470–487. Oldfield, J.R. (2013). Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Piven, F.F. and Cloward, R.A. (1979). Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Random House. Pleyers, G. (2011). Alter‐Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rosen, A. (2013). Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903–1914. London: Routledge. Rucht, D. (2017). Studying social movements: some conceptual challenges. In: The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective (ed. S. Berger and H. Nehring), 39–62. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rucht, D. and Neidhardt, F. (2002). Towards a ‘movement society’? On the possibilities of institutionalizing social movements. Social Movement Studies 1 (1): 7–30. Ryan, H.E. (2015). Affect’s effects: considering art‐activism and the 2001 crisis in Argentina. Social Movement Studies 14 (1): 42–57. Santos, B.d.S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Routledge. Saunders, C. (2008). Double‐edged swords? Collective identity and solidarity in the environment movement. British Journal of Sociology 59 (2): 227–253. Scott, J.C. (1987). Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shoshan, A. (2018). Habitus and social movements: how militarism affects organizational repertoires. Social Movement Studies 17 (2): 144–158. Simmons, J. (2018). ‘Not that kind of atheist’: scepticism as a lifestyle movement. Social Movement Studies 17 (4): 437–450. Sinha, M. (2016). The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smelser, N.J. (1962). Theory of Collective Behavior, International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Snow, D.A. and Benford, R.D. (1988). Ideology, frame resonance and participant m ­ obilization. In: International Social Movement Research Volume 1 (ed. B. Klandermans, H. Kriesi and S. Tarrow), 197–216. JAI Press. Snow, D.A., Burke Rochford, E., Worden, S.K., and Benford, R.D. (1986). Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation. American Sociological Review 51 (4): 464–481. Snow, D.A., Soule, S.A., Kriesi, H., and McCammon, H.J. (2018). Introduction. In: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (ed. D.A. Snow, S.A. Soule, H. Kriesi and H.J. McCammon), 1–16. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, V. and Van Dyke, N. (2007). ‘Get up, Stand up’: tactical repertoires of social movements. In: The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (ed. D.A. Snow, S.A. Soule and H. Kriesi), 262–293. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Thörn, H. (2006). Anti‐Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Tilly, C. (1979). “Social Movements and National Politics.” CRSO Working Paper 197. University of Michigan. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50971/1/197.pdf. Tilly, C. (1995). Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Tilly, C. (1985). Models and Realities of Popular Collective Action. Social Research 52 (4): 717–747. Tilly, C. (2008). Contentious Performances, Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. and Tarrow, S. (2007). Contentious Politics. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm. Tiratelli, M. (2018a). Reclaiming the everyday: the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots. Social Movement Studies 17 (1): 64–84. Tiratelli, M. (2018b). Rioting and Time: Collective Violence in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, 1800–1939. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester. Touraine, A. (1985). An introduction to the study of social movements. Social Research 52 (4): 749–788. Touraine, A. (2002). The importance of social movements. Social Movement Studies 1 (1): 89–95. Wall, D. (1999). Earth First! And the Anti‐Roads Movement. Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements. London: Routledge. Welsh, I. (2001). Anti‐nuclear movements: failed projects or heralds of a direct action milieu? Sociological Research Online 6 (3): www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/welsh2.html. Wiedenhoft, W. (2008). An analytical framework for studying the politics of consumption: the case of the National Consumers’ League. Social Movement Studies 7 (3): 281–303. Williams, M.S. (2016). Strategic innovation in US anti‐sweatshop movement. Social Movement Studies 15 (3): 277–289. Yates, L. (2015a). Everyday politics, social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona’s Social Centres. The British Journal of Sociology 66 (2): 236–258. Yates, L. (2015b). Rethinking prefiguration: alternatives, micropolitics and goals in social movements. Social Movement Studies 14 (1): 1–21.

19 War and Society Miguel A. Centeno and Vicki Yang

War, whatever its nature, is a social fact  –  a reflection and consequence of social structure, group norms, and relations. It involves the organization of violence through the coordination of many and the support of some social infrastructure. War is about inflicting as much pain as is necessary to other human beings, to the point that they cease to exist or are willing to accept subjugation, while withstanding as much pain as the opponents may hurl. However, we need to discriminate between what we might call impulsive and instrumental forms of aggression (McEllistrem 2004). Aggression or violence that is impulsive is associated with anger and emotion in response to particular environmental stimuli; it is violence as an end in itself. We do often see this type of violence in war in the midst of battle, where the emotional states of combatants will be primed for aggressive behavior. Thus, war may be partly defined as the social and political space in which this kind of aggression is allowed and encouraged. But war as a social fact is not about and cannot depend on the individual acting out of aggressive impulses. It is a function of what has been called “coalitionary aggression” (Smith 2007). That is, wars involve aggression not of some completely independent individuals but of groups of people united in some way to act in concert. War is defined by instrumental or premeditated aggression: violence as a tool in the pursuit of some other end. If the first type of violence is associated with the classical conditioning of innate reflexes, this form is about operant conditioning driven by expectation of a desired re‐enforcement (McEllistrem 2004). It is associated with the most socialized and most valued members of a society: those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of their social unit.

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Part of what makes war an excellent candidate for sociological study is the way in which it is an example of micro‐level motivations and activity (soldiers, officers), meso‐level coordination and strategies (group training, particular engagements and wars), and macro‐level political coordination and intent. These levels of organization exist at the inter‐ and intra‐group and society level and at the institutional level, creating observable social facts that are about more than the sum of the aggregate participants of war.

Born or Bred for War? To what extent is war particular to humans? The consensus of research is that (i) humans are certainly not the only species that shows aggression against its own, (ii) coordinated aggression by groups is also not unique to humans, and (iii) other ­animals engage in aggressive behavior that looks remarkably like ours, including war‐like behavior. What may best distinguish human violent behavior from those of animals is that we are the only species that is reflexive about its own capacity for violence. We have a considerable archive of moral condemnations of violence and also just as large a stack of literary and philosophical justifications and invocations of it. We ponder alternatives and circumstances. Arguably, we are the only species that plans and executes mass killing while being quite aware of what we are doing. But how biologically ingrained is our penchant for war? There is considerable evidence that aggression in part is a natural, adaptive response to certain situations and stimuli (Nelson 2006). Attack behavior, for example, appears to result from the stimulation of the hypothalamus. Aggressive behavior can be induced by increases in male sex hormones, especially testosterone. A great deal of work has been done on the regulation of aggression by neurotransmitters. Continuing research is attempting to establish if pathologically violent people share physiological or genetic characteristics that help explain their behavior. One interesting new indication is that violent individuals may not be programmed for such behavior, but actually lack the equivalent programming for empathy (Baron‐Cohen 2011). “Dehumanized perception,” which may facilitate violence and ­brutality, is not just the province of a few, but may be elicited in broader groups with particular signals (Harris and Fiske 2006, 2011). But there is equal evidence that we have instincts for cooperation and for affection. That human beings are hard‐wired for behaviors is clear; but it should also be obvious that the on/off switches of these are not deterministically preset. War has been almost the exclusive domain of men. Males make up more than 99% of global military forces throughout history, and even today, with the increasing participation of women in the military, global forces are still 97% male (Goldstein 2001, p. 10). But why is this the case? Are males biologically more prone to fighting, or are they taught to do so? It is undeniable that the taboo on female participation and the primacy of males in any military activity is pervasive. There is certainly no shortage of evidence of the extent to which a varied number of cultures drew a gendered boundary around ­military service. Military service is overtly associated with masculinity and the onset of



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manhood (rituals for acceptance as a warrior and as an adult male are often the same), while femininity is associated with submission to and support of the warrior. In general, the likelihood of women participating in battle increases when they are on the side of a radical social change, when they belong to a marginal group, or when they find themselves geographically or politically distant from the center of social power. Apart from the traditional association of war with masculinity, studies indicate that men and women respond differently to aggression on a biochemical level. While male responses to stress emphasize the flight‐or‐fight dichotomy, female responses emphasize a strategy best labeled tend‐and‐befriend (Fiske 2010, p. 403). It is not clear how biologically driven these differences may be – aggressive behavior is linked to testosterone – or whether it simply reflects an overwhelming process of socialization. Whatever its origins, once the male monopoly on war was established, cultural reproduction would assure that this division of labor would be perpetuated beyond its evolutionary functions. But why would males want to “own” war? While the costs of battle are obvious and women may be supposed to be spared these, they are also kept from the privileges associated with participating in them. The link between military service and the right to citizenship or property ownership, for example, is deep and common. The monopolization of violent labor may have its costs for men, but it also assured their exclusive access to political and economic authority.

The Universality of War The argument for the temporal and geographic universality of war has been best made by Lawrence Keeley (1996) and supported by the work of Steven LeBlanc. According to Keeley, definitive evidence of homicidal violence appears the minute Homo sapiens arrive on the scene. Keeley argues that there is simply no evidence that warfare in small‐ scale societies was more rare or a less‐serious undertaking than among more “civilized” societies. Nor is it the case that these ancient wars were less lethal: the killing ratio of “primitive” war appears to be the same or higher than in “modern” war. Scholars including Douglas Fry and Brian Ferguson strongly disagree with Keeley. For these authors, the evidence cited by Keeley reflects the existence of inter‐personal violence (which they appear to agree may be inevitable), but does not provide confirmation for the existence of their more demanding definition of war, which involves conflict between mass groups. War, they suggest, is a product of the creation and aggregation of stored surplus, which was only made possible with the advent of ­agriculture and permanent settlements in the Neolithic era (10–8000 bce). This argument is supported by the work of Guilaine and Zammit (2005), who suggest that while both Neanderthals and Cro‐Magnons were clearly capable of violence, conflict tended to be circumscribed at the level of individuals. Two sites from the Mesolithic period (12 000–10 000 bce) illustrate the turn to organized group conflict. The first are the famous cave paintings in Ares del Maestre, where a number of individuals are clearly depicted to be working in unison to fight another group doing the same. The second is the burial site in Djebel Sahaba in northern Sudan, where the remains of at least 59 individuals have been found, most exhibiting damage from human weapons. Guiliane and Zammit suggest that at least some of

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these conflicts are linked to increasing competition for control of land and water, as well as the first indications of social inequality and competition for control (Boix 2015). While the first appearance of warfare varies by region (Ferguson 2008), warfare as we have defined it seems closely associated with the establishment of more sedentary living arrangements, whether endogenously developed in each locale or imported by some other group (Ferguson 2008) – an association that also holds in Mesoamerica (Hassig 1992). The positive correlation between social complexity and war making is quite strong among anthropological studies (Eckhardt 1990; Fry 2007). If civilization is about the synchronization of needs and hierarchies among large aggregate populations, then war may not only be conducive to civilization but the ultimate expression of it. The conclusion we can come to from the evidence available is that while interpersonal violence may be “hard‐wired” in us, the more complex process that we call war is not. Over time, institutions arose to repress intra‐group aggression and direct it toward the outside. This process had two basic requirements: a political hierarchy that could impose the internal control and coercion needed to manage aggression, a hierarchy of identity whereby obligations to the collective overrode self‐preservation or duty to immediate kin. This same process also required the creation of enough of a collective identity to distinguish one’s own group from those against whom aggression was prohibited and those against whom it was encouraged.

Why War? What is the rationale behind organized, instrumental violence? War is often about control over scarce resources. In many ways, war comes about when some group decides that the costs of violence are outweighed by the benefits to be gained in engaging in it. Some have suggested that the failure to discover significant signs of organized violence in the Paleolithic era may be because the population density was so low as to make struggles over resources moot (Guiliane and Zammit 2005, p. 33). Thus, once there were enough humans to be able to come into contact over a disputed good, organized violence was inevitable. Furthermore, the Agricultural Revolution may have not only produced a key motive for war but also its means, by enabling groups to produce the surplus necessary for sustaining large‐scale campaigns. However important the rational competition for resources may be, we have yet to explain the emotional impact of war and its cultural resonance. The willingness of soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the collective good cannot be totally explained by some socio‐biological instinct for group self‐preservation or enrichment. The culturalist perspective – a perennial contender that has gained new traction over the last 30 years – argues that conflict between some societies is inevitable. In some ways, these explanations substitute the evolutionary or genetic disposition toward violence with an equally deterministic view of the essential characteristics of certain societies and cultures. One problem with such accounts is that they are usually used to explain the behavior of either perceived enemies or societies that the observers have somehow declared as “beyond the pale” of civilized behavior. An alternative take on the culture of war is Jeremy Black’s notion of “bellicosity” (1998), which refers to a more



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time‐specific set of popular or elite inclinations toward accepting violence as an inevitable part of inter‐societal relations or granting greater legitimacy to martial institutions. It accepts the possibility that cultural repertoires can be used by some to lower the threshold at which violence is tolerated. From this perspective, wars happen not because cultures push us toward them, but because cultural prohibitions against violence are lowered under conditions of perceived threat. The group psychologies that shape individual behavior are not mere aggregations of individual violent tendencies, but rather the result of social processes that were part and parcel of group formation. There is some evidence that differentiation by  physical differences and other signals lead to cohesion within “like” groups (Gil‐White 2001) and “in‐group bias.” In this sense, war is not necessarily the opponent of civilization or collective social life, but its handmaiden – for if we choose to celebrate the creation of an “us” as the basic social act of humanity, then we may have no choice but to accept the creation of a “them.” Interactionist and game theoretic perspectives lie at the heart of many social scientific theories on war. Experiments using reiterative games seek to understand war not as the product of a single agent’s desire or strategy, but as the product of the actions and expectations of multiple relevant parties. A variation on the interaction perspective, presented by Keeley, argues that many wars are “neighborhood effects” caused by the presence of a particularly aggressive group. This suggests that it is not necessary for all involved in a conflict to be aggressive; rather, the (still unexplained) presence of one “bad apple” will transform the entire barrel. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2011) identify a fascinating paradox in human history: “the tension between the relentless logic of self‐interested behavior and the ubiquity of collective action” (p. 6). Human beings are unique in that cooperation extends beyond immediate genealogical kin and may include strangers. War as organized violence may be the key to this apparent contradiction. First, societies with higher levels of aggregation tend to have advantages over those with lower levels (Flannery and Marcus 2012). Those groups that were able to organize themselves in a violent competition for resources in periods of dramatic environmental change or increasing population density (Christian 2004) would have a distinct advantage over those that remain atomized. Following the logic of “group selection” reintroduced by recent authors such as Boehm (2012) and Wilson (2012), we might speak of war as a learned behavior that selected for those groups that were able to practice it most efficiently. Once organized violence was unleashed into an environment of increasing population density, sedentary social development, and intensified competition for resources, only those who adapted could and would survive. The same factors also allowed for the development of collective notions of shared identities, and the socialization of cultures of opposition to strangers. In a sad reversal of 1960s utopianism, “coming together” may not be the recipe for peace, but just the opposite.

What War Feels Like What does it feel like to be in battle? A survey of the immense amount of scholarly, literary, and popular writing on war would indicate the primacy of two emotions: confusion and loneliness. Together, they define the special terror of battle.

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Confusion comes from the fact that, for most of history, most individuals in a battle have had no idea of where they might be or what role they are meant to play in the larger drama of the battle. Well into the twentieth century, the average soldier did not have access to maps, nor would they have been able to read them. Often, soldiers would lose their sense of time as the flow of days and exhaustion mixed into a blur. Even today’s most advanced soldiers with their GPS apparatus and their constant feedback from command may feel lost within an urban warren or dislocated by the flow of battle. The ever‐present threat of death makes existential loneliness inseparable from battle. Warriors have been known to bunch together to provide each other emotional re‐enforcement  –  although this became more fatal following the development of artillery. To this psychological trauma we can, of course, add the obvious observation that battle is an extremely unpleasant physical experience. Churchill’s famous list of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” (1940) might more accurately also include mud, vomit, urine, and feces. The very pervasiveness of fear, rather than romanticized notions of machismo, should indicate that we cannot understand war as a simple expression of aggression. Rather, we must ask how war as a social institution is able to push millions into ­situations that they would under normal circumstances avoid, and we must also examine the role of cowardice in warfare (Walsh 2014). There are clear patterns in the probability of both individual and collective violence. We are more likely see excessive violence, atrocities, or brutality when the lines dividing the two sides are (in roughly increasing order): ideological, religious, and racial. That is, the more alien or threatening the enemy, the more likely that whatever bounds of behavior may be normal in war will be crossed. It is critical to note that this distance does not need to be “real” or recognizable to an outsider, merely salient to the group at war. Randall Collins (2008) notes that cruelty and barbarity can be forms of a kind of boundary management – they both reflect and mark who is on the inside and who is outside the violent group (pp. 119–120). In many religions, for example, there is simultaneously a call of charity, forgiveness, and love to coreligionists and a call for hatred and rejection for those outside of the faith. In war, we may observe self‐sacrifice and love for comrades alongside cruelty toward those deigned the enemy.

Where Do Warriors Come From? Given that the vast majority of human beings across time and space are neither idealized warriors nor blood‐lusting madmen, how is it that large numbers have not only obeyed orders that would place them in danger, but are also engaged in forms of violence that would normally be considered unthinkable? One possible answer is that many appear to enjoy war. Here, we are not speaking of marginally psychotic personalities or of “adrenaline junkies,” but of “ordinary men” (Browning 1992) who relish the particular conditions of armed conflict (Marlantes 2011). There is “the glory that never dies” that Achilles chose over a long life  –  an appeal that was more relevant in warrior societies than in modern mass armies. Joy also comes through the bonding experience with one’s comrades and



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through the retrospective relief of survival. In battle, warriors have no choice but to focus on the “here and now” if they are to survive, and in concentrating so intensely experience what Robert Graves called “life’s discovered transitoriness” (Hollander 1999, p. 188). Another answer to our question of how society mans the engine of war is that many warriors had no choice but to fight and die. Coercion has a long history in warfare and some military tactics have been designed to enforce the discipline of fighting and facing danger. The effectiveness of coercion in part depends on the nature of the battle. Relatively small set‐piece combat can be easily mentored. As the size of the battlefield, the length of engagement, and the complexity of battle increase, the possibility of constant and active vigilance is reduced. Despite the critical importance of coercion, at the heart of the social phenomenon of war is an institution that transforms individuals with fears of and ethical objections to killing into elements of a collective whole that is designed to withstand horrific pain and to inflict it on others. What is the basis of this cohesion? Indoctrination into a set of values – including camaraderie, leadership, faith, honor, and courage – is much more important than coercion. Small fighting groups are what Stephen Crane called “mysterious fraternities born out of smoke and danger of death” (Crane 1998, p. 31). Throughout history and across geography, descriptions of fighting emphasize the importance of friendship and the semi‐erotic bond that unites men in battle. Wartime is often remembered as the period of life when men had their most intense friendships and for many veterans, their memory of military service is often filled with affection for those with whom they served. The rights and obligations of leadership are a second fundamental military value. While warrior societies do possess a certain democratic ethos, even the most basic organized armies are inherently hierarchical. The importance of a command structure increases with organizational complexity, but there appears to be something about military action that both requires and fosters leadership (Davis 2013; Keegan 1987). Contemporary armies devote a great deal of time and effort to cultivating leadership qualities. Because the military must often depend on ordinary men to do extraordinary things, it has to institutionalize and standardize leadership training to produce the results needed. Faith in a set of principles is a third critical military value, providing both a rationale for action and, perhaps, a sense of protection. Faith provides internal solace amidst the chaos of battle by assuring the warrior that not only is one’s cause right, but that some higher authority will protect the righteous (Armstrong 2014). Honor, which may be defined as the absence of self‐reproach, is the necessary foundation of any military system (French 2003; Hampson 1973). To maintain one’s honor is to be certain that one has kept allegiance to what is due or right and an unquestioning obligation to live by these rules. Honor may be based on individual qualities or on membership in a group – the squad, regiment, or country. Note that the actual content of the rules may vary widely, but among military professionals, adherence to the code of honor provides an ideological link across a wide variety of cultures and behaviors. Though this can be disrupted if the definitions vary too widely (e.g. what is an honorable way to treat civilians), honor remains

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the military lingua franca. Because honor demands unquestioning compliance, we might argue that honor demands sacrifice: obedience without sacrifice is not an expression of honor. Notions of honor and sacrifice are at the core of the stoicism that characterizes so many warrior cultures (Sherman 2005). Courage is also central to any military code (Miller 2000). Courage is distinguished from bravery: “bravery is in the blood, but courage is in the soul. Bravery is instinctive…courage is a virtue” (quoted in Stephenson 2012, p. 106). Bravery is associated with reckless behavior or a willingness to accept risks, often accompanied by a disregard for consequences. Courage, by contrast, implies a willingness to deal with adversity in the face of fear. Courage is a form of self‐control based on the conscious effort to manage our animal instincts for self‐preservation (Clendinnen 1985). It represents a compromise between rashness and overcaution. The sense of obligation known as duty links together faith, camaraderie, and courage. It is the force that binds warriors to their comrades and to the collectives that they represent. In many ways, duty, which is about the submission of one’s own will to that of the collective, is the antithesis of the warrior ethos embodied by Achilles (it is more closely aligned with the ethos of Aeneas). Duty is inseparable from discipline. The modern notion of discipline as defined by Weber (1946a) emphasizes the “the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact execution of the received order” (p. 253). Obedience must be uniform and based on habitual routinized drill rather than heroic ecstasy or personal devotion. This is the core behavioral focus on which the ethical values described above revolve. Military collectives have been in the forefront of constructing this kind of discipline. Once the armed force was no longer representing an organic social unit (such as a family or a small clan), the need arose for a cohesive principle that would bind warriors together and allow them to function as a single unit. Throughout history, armed forces have attempted various means of inculcating obedience to a hierarchical command structure. To do so, militaries have often created what Foucault describes as institutions that “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1995 [1975], p. 201). The sociologist Erving Goffman (1961) has called such institutions “total institutions”: situations in which a group is isolated from broader society in work, recreation, and sleep. For contemporary recruits, basic training is the latest expression of these efforts of psychological manipulation (Franke 2000; Siddle 1995).

The Progress of War The central goal of military organization is to optimize the instrumental use of violence so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The progress of war over the millennia has been characterized by the increasing complexity of tactics and strategies, greater organizational sophistication, and the imposition of more elaborate forms of discipline. These requirements changed everything from the type of warrior formed by society to the form of political organization required to do so. Each shift has been accompanied by revolutionary changes in operations, logistics, technology, and social support (Archer et  al. 2002; Chaliand 1994; Jones 2001; Lacey and Murray 2013).



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How did the pattern of mass battle come to dominate the globe? We cannot trace its prehistoric origins with any precision, but we can observe other social developments that appeared to occur in tandem. As the complexity of the violence grew, it seems logical that it was accompanied, if not preceded by, the imposition of hierarchical authority. The social basis for this type of organization appears to have been relatively similar in societies around the world. All were characterized by class inequalities, dependency on a mass of agricultural producers, and political authorities or states that were largely dedicated to war making (Boix 2015). While it is uncertain whether the states were created in order to make war or war arose because of the development of competing states, the relationship between phenomenon and institution was clearly established (Tilly 1985, 1992). These developments appeared to have happened independently, although not simultaneously, in most major agrarian civilizations of the ancient world beginning around 3500 bce (Ferrill 1985; Herwig et  al. 2003; Keegan 1993; Trigger 2003). Within each region, the new forms of war may have developed in one or two centers and then spread. Despite the social and material limitations of ancient warfare, ­evidence indicates that already by the mid‐second millennium bce, armies were capable of considerably complex maneuvers (Gabriel 2005). If contemporary militaries have a common ancestor, it is the Roman army (Goldsworthy 2011). Thanks to their better training, the Romans dominated the Mediterranean basin for close to 500 years. Each soldier in the Roman army knew his exact place and role and could count on his fellow soldiers to do their duty. In the words of Vegetius, “Victory was granted not by mere numbers and innate courage, but by skill and training … [Romans] owed the conquest of the world to … military training, discipline in their camps, and practice in warfare” (quoted in Parker 1995, p. 57). The disappearance of imperial armies during the last half of the first millennium led to a fragmentation of military authority and a return to the value of individual prowess in battle (Jones 1987, p. 94). Combined with the diffusion of the stirrup, this produced the heyday of aristocratic war in the West. Along its frontiers and toward the East, the same general collapse of imperial powers helped foster the return of the nomad to relevance following the millennia‐long domination of infantry‐based militaries rooted in sedentary culture. While the horse and the individual warrior could dominate the battlefield for centuries, they could not resist the twin developments of centralized political ­ authority and gunpowder‐based weaponry. The former was able to create a human mass against which military charges would break, while the latter provided a weapon that soldiers could not escape or evade. In an interesting contradiction that would remain constant through the twentieth century, the standardization, bureaucratization, and general imposition of order on what had been an often‐chaotic enterprise was accompanied by greater passive destruction. This destructive potential then required ever more discipline to manage and direct. The next revolution in warfare had less to do with the particulars of fighting than with the social basis of political authority behind the war enterprise. The political revolutions of the late eighteenth century  –  especially the American and French

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Revolutions – challenged not only the domestic political orders of the relevant states, but the very international system under which they operated. The new forms of war were uncertain and inchoate, the struggle increasingly existential (Strachan 1983, pp. 91–93). The great Prussian general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz recognized that wars could no longer be limited or choreographed, but required an absolute commitment (1984 [1832]). Although still debated, many see the birth of total war (Aron 1954) in the French Revolution (Bell 2007; Esdaile 2007), carried on through the American Civil War (McPherson 1988), and finding its apotheosis in World War II (Hastings 2011; Weinberg 1994). In many ways, war and the twentieth century defined each other. These 100 years were marked by a bloodletting unprecedented in its reach and barbarity. While the precise number of victims remains a scholarly debate, the death toll from inter‐state wars alone was roughly 80 million. To this number we may add the estimated 40–50 million victims of colonial, civil, and revolutionary wars. Finally, if we include as wars efforts by states to “reform” their populations along ethnic, religious, or socio‐economic criteria, we may add yet another 80 million to the death count (Clodfelter 2008). What made this new form of killing possible? The nineteenth century saw critical technological, organizational, and social and political developments: by 1900, all leading armies were equipped with breech‐loading rifles, permitting higher accuracy and faster firing, and allowing for greater tactical flexibility. Developments in artillery meant that commanders had to think of threats coming from miles away, and the invention of the machine gun made massed frontal assaults suicidal. In World War II, the development of air forces opened up a new dimension for combat and made the distinction between soldier and civilian irrelevant. Without the Industrial Revolution, the sizes of armies and their geographical reach would have been impossible. These efforts to tame the new technology also required a context of political authority that made the harvesting, packaging, and delivery of resources possible. Without the political legitimacy of nationalism, no armed force could rely on the support of their society for such long periods and with such immense sacrifice. Finally, these wars occurred in specific international contexts that helped shape their strategies and methods. The phalanx was a reflection and a creation of the ­geopolitics of the ancient Greek polis, and the limited warfare of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not survive the Napoleonic revolution. What characterizes total war from the mid‐nineteenth century on is the continual breaking of a series of norms and expectations where the only limits to absolute war were technical and organizational. With the development of total war, warfare spread from the ­battlefield to the home front through political and economic channels, pushing its impact on society in previously unforeseen directions.

Conquest, Genocide, and Armageddon The concept of conquest involves two related phenomena: acquisition and domination. Much of military history can be described as attempts to appropriate some resource through the use of violence. The ubiquity of “might makes right” often makes it easy to ignore the role of conquest in shaping human history: victors forget



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and losers disappear. Yet conquest is arguably the central narrative behind the historical and contemporary distribution of ethnic groups, cultures, and global ­ stratification. Waves of conquest and empire‐building helped shape our world from the campaigns of Sargon in third millennium Mesopotamia, through the creation of the Hellenistic and Roman empires, the consolidation of Qin China, the Islamic expansion beginning in the seventh century, and the Mongol explosion of the thirteenth century. Yet no wars have had a greater societal impact that the victory of the “West” beginning in the fifteenth century. Why did the West win? Four categories of advantages have been posited in the literature (Diamond 1999; Headrick 2010; Raudzens 2003; de Moor and Wesseling 1989). The first is the significant advantage of European military technology. The second advantage, argued most famously by anthropologist Jared Diamond, is that Western conquerors brought diseases to the New World against which local populations had no defense. Third, the West appears to have enjoyed an organizational and managerial advantage in bringing a large and effective killing force to bear. Finally, in case after case, we find that the Europeans defeated their indigenous opponents with the aid of strategic local alliances. Both the gunpowder and the organizational arguments are tied to the ability to capitalize on technological and strategic developments in war making. Why did the West have this advantage? There is considerable support for the idea that the competitive market of war in Western Europe produced organizations well‐designed and developed for conflict (Hoffman 2012). First, intense competition within Europe prior to the conquest honed European military skills. Second, Western forces were able to leverage existing enmities in conquered lands to their benefit. Western conquest was most successful when it was able to establish strategic and tactical agenda, although indigenous groups were sometimes successful in smaller campaigns where their local knowledge and flexibility could be put to greater use. Conquest was often only the antecedent of an even more “total” form of conflict. From a sociological perspective, we define genocide as the organized use of violence for the purpose of eradicating a population defined by a given categorical characteristic. It is important to distinguish between conflicts that have had secondary genocidal consequences (e.g. the conquest of the Americas) and ones where primary purpose is to kill all members of a community. While historical intention is not established without controversy, we can draw the boundary broadly between mass killings that were incidental to the conflicts and ones where they served as the very point of it. These latter cases are pure “wars of societies” in that they represent an explicit existential threat to a large cohesive group. There are sadly many candidates for inclusion as genocides, including the battle of Carthage in the second century bce, the Mongolian conquest of Asia, some medieval Islamic conquests, the Crusades, the European conquest of North and South America, the European settlement of Australia, Germany in southwest Africa, England’s treatment of Ireland, the Armenian massacre during World War I, the history of Soviet collectivization, the partition of India, and Rwanda. Scholars have tried to be both inclusive and analytical in their attempts to clarify and explain the  process (Jones 2011; Kiernan 2007; Moses 2008; Staub 1989, 2011). For the ­twentieth century, the archetypal case is that of the Jewish Holocaust, in which both

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perpetrators and victims could agree that this was very much a “war against the Jews” (Snyder 2012, p. 188). The twentieth century also saw the development of another form of mass killing. Few who are not military historians have heard of the twentieth‐century Italian general Giulio Douhet, yet his book, The Command of the Air (1983 [1921]), was the intellectual origin of the concept of strategic bombing. Douhet predicted that the wars of the future would be decided by air power alone, arguing that massive fleets of bombers would destroy an enemy’s cities before the more traditional forces of army and navy could even be mobilized. The futility of defense was central to Douhet’s thesis, and he advocated the targeting of both enemy production centers and enemy populations in order to cut support and damage morale. While many of the particulars of Douhet’s thesis were wrong, the central premise of indefensible destruction defined twentieth century warfare. PM Baldwin of interwar Britain well understood these implications: “The only defence is in offence, which means you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.” With the advent of strategic bombing, the means of war have become an end in and of themselves. The deaths that result from strategic bombing occur not because the enemy is despised, nor because she stands in other way of some resource, but because military logic declares it the only possible strategy (Kaplan 1991; Sherry 1987). The addition of nuclear weapons to the arsenal made the killing potential of total war truly global. The arguably most important development in mass killing was the evolution of missile delivery systems beginning in 1957. The scale and speed of these meant that the warning time of an attack would be reduced to hours if not minutes, and the possibility of preventing enormous damage rendered null. By 1960, the United States and the Soviet Union would be locked in the stalemate of mutually assured destruction (Rhodes 1995, 2007; Sheehan 2009). We focus on four key processes in explaining the sociology of nuclear warfare: the “other‐ization” of each side, the apparent surgical precision, the sheer industrial capability and wealth of the two societies, and, strangest of all, the mutual agreement and understanding required to maintain the system. In the long arc of technological developments accompanying the history of warfare, World War II represented the zenith of the complexity and destructive capacity of total wars (Gordin 2009).

How Wars Build War has often been portrayed as unequivocally destructive, cruel, brutal, and useless. Such a view is understandable in light of the devastating consequences of modern wars such as the great bloodletting of the twentieth century’s “Thirty Years’ War.” Nevertheless, wars throughout history have given birth to fantastic social, technological, and political development. While certainly destructive, war’s social consequences are often greater than we realize. Wars require tremendous amounts of capital and manpower. In Charles Tilly’s oft‐quoted line, wars make states and states make war. As pre‐state political ­formations in Europe increasingly engaged in warfare, a number of institutions rose



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up to extract capital and coerce people into war. These institutions, in turn, became critical to the development of the modern nation‐state. In return for providing capital and manpower to fuel the engine of war, people sought from their state market protections and regulations and, eventually, political representation and rights. The organizing principles of war are inextricably bound to the organizing principles of the state: historically, the advance of bureaucratic forms may be partly explained by increasing demands for administrative efficiency generated by the needs of the growing military and the escalating costs of war‐making. The rise of the modern European state may be traced to the military revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period, three critical political and organizational developments changed the nature of military struggle and its relationship to state‐ making: control over the means of violence shifted from private to public control; the size of armies increased dramatically; their composition became less varied and more based on a specific national identity. Wars can also elevate community cohesion to nationalism, a sort of civil religion that celebrates the nation and its people. Though the causal relationship between wars and nationalism has been contested, few would argue that wars contribute to a sense of unity based on a shared community, real or imagined. This sense of unity is born out of shared sacrifice and a sense of danger, and it is both the essential foundation for democracy and an essential product of war. It can foster a sense of oneness that translates into a recognition of the less fortunate in society as worthy of assistance, serving to expand suffrage and civil rights. The flipside of this group cohesion, of course, is the exclusion of the they who are different from us. Since the mid‐nineteenth century and through the immediate post‐World War II period, the European and North American armed forces served as social institutions whose tasks included not only national defense, but also the forging of young men into productive and responsible members of the community. The distinguishing feature of militaries in Western Europe after the mid‐nineteenth century through the 1970s is universal conscription across all social sectors, at least in theory. This universal conscription of national members, it has been argued, is the foundation of the citizen‐soldier paradigm, and it has played an important role in the self‐definition of Western civilization. Yet for much of history, conscription has not borne out as the great equalizer of men: to be liable for conscription was a good index of one’s inability to avoid it. In France, the levée en masse of 1793, inspired in part by external threat but also by the need to mobilize the population for the Revolution, represented a radical rupture with the past in that it called the “people” to defend their newly acquired status of citizen. The state came to represent the aspirations of the many and as such, it had the right and obligation to call on them to defend their property. As the state came to demand more from the population than passive obedience, the people came to see themselves in the state and to demand more from it in return for their ultimate sacrifice. This relationship could be seen as a political exchange, in which the citizen was to be offered political power as recompense for the obligation to participate in war. The development of citizenship leads to increasing demands from the state, including social and economic guarantees. Another way in which this political exchange plays out is through the instrumental use of welfare policies to  produce citizens more prepared for war‐time service, for example through

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e­ ducation. Such policies produce the paradoxical trend that service in the military may actually improve the health and education of recruits!

An Unseen Global War in the Twenty‐first Century? The number of books and essays on war in the twenty‐first century is quite large. There are, for example, those who speak of a “new” form of war (Coker 2004; Hirst 2001; Kaldor 1999; Kolko 2002; Shaw 2005), of new geographies (Barnett and Low 2004; Kilcullen 2013), and of new technologies (Harris 2014; Singer 2009). Beginning with North America, we note a continued state of alert in the United States following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In Mexico, the number of dead associated with its “war on drugs” over the past decade is in the tens of thousands. While no formal state of war exists, the presence of semiorganized violence is pervasive throughout parts of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In South America, the casualties of the Colombian civil war have declined, but there remain threats to state control over its territory. In the rest of the region, such threats tend to be concentrated in parts of major urban centers. Whether the level of organization qualifies such conflict as “war” is up for debate, but there is no question about the extent and brutality of the violence (Imbusch et al. 2011). Crossing the Atlantic, we see that the traditional fulcrum of Western European wars from Flanders through to the mouth of the Danube remains relatively peaceful. The possible exception is the increasing militarization of the Mediterranean as the EU countries attempt to secure their borders from the vast demand from Africa and the Middle East for economic and political asylum (Jones 2012). Approaching the traditional “bloodlands” (Snyder 2012) of Europe, the conflict over the eastern Ukraine very much talks like a classic war, but at a subdued volume. The ambivalent participation of the Russian military makes this a perfect example of one of the “new” kinds of war: violent, but with unclear roles. Africa is awash in conflict. From the Atlantic shores of the Sahara through Suez, claims of territorial monopoly over the means of violence are contested daily. The chaos of the region north of the Gulf of Guinea has declined and the respective states have at least some semblance of control over their territory. The situation in northern Nigeria remains volatile with a variety of threats to the state. In all of these countries, some form of political violence is endemic, but as with the case of Central America, the degree of organization is problematic. While the Angolan civil war is over, Mozambique’s appears always about to break out again. By contrast, southern Africa is arguable the most peaceful part of the continent. The bloodiest part of the region remains the Great Lakes (Prunier 2009), where a two‐decade war and associated dislocation has produced close to 10 million casualties. An imaginary rectangle stretching from the western borders of south Sudan to the Indian Ocean holds as much human misery resulting from direct and indirect violence as anywhere in the world, though the degree to which institutional actors are involved in the violence is murky. South Asia contains the site that arguably best fits the criteria for warfare that we have outlined. India and Pakistan have been in some form of conflict for more than 60 years, at times culminating in classic military maneuvers and tactics (Hiro 2014). The fact that both now possess nuclear weapons gives any South Asian war a global



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scope, as the climactic consequences of even a limited nuclear exchange would be significant. Southeast Asia toward the Pacific is relatively quiet, but threats to states in isolated regions persist. Moving north, the East and South China Seas are sites of “grand strategy” disputes between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its neighbors (Christensen 2015). The increasing resources devoted to naval forces by the PRC, combined with the American commitment to regional allies, makes this the most likely site for some form of Great Power conflict. The Korean peninsula remains a permanent “hot‐zone,” and the discrepancy between the North Korea’s military threat and its productive capacity represents a new kind of puzzle for war. Finally, we come to the region most associated with military conflict in the twenty‐ first century: the Middle East widely defined. The complexity of conflicts here belies even a summary, but these include at least inter‐nation (Saudi Arabia vs. Iran, Israel vs. all neighbors), religious or ideological (Salafi vs. Shia vs Sunni; secular vs. religious; democratic vs. authoritarian) conflicts, and conflicts over resources (oil and gas, water). The level of violence ranges from the possibility of a nuclear exchange to fights between isolated partisans armed with AK‐47s. The level of organization of the violence ranges from global to national alliances, to subnational entities such as the Assad Alawite group, Hezbollah, and ISIS (Karsh 2015). While present‐day conflicts still produce massive casualties, the global statistics show that the percent overall killed by war is lower now than at any point since the 1940s (Pinker 2011). While there seems to be some quantitative proof of the “waning of war” (Waning of War URL), there are several problems with such statistics. First, the twenty‐first century wars and their fatalities tend to occur far from media centers, so the killed in action (KIA) statistics are not nearly as reliable as those of, for example, US losses in Vietnam. Moreover, the technological advantage of the United States and allied countries, combined with the professionalization of the military, means that civilians in large parts of the world can live in a world where war is nothing but an “action‐shooter game.” Among the wealthier parts of the world, massive expenditures on arms and bodies can appear abstract (if at all), with war leaving barely a ripple in the civilian cultural consciousness. Second, because of the nature of the weapons used and the quality of medical care, survival with horrific mental and physical trauma is now much more likely. The value of measuring war by deaths may be declining at a time when the consequences are not necessarily fatalities, but life‐changing events such as rapes, disabling wounds, post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or exile. The share of civilian deaths in armed conflicts has increased even in the absence of the kind of strategic bombing used in World War II. In Iraq after the 2003 invasion, over 70% of those who died of direct war violence have been civilians (Crawford 2013). These “collateral” casualties are difficult to measure and not without significant controversy. We are therefore faced with a dilemma involving increasing stratification in who suffers the consequences of war: While war remains pervasive throughout the world, the social ramifications of war appear to be increasingly diluted in the West and the rich East. What does this mean for the relationship between war and society? The most significant trend since World War II may be the increasing divorce of military might from social resources. While much of war for the previous 500 years was a reflection of relative organizational effectiveness and access to physical resources, the past few

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decades have witnessed a reversal to the apparently endless aggregation of empires. The fall of the Soviet empire brought into question the ability of global powers to dictate everywhere and anywhere in the world; at the same time, the destructive military capacity of these same powers, particularly that of the United States, had grown exponentially. How can we explain this decline of imperial powers while accounting for the growth of military force (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Mann 2013)? First, we name the standard reasons given for the domination of global powers: the technological monopoly on violence, as well as the capacity to project power globally, possessed by the imperial powers (Adas 1989) allowed colonial and imperial wars to be fought on the enemy’s terrain, away from one’s own population centers; the monopoly over transcontinental transport, which allowed the West to use local allies to support their own land grabs. While some have remarked on the cultural superiority of the western powers (Hanson 2002, but see Morris 2014), we might better focus on the specific military and organizational practices that had been honed by the perpetual warfare in Europe for several centuries. Another factor was the willingness of societies to bear the cost of empire (Kennedy 1989; Tilly 1992). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the process of Western conquest depended on the other side being willing to fight on Western terms. When these conditions disappeared after 1945 – as a result of the escalation of political and moral costs of war due to the advent of nuclear technology, as well as the subsequent increased use of guerilla tactics by nonimperial forces  –  the military logic of Western supremacy disappeared. The standard definition of guerrilla war or insurgency is that it is an irregular conflict carried on by small groups acting independently (Laqueur 1976). While regular armies concentrate their violence and seek decisive battle, guerrilla forces disperse and seek the slow destruction of the enemy. In most cases, a guerrilla force cannot hope to destroy a regular armed force, but it can debilitate it to the point that it can no longer function. This has been called the war of the flea (Tabor 1970), as it relies not so much on sheer resources or size but on small continual bites to drive the adversary mad. In this way, insurgency and its close relative, terrorism, are the perfect confirmation of the Clausewtizian maxim of war as politics by other means. Insurgency returns our attention to the politics behind conflicts and the kind of social and cultural supports regular wars require. Rather than defeating the enemy on the battlefield, it seeks to drain the home societies’ willingness to pay the price of war. Like strategic bombing, insurgency and terrorism aim to wither away the enemy’s fighting spirit. The rise of industrial war and the increase in the sheer destructive capacity of militaries has diverted our attention from a basic principle of war: it is not necessarily about the elimination of an enemy force, but about destroying the effectiveness and coherence of that force. Phalanxes did not win by necessarily killing more or better, but by shattering the cohesion of the enemy and its faith in a possible victory. Perhaps the best illustration of this principle is the success of the German Blitzkrieg against the arguably superior French army in 1940 (May 2000; Nord 2015). The logic of guerilla warfare takes these lessons to their conclusion. Critical to the success of an insurgency is the perceived legitimacy of the struggle. Organizational competence and physical resources are important to win wars, but guerrilla warfare demonstrates the power of the people’s will to persevere. An enemy



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unwilling or unable to accept defeat requires a level of destructive violence that its opponents may be unable – or unwilling – to deliver. We argue that these developments – the decline of Western imperial control, the rise of irregular forces in conflict, and the changing face of military service – are the hallmarks of the future of warfare in the world. We have already seen the how irregular forces with negligible military power in Afghanistan and Iraq have been able to maintain long‐term engagement with the United States, indisputably the greatest military power on the planet. Where this will lead us remains to be seen. While we have argued that social structure has been affected by military conflicts, what we do not yet know is how these changes in war will affect the nature of society in the decades to come.

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20 Immigration Noriko Matsumoto

Migration and mobility have been factors in social formation throughout human history. Today, an unparalleled level of cross‐border mobility has become one of the defining features of our interconnected world. International migration is on the increase globally and the volume of immigration has surged in North America, Europe, and Australia since the latter half of the twentieth century. For the twenty‐ first century, immigration represents a process central to domestic and international politics and has profound economic, cultural, and social consequences for society. In 2010, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), roughly 3% of the world’s population, an estimated 214 million, could be classified as international migrants living beyond their country of birth (Castles et al. 2014). Migration does not concern immigrants alone. Population movements affect nonimmigrants and sending and receiving societies as a whole. The greater part of migration consists of legally admitted immigrants, but the proportion of unauthorized and forced migrants  –  including refugees and asylum‐seekers  –  is increasing. Although the study of migration involves internal migration (often in the form of rural–urban movement), this chapter provides an overview of the major themes and scholarly debates in international migration, with a focus on the United States. The study of immigration covers interdisciplinary topics and diverse themes related to complex social processes. Its theoretical and methodological approaches are drawn from anthropology, demography, economics, geography, history, law, and political science, as well as from sociology. Contemporary sociology of immigration seeks to understand the dynamics of human mobility accompanying rapid global transformations. Researchers employ a range of quantitative and qualitative methods,

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drawing on administrative data (census), surveys, i­ nterviews, and ethnography. Three basic concerns characterize the goals of the field and the existing literature: 1. Why does migration occur and who migrates? What motivates people to migrate across national borders? 2. What happens to immigrants after arrival? How are they changed by receiving societies? 3. What impact do immigrants have on receiving societies? What are the economic, political, and social consequences of their presence in society? (Portes and DeWind 2004). Immigration has long been considered at the core of sociological investigation in the United States. Its origins within the discipline are associated with the Chicago School, which remained dominant in American sociology between the two world wars. Urban change in Chicago became a major focus of empirical inquiry and was stimulated by large‐scale immigration, primarily from southern and eastern Europe. The tradition and themes of the Chicago School profoundly influenced the field; moreover, the study of immigration to the United States has been a model for the study of other migrations. The broad influence of the United States in the global academy generally and the extraordinary and sustained volume of immigration to the United States have played a major role in the study of immigration (FitzGerald 2015). Passage of the landmark immigration law, the Hart‐Celler Act of 1965, resulted in a dramatic change in immigration flow to the United States. The Hart‐Celler Act abolished the national origins quota system implemented by the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson‐Reed Act), which had effectively barred immigration from Asia and had sharply curtailed immigration from eastern and southern Europe. The provisions of the Hart‐Celler Act, privileging family reunification and highly skilled professionals, opened the gate to immigrants from all corners of the globe. Today, more than four in five immigrants hail from Latin America, Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean, which has diversified the US racial demographic in an unprecedented way (Alba and Nee 2003; Lee and Bean 2010). The groups that have grown most rapidly in the past half century are Latinos and Asians. Latinos have surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group, and Asians are currently the fastest‐growing group. In the first decade of the twenty‐first century, immigrants in the United States represented 13.1% of the population; US‐born children of immigrants, or the second generation, represented 12% of the population. Together, the first and second generation today account for one in four members of the US population (Waters and Pineau 2015). It has been argued that given the complexities of the phenomenon of migration, mid‐range theorization is preferable to a grand theory seeking to encompass all of its aspects (Portes 1997; Portes and DeWind 2004). Rather than aiming at synthesis, current trends suggest that understanding contemporary migration depends on interdisciplinary approaches, a focus on multiple levels of analysis, and the development of models with a variety of perspectives and assumptions (Massey et al. 1998).

342 Noriko Matsumoto The Origins of Immigration The sociology of immigration studies the factors and conditions that promote and sustain human movement across national borders. Migration affects people and institutions in both origin and destination countries. Immigration is either the result of conscious labor recruitment, immigration policies, or spontaneous response to connections between sending and receiving countries (Castles et  al. 2014). Such trends reflect growing economic interdependency between sending and receiving countries – in turn, linked to shifts of capital across national boundaries, widening disparities between the global south and north, and the expansion of transnational economic and social exchange. Earlier thought in migration studies considered the prime causes of human movement to be economic. But migration is also contingent on noneconomic issues (at both origin and destination sites), intervening obstacles (e.g. distance, immigration laws), and personal factors. Such concerns are commonly referred to in terms of “push–pull” models. These models identify the economic, environmental, and demographic factors that are assumed to “push” people out of places of origin and “pull” them toward destination places. In a similar vein, neoclassical economic theory has identified certain factors in the propensity for migration, such as wage differentials and employer demand for low‐wage labor. In this model, migration is explained as a result of geographical differences in the supply and demand of labor. At the micro level, neoclassical economic theory sees migrants as rational actors who make decisions to move based on a cost–benefit calculation. Real‐life migration patterns, however, often deviate from neoclassical theory. Structural constraints, such as limited access to money, connections, and information, have proved to be crucial factors in determining actual migration rather than the rational choice of individuals (Castles et al. 2014). The concept of social networks has contributed to the understanding of the perpetuation of migration. Social networks connect migrants and nonmigrants at both origin and destination countries through interpersonal ties. Kinship, friendship, and shared community origins are important factors for the rate of migration. Social networks further contribute to the reinforcement of migration through a process termed cumulative causation (Massey et al. 1998). Migration, over time, produces further migration: once the number of network connections in an origin area reaches a  ­ critical threshold, migration tends to become self‐perpetuating through the reduction of risks and costs for subsequent migration. Moreover, migrant social networks  –  including social capital in the form of resources available for co‐ethnic members – may be used to improve or maintain social position through access to various kinds of financial capital, such as employment, better wages, and the possibility of accumulating savings and sending remittances. The reason that people from one community migrate, while people from communities in similar economic situations do not, can often be traced back to migrant access to border‐spanning social networks of family, friends, and people from the same hometowns (Massey et  al. 1998). Once migrants arrive at their destination, social networks shape subsequent adaptation. The availability of resources through migrant social networks may help immigrant entrepreneurs to establish and orient themselves in the new land. At the

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same time, scholars have suggested that exclusive co‐ethnic networks can become barriers to social mobility under certain economic conditions, or may produce exploitative co‐ethnic relationships (FitzGerald 2015).

Immigrant Assimilation and Integration Although sociologists are interested in the causes of emigration, a greater emphasis has been placed on the process of immigrant incorporation into the receiving society. These social relations are understood as central to understanding the processes of migration that have a direct bearing on integration into the society of settlement. Most scholarly debate and work on contemporary immigration takes place in this area of inquiry.

Major Theoretical Paradigms of Immigrant Assimilation Assimilation  –  the process by which the immigrant becomes integrated into the dominant society – has provided a major theme for the sociology of immigration. The Chicago School in the early twentieth century considered assimilation a gradual but inevitable process. Based on the experience of European immigration around the turn of the twentieth century, classic theoretical frameworks such as that proposed by Robert Park (1950) saw the assimilation of ethnic minorities or immigrants as a trajectory oriented toward structural integration into the mainstream. In this view, immigrant offspring move beyond the status of the first generation and become progressively less distinct from what Milton Gordon (1964) termed the “core” cultural group  –  white, middle‐class, Anglo‐Saxon, Protestant Americans. Gordon considered that assimilation involves an orderly passage through distinct phases of adjustments, an inevitable and irreversible process toward dissolution of the distinctive ethnic characteristics of the original immigrant group. Earlier scholars envisioned assimilation as a “straight‐line,” which moved inexorably forward. Later authors have proposed that the assimilation ­process is less direct – in recognition of various kinds of adaptation to changing circumstances that have no predictable end (Gans 1992). The classic assimilation model has been overshadowed since the 1960s by the rise of ethnic pluralism in the United States. The arrival of new immigrants since 1965, has challenged the assumptions of the inevitability of assimilation. Persistent structural inequality, prejudice, and racism against ethnic immigrants  –  obstacles that were formerly assumed to be transitory – have given rise to notions of ethnic resilience and a choice among identities based on difference. Much of the earlier empirical evidence supporting classic assimilation theory and the decline in ethnic boundaries was based on the experiences of southern and eastern European immigrants, while effectively excluding non‐European immigrants (Alba and Nee 2003). Institutional racism excluded nonwhite immigrant groups from sharing in the opportunities of socioeconomic mobility and thus from assimilation during the twentieth century. Rather than disappearance, it seemed, by the latter half of the last century, that there was instead a persistence of ethnicity.

344 Noriko Matsumoto The consideration of the “second generation”  –  the offspring of post‐1965 i­mmigrants  – has generated much research and debate. As the second generation comes of age both in the United States and Europe, scholarly interest in their assimilation has grown. Research suggests varying outcomes regarding assimilation, and this has led to the concept of segmented assimilation. This theory proposes divergent paths based on race/ethnicity and socioeconomic background. Outcomes can depend on different societal and group‐level circumstances. Middle‐class backgrounds and positive reception (due to host perceptions regarding the immigrant group, as in the case of Cuban refugees) allow for smooth integration into the host society. On the other hand, some members of the second generation, despite the low human capital of their immigrant parents, attain upward mobility through the support of ethnic networks. Sustaining ethnic ties and heritage may thus benefit second‐generation socioeconomic achievement (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993). The segmented assimilation model also considers that immigrant children with lower socioeconomic status from a racial minority group are more likely to “downwardly” assimilate into the subculture of native‐born minorities – predicting less positive trajectories for many of today’s nonwhite immigrant children. Writing about the descendants of previous waves of Mexican immigrants, Telles and Ortiz (2008) demonstrate how individual and institutional‐level discrimination have impeded the assimilation and social mobility of later generations. The blocked upward mobility of some immigrant groups of today runs counter to classic assimilation theory. Yet the degree of downward assimilation postulated by the segmented assimilation model has also been questioned by critics, as an essentialization of minority culture and for its treatment of class as an overdetermining factor (see Alba and Nee 2003; Kasinitz et al. 2008). Alternative perspectives, where ethnoracial minority immigrant children adapt to an environment in which majority‐minority settings have become common, indicate that in many urban environments their experience does not necessarily replicate the path of downward assimilation (Kasinitz et al. 2008). New assimilation theory proposed by Alba and Nee (2003) revives the concept of assimilation while removing the normative and prescriptive connotations attached to classic assimilation theory. Alba and Nee (2003) define assimilation as, “the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences” (p.  10). This more recent theorization is concerned with the changing distance of immigrant‐origin groups from the mainstream. Assimilation is theorized as a symbolic boundary change occurring between immigrant and native‐born populations, involving the decline of a boundary’s relevance for a group (in relation to another group) or for some individuals within the group. This “blurring,” or weakening of ethnic boundaries, is a two‐way process of boundary negotiation enacted by both immigrants and natives. Assimilation into the mainstream may be eased, insofar as these immigrants, “do not sense a rupture between participation in mainstream institutions and familiar social and cultural practices and identities” and when they do not feel “forced to choose between the mainstream and their group of origin” (Alba 2009, p. 43). Such conceptualization treats assimilation as compatible with ethnic pluralism and ethnic persistence (Alba and Nee 2003; Brubaker 2001). Assimilation has come to be considered as a relational process, which necessarily involves the native group. The classic assimilation model presumed that assimilation concerned immigrants alone, with little change on the receiving society. By contrast,

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recent approaches view host reception as an essential component in immigrant assimilation (Schachter 2016). Although newcomers and established individuals begin as strangers, over time and through regular contact they become more familiar and often similar to each other through reciprocal adjustments (Jiménez 2017; Jiménez and Horowitz 2013). Tomás Jiménez (2017) has observed that, while newcomers do change in the country of settlement, established residents are also being changed by the newcomers. This is true in many places within the United States that are rapidly becoming majority‐minority. Native‐born populations live with immigrant‐driven change in their neighborhoods, and such experiences influence how they negotiate and make sense of the immigrant presence in their community.

Transnationalism Emerging from anthropological discussion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of transnationalism focuses on the maintenance of substantial commitments that connect migrants to people in their country of origin. Frequent border crossing among contemporary migrants shows that immigrants can remain embedded in the social lives of their countries of origin even after migration and that both sending and receiving sites continue to play a critical role in migrants’ lives (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). Scholars have argued that such experiences cannot be understood from the viewpoint of the destination country alone. The transnational perspective recognizes the significant influence of transmigrants on sending societies through the retention of ties with hometown associations, business investments, remittances, and religious and political affiliations. The focus on transnational practice also directs attention to the impact of immigrant‐receiving societies on sending societies, such as changes in ideas, norms, and behavior, which in turn affect gender roles, family structures, and consumption patterns. Both sending and receiving countries can promote transnational activities and allegiances – for sending countries, continued ties encourage remittances or investment in the country of origin. Transnationalism thus represents the obverse of the classic assimilationist paradigm. Instead, it suggests the formation of a bifocal identity among transmigrants and the oscillation by which migrants maintain a presence in two societies and cultures (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Portes and DeWind 2004). Some scholars have argued that migrant transnationalism is likely to intensify and accelerate (Vertovec 2004), but critics of the transnational framework have debated the long‐term effects of the practice. Research suggests that transnational practices are exceptional rather than the norm: only a small proportion of immigrants can be characterized as active transmigrants. Transnational activities appear to decline over time in the country of settlement, rarely surviving into the second generation (Bloemraad et al. 2008; Levitt and Waters 2002). Still others question the premise of novelty, arguing that earlier immigrants were widely engaged in what are today labeled as “transnational” activities (Foner 2005). There is a growing consensus that transnationalism represents a new analytic perspective, not a new phenomenon, and that developments in transportation and communication technologies have qualitatively transformed the character of transnationalism – which is far more dense and dynamic than anything possible in earlier times (Glick Schiller 1999; Portes and DeWind 2004). While offering an analytic framework for understanding fluid identity

346 Noriko Matsumoto formation among migrants and their continued interest in their points of origin, immigrant integration into the host society and the maintenance of cross‐border ties among transmigrants are not considered incompatible from the transnationalist ­perspective (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004).

Socioeconomic, Political, and Residential Integration of Immigrants The remarkable socioeconomic progress among the offspring of European immigrants (who often arrived with few possessions and little education) within a few generations in the early twentieth century was referred to as the ethnic miracle. The vast differences in the structural conditions of the past need to be taken into consideration, but this narrative of successful integration has informed research into the outcomes of today’s immigrants. Have immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean experienced the same socioeconomic mobility as their predecessors from Europe? Will they also achieve parity with native‐born Americans? In sociology, assimilation and integration have typically been considered in terms of variables of upward mobility – educational and occupational achievement, income parity with the native majority group, and residential integration into mainstream neighborhoods. Interracial marriage is also used as a measure of integration – as an index of declining social distance among groups. The vast literature in this area presents a multifaceted reality (for a comprehensive overview, see Portes and Rumbaut 2014; Waters and Pineau 2015). The diverse backgrounds of today’s immigrants – including within‐group heterogeneity (Africans, Asians, Hispanics, etc.) – are one of the key factors contributing to today’s complexity. While immigrants are still overrepresented at the bottom of the educational distribution, a sizable proportion now come with advanced educational credentials. Asia and Africa send relatively more immigrants with high educational attainment, while Latin America and the Caribbean send relatively more immigrants with low attainment. The second generation of immigrants shows remarkable educational progress when compared with the first generation, including groups with parental levels of education among the lowest (e.g. Mexicans). The second generation of all groups are converging with the native‐born in terms of educational attainment, a positive sign of rapid educational integration (Waters and Jiménez 2005; Waters and Pineau 2015). The high labor market participation rate among immigrants demonstrates the significant role that immigrants play in the labor market and in the economy. Immigrants with less skills take low‐skilled jobs for which natives are unavailable (due to the shrinking size of the working‐age native population) or are unwilling to take (because of the average higher‐level of educational attainment among native‐born groups). On the other end of the spectrum, research has found ­evidence of economic integration for an increasing portion of Asian and Latino immigrants on the higher rungs of the occupational hierarchy. In better‐paid occupations, the percentage of non‐Hispanic whites is sharply declining, while the proportion of immigrant‐origin minorities, namely Asians (both foreign‐born and US‐born) and US‐born Hispanics, is growing (Alba and Yrizar Barbosa 2016). Demographic shifts are likely to drive further diversification at the top tier of the US workforce.

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Foreign‐born workers’ earnings improve relative to native‐born the longer they reside in the United States, although there are variations by group. For example, income assimilation is considerably lower for Hispanic (predominantly Mexican) immigrants by comparison with other immigrants, and the economic assimilation of immigrants is still strongly shaped by racial and ethnic stratification, where penalization for darker skin color persists. Notwithstanding heterogeneous backgrounds within the first generation, socioeconomic integration is remarkably high, in general, for the second generation (Waters and Pineau 2015). Sociologists have also focused on the formation and social organization of the ethnic enclave economy and the ethnic niche. These concepts seek to explain the economic adaptation paths followed by certain immigrant groups excluded from the mainstream labor market, such as unskilled immigrants with limited English fluency and low levels of education. The persistence of the ethnic enclave economy, indicative of group cohesion, opposes the traditional notion of assimilation and is suggestive of the socioeconomic and psychological benefits of the enclave for immigrants. While studies have found that the ethnic enclave may limit the upward mobility of immigrants, it provides significant opportunities unavailable for them in the mainstream economy (Massey and Magaly Sánchez 2010). Observers have also noted a tendency for immigrants to develop and maintain job concentrations among co‐ethnic groups, thus forming niches that continuously reorganize the ethnic division of labor (Waldinger 1996). The political participation of immigrant origin groups might be considered “the paramount indicator of their overall inclusion” (Alba and Foner 2015, p. 143). In addition to the acquisition of citizenship and political participation, electoral success by immigrant‐origin members is a major index of integration. The entry of immigrants into politics – the arena of power – is typically resisted by the native‐born majority group. Political integration is significant not only for immigrants but also for the native‐born and for liberal nation states. The degree of immigrant political participation raises questions for democracy and equality. Naturalization – a prerequisite for political participation and integration – is commonly considered a matter of individual choice, yet studies have shown that institutional contexts and reception in the immigrant receiving societies play a crucial role in such decisions (Bloemraad 2006). The traditional focus in research has been on immigrant participation in nonelectoral politics – for example, immigrant organizations with influence over political actors, where such social movement provides venues for the excluded to gain a political voice. The political significance of immigrants is bound to increase in the future given the increasing importance of immigrant minority votes in national elections. In recent years, immigrant minorities have made significant progress in gaining representation in elected bodies (Alba and Foner 2015). Place of residence and co‐residence with the majority group is another indicator of immigrant integration. The concept of spatial assimilation (Massey 1985) posits that immigrant assimilation is connected with the attainment of residence in desirable locations, frequently in middle‐class suburbia, which allows for interaction with the dominant group thereby promoting immigrant assimilation. Socioeconomic improvement tends to increase the likelihood of moving out of immigrant neighborhoods into areas with a greater number of native whites (Alba and Foner 2015). The enduring pattern of residential segregation in the United States has been tied to

348 Noriko Matsumoto discriminatory housing policies, institutional practices, and the avoidance of minority neighbors by whites. Patterns of residential segregation, however, indicate that the degree of segregation from whites varies by groups. Asians are the least segregated, followed by Latinos and African Americans (Lee 2015). In the last few decades of the twentieth century, the suburbs were home to a large proportion of the foreign‐born and began to represent high ethnic concentrations. Such ethnic residential and business clusters in metropolitan suburbs have been referred to as ethnoburbs (Li 2009). Reflective of the growing number of immigrants with resources (especially Asians), this emerging trend of direct settlement in the suburbs immediately upon arrival appears to defy the assumptions of spatial assimilation. Studies on ethnoburbs have documented that ethnicity is preserved and full assimilation may be resisted, while allowing for interaction with native‐born groups (Li 2009; Zhou 2009).

Implications of Immigration on Race Relations and Identity Since 1965, immigration to the United States has been characterized by an unprecedented diversity in terms of national origin, socioeconomic background, race and ethnicity, religion, and immigration status. With the steady inflow of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, it is predicted that whites will become a numerical minority by the mid twenty‐first century. Rapid immigration from diverse points of origin over the last four decades has prompted reconsideration of ethnoracial boundaries and the examination of the effects of immigration on the transformation of intergroup relations in the United States. Particular attention has been drawn to the ways in which immigrants from Asia and Latin America have made an impact to the existing racial hierarchy long characterized by the black‐white dichotomy. Sometimes these questions are framed as a debate about how and where the “color line” will be drawn in the twenty‐first century (Bean and Lee 2004; Lee and Bean 2010). One of the results of increasing immigration from Asia and Latin America is the growth of interracial marriage, which accounted for 1 in 12 marriages in 2010, with the ratio narrowing among more recent marriages (Lee 2015). The majority of those Asians and Latinos who outmarry tend to marry whites. Lee and Bean (2010) have found that Asians and Latinos with multiracial heritage (with white parentage) tend to identify themselves as white and that social institutions do not question such identification – which further eases the way to immigrant juncture with the mainstream. Such trends are contrasted with the case of African Americans, the group with a persistently low intermarriage rate with whites, despite the growth in such unions. The legacy of slavery and the “one‐drop” rule, coupled with anti‐black racism, continue to affect the pattern of identification among African Americans; a very small fraction of African Americans choose to self‐identify as multiracial. Research shows that compared to blacks, Asians and Latinos experience fewer social constraints in intermarriage and in the willingness to report multiracial ­identity. That Asians are twice as likely to claim a multiracial identification as blacks (Lee 2015) is suggestive of the fact that boundaries have historically been more porous for immigrant groups than for native‐born African Americans. These trends

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imply a newly emerging racial boundary based on “nonblack” and “black,” rather than on the traditional distinction between “white” and “nonwhite” (Bean and Lee 2004). Racial boundaries may be changing but continue to remain salient for nonwhite immigrants and their offspring who are not exempt from racial and ethnic prejudice. Race and ethnicity remain factors in the continued marginalization of Asians and Latinos, even when they have attained middle‐class standing. Middle‐class status does not entail the automatic acceptance of nonwhite immigrants into the mainstream. Even though “hyper‐selectivity” among Asian immigrants (i.e. the highly educated and selective backgrounds of these immigrants) may have led to favorable socioeconomic outcomes for the group, Asian Americans are still subject to persistent stereotyping and are not viewed as status equals by whites (Lee 2015). Middle‐ class Mexican Americans experience racialization even though a significant proportion are following the traditional path of assimilation and becoming part of white America (Agius Vallejo 2012). Identities are provisional and negotiable. They are formed in relation to the actions of natives, as much as those of immigrants. Immigrant identity is a dynamic repertoire of practices, beliefs, and behaviors that are subject to constant readjustment and reorganization in response to changing circumstances (Massey and Magaly Sánchez 2010). Assimilation influences the pattern of identification of immigrants. The existing racial order and the contexts of reception shape identity. Panethnicity – the generalization of ethnicity superseding the national/ethnic identity categories  –  emerges in response to marginalization from the mainstream and as a political instrument for group mobilization (Foner and Fredrickson 2004; Le Espiritu 1992; Massey and Magaly Sánchez 2010). For example, among Latino immigrants, hostile reception in the receiving society promotes panethnic identity as “Latino” as well as a reactive identity that explicitly rejects identification as “American” (Massey and Magaly Sánchez 2010). Anti‐Asian racism is also a decisive factor in the formation of panethnic identity among Asian Americans (Espiritu 1992). Panethnicity does not attenuate ethnonational distinctions, however, and is likely to coexist with ethnic/national origin identity (Okamoto 2014). For some Americans, ethnic identity may ultimately become “symbolic” (Gans 1979) or “optional” (Waters 1990) with little material consequence for social life – as in the case of earlier European immigrants. Racialization, however, excludes minority groups from such fluidity. Recent African immigrants, who may have little in common with native‐born black Americans, are nevertheless racialized as “black” in the United States. Both racialization and assimilation are a part of the nonwhite immigrant experience today (Alba et al. 2014; Waters et al. 2014; see also Waters 1999).

Immigration Control: Mechanisms of Inclusion and Exclusion State power determines who shall enter and who shall be given political rights, including citizenship. States seek to regulate what takes place within their borders and who enters from beyond them. International migration is not only a social but also a political process. While international migration becomes less inhibited by physical and economic constraints, owing to advances in transport and

350 Noriko Matsumoto c­ ommunication technology, it becomes more encumbered by legal constraints. Consequently, international migration has become an increasingly important issue in politics. The state plays a major role in the origin and flow of international migration while changes in the policies of the countries of emigration allow and shape international migration in the first place. Through polity and national borders, the volume and type of immigrants admitted is controlled (Ngai 2004; Zolberg 1989, 1999). Immigration policy creates, influences, and reinforces socially constructed categories of difference. Although relatively less attention has been paid to the role of the state or to the interrelationships between citizenship and immigration, research in this area has grown in recent years (Bloemraad et al. 2008; Zolberg 1999).

Undocumented Immigration The terms undocumented or unauthorized migrant are employed to refer to persons who reside in the United States but who are neither US citizens, permanent residents, nor authorized visitors. According to Mae Ngai (2004), the category of illegal immigrants emerged in the United States in the early twentieth century when immigration laws were tightened. Before the 1920s, immigration into the United States was numerically unrestricted, reflecting a tradition of laissez‐faire labor mobility for whites dating back to the colonial period. The concept of “illegality” or legal status became an essential analytical framework during the first decade of the twenty‐first century in migration studies in the United States. Scholars recognize that legal status now constitutes a stratifying attribute that affects immigrant experience. Over the past three decades, the size of the unauthorized population in the United States has surged, along with counterefforts at exclusionary enforcement. The number of undocumented immigrants reached a record high in the 2000s. The number was estimated at roughly 11.7 million in 2012, up from 2.5 million in 1990. The majority are from Mexico, but the undocumented population in the United States includes individuals from all regions of the world. Ironically, the growth of unauthorized immigrants was primarily driven by stricter border control and more punitive immigration policy (Massey et al. 2002; Ngai 2004). A growing difficulty in maintaining return migratory patterns prompted a greater number of Mexican immigrants to remain in the United States, due to perceived difficulties of return having once left the country. Circulatory movement – without permanent settlement – was found to be greater when border control was looser before 1965. Immigrant “illegality” has become a charged political issue, as government policies have led to deportations, the separation of families, and economic insecurity. Citizenship is increasingly a legal instrument  – and divides immigrants with legal status from those without it (Menjívar and Lakhani 2016). Legal status affects integration prospects profoundly and in myriad ways. Lack of citizenship precludes upward mobility and access to pathways of immigrant integration. Growing research has revealed that undocumented status has a wide range of negative outcomes for both unauthorized individuals and their children – the effects of a long‐term lack of legal status is multigenerational, even affecting US‐born children (Agius Vallejo 2012; Gonzales 2016).

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The number of US‐born children with unauthorized parents rose sharply during the first decade of the twenty‐first century, from 2.7 million in 2003 to 4 million in 2008. Undocumented immigrant families increasingly contain members of varying legal status. Such multistatus families face destabilizing and negative effects with regard to the education of children (Waters and Pineau 2015). Not only the direct threat of detention and deportation but the lack of legal status exerts what has been called “legal violence” – the, “normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law” (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). The symbolic violence embedded within the ­constructions of immigrant legality has increased the association of immigrants with crime. Deportations often result in the permanent disintegration of the family and, even where it does not, the possibility of deportation poses a constant threat (Dreby 2012). Deportation affects men and women differently: typically, men are subject to deportation, which results in negative consequences for the women and children who remain in the United States (Dreby 2012; Menjívar and Abrego 2012).1 Contemporary deportation campaigns also affect millions of citizen children who grow up in undocumented – largely Mexican – households (Dreby 2012). The marginalization of undocumented 1.5‐generation youth, the deprivation of opportunities and of the sense of belonging, crystallize into a permanent outsider position and produce emotional distress (Dreby 2012; Gonzales 2016). Recent policy measures regarding undocumented populations in the United States including the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) concern undocumented persons brought to the United States as children. The aim is to offer temporary protection from deportation and to grant educational opportunities and work authorization. These are discretionary statuses, not created by legislation, and are thus inherently unstable. Although these programs do not represent long‐term solutions, research to date suggests that DACA can have a positive impact on integration  –  providing access to better jobs and earnings and stability in life (Waters and Pineau 2015). Any changes to such measures and the debates around them will continue to have profound effects for undocumented immigrants.

Changes in Immigrant Receiving Societies Immigrant‐receiving societies undergo transformations with the arrival and settlement of newcomers. Immigration has an immense impact on the attachment to place, on what places mean, and on perceptions of who belongs where. With continuous immigration, the sense of belonging, or “feeling at home” in immigrant‐receiving societies, is not only a challenge for newcomers but also for the native‐born who see their world changing. The idea of “belonging” is relational, constituted through the exclusion of those deemed not to belong (Duyvendak 2011). Growing immigration has intensified a political divide in many immigrant‐ receiving countries in North America and Europe. Extreme right‐wing, anti‐­ immigration, anti‐Islamic parties in Europe, and the resurgence of anti‐immigration rhetoric and nativist ­policies in many liberal democracies, attest to an increasing tension and societal hostility toward immigrants (Castles et al. 2014). The debate

352 Noriko Matsumoto over immigration bears on the question of national identity, influencing a broad range of political, social, and cultural modalities. Despite such countervailing trends resisting the new diversity, many urban centers in the global North – cities such as London and New York, for example – are now home to large numbers of immigrants whose backgrounds vary widely. The proposed concept of “super‐diversity” – or the “diversification of diversity” – challenges the assumptions of a fixed ethnic identity among newcomers. The urban areas of immigrant destination countries are now receiving demographics not only from greater numbers of ethnicities but also from a wider variety of countries of origin than in the past. New immigrants have a “plurality of affiliations” – ethnic identity is only one dimension of an identification that cuts across immigrant groups (Vertovec 2007). In part, the concept of super‐diversity is considered as superseding contemporary assimilation theories with regard to the new reality of large urban areas. Increasing growth in the multiracial population and new immigrants in the United States, are creating communities across the nation where there is no single “majority” group. Immigrants and their offspring no longer integrate into a singular entity, but into an amalgam of ethnic groups. Such “diversity explosion” is interpreted by some researchers as the necessary future to be embraced (Frey 2015). A key trend in recent immigration concerns the geographic dispersal of immigrants across the United States, a process that has led to American neighborhoods becoming increasingly diverse and multiracial. Although research on immigrant communities has traditionally focused on urban centers, the increasing move of immigrants to “new destinations” (Massey 2008) and to “new gateway” suburbs (Singer et al. 2008) has drawn increased attention to locations that had previously experienced little migrant inflow. Historically, immigrants tended to cluster in traditional “gateway” cities or states such as California, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Recent years have witnessed steady growth of immigration to new destinations in suburban and rural areas across the country. Those with the fastest increase today are in the South and West. Research into these “new destinations” has explored how immigrants influence the social and economic landscape of communities unaccustomed to immigrant presence and how such new dispersals are challenging communities and local institutions (Singer et al. 2008; Waters and Jiménez 2005; Waters and Pineau 2015). Different conditions in new destinations compared with established sites – e.g. smaller size of the community, absence of preexisting infrastructures for new immigrant orientation – are predicted to have different impacts on immigrant assimilation in these new destinations. Findings regarding intergroup relations at new destinations have been mixed: with reports of a rise in intergroup conflict and backlash from native‐born residents, as well as communal efforts to improve relations between native‐born and newcomers (Massey 2008; Singer et al. 2008).

Conclusion Influencing almost all aspects of social life, immigration plays a major role in the transformation of societies and will continue to do so in years to come. International migration is an integral part of contemporary social transformation and globalization. The topics of assimilation/integration and the adjustments that societies make

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in responses to immigration, along with the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics raised by the new ethnoracial diversity, will remain important questions for immigration scholarship. Sociological theory will continue to revise old models and to develop new ones to account for the diversity of experiences. Recent initiatives in comparative research (mainly in North America and Europe) suggest the direction of future endeavors (Alba and Foner 2015; Bloemraad 2006; Crul and Mollenkopf 2012; Foner 2005). Richard Alba and Nancy Foner (2015), for example, examine the challenges of integration through a comparative framework drawing on the cases of North America and several Western European countries. Their study reveals that in key domains of integration – labor market, intermarriage, residential segregation, and the economy – there has been a mixture of success and failure in different ways. Comparative research helps enrich our understanding of the processes of immigrant assimilation – by elucidating social conditions and framing policy that shape immigrant outcomes and trajectories. Such an approach can help illuminate, for example, the significance of immigrant religion for integration in Europe, by comparison with the United States, and the conditions of their differences (Alba and Foner 2015). While the state provides useful contexts for assessment of the significance of similarities and differences in migration processes, transnational perspectives provide a further scope and context through which to consider international migration. The sociology of immigration in the United States has paid relatively less attention to questions of forced migration policy when compared to Australia or Europe. The field has not systematically addressed migration resulting from the threat of violence or persecution. The field of “refugee studies” initiated in the 1980s, has little overlap with the sociology of international migration (FitzGerald 2015). Since 1948, the United States has provided relief for persons seeking refuge from persecution abroad (Waters and Pineau 2015). The number of refugees worldwide has grown in the early twenty‐first century. Although refugees and asylum seekers receive the most direct assistance with integration, they face the same potential barriers as immigrants, given their relatively lower socioeconomic status (Portes and Zhou 1993). Those who are black or Muslim (or both) may face discriminatory attitudes or may be stigmatized by the media and politicians for alleged consequences – an increase in crime rates, terrorism, and overburdened welfare systems (Castles et al. 2014). Decisions regarding admission of refugees and attitudes toward them have reflected political and ideological concerns in the United States, subject to changes in the political climate. For example, refugee processing was greatly slowed after the 9/11 attacks. Research into incorporation, native reception, possible obstacles to inclusion, and how the experience of refugees may differ from that of immigrants, will remain of importance for future research agenda. International migration has been a central component, diachronically, within historically significant demographic shifts, social transformations, political conflicts and tension. Today, migration is an issue for, and a key characteristic of our global  societies, with wide economic, political, cultural, and social ramifications. For  political leaders, migration concerns are a major priority. In the contemporary  world  –  especially for liberal democracies in their continued transition to ­diversity – immigration is a subject of crucial human significance. Social scientific research in this area will continue to be a necessary and critical guide, both for public ­enlightenment and for the success of reasoned approaches in policy discussion.

354 Noriko Matsumoto Note 1 Gender was relatively neglected in migration studies until the rise of feminist theory in the 1970s. Contemporary research utilizing gender as a central framework in migration studies remains scarce, with some exceptions – for example, research on undocumented immigrant families and transnational motherhood (Dreby 2012; Hondagneu‐Sotelo 2003). The significance of gender for the structuring of processes of immigration and incorporation has led to a call for greater attention to gender in immigration scholarship (Donato et al. 2017).

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21 The Sociology of Consumption Christopher Andrews

Historical Context Consumption has been a subject within the discipline of sociology since its earliest days, appearing in the mid‐to‐late nineteenth century work of founding figures such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. While Marx addressed consumption in terms of production (1857–1858/1974), the accumulation of capital (1867/1967), and class differentiation (1884/1981), Simmel (1904/1971, 1907/1978) and Weber (1904–1905/1958, 1921/1978) wrote about consumption‐related topics such as credit, fashion, money, and thrift. However, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) was arguably the first major sociological work devoted to the subject of consumption, focusing on “conspicuous consumption,” leisure, and waste that have in turn become recurring themes in the sociology of consumption. However, while consumption emerged as a major topic in related social sciences such as anthropology (Mauss 1922/1990; Douglas and Isherwood 1979), economics (Samuelson 1938; Gaibraith 1958), history (Potter 1954; Boorstin 1973), and ­psychology (Perloff 1968; Kassarjian 1971), it largely remained a marginal topic within sociology until the latter decades of the twentieth century, in part, some suggest, because of a “productivist bias” in sociological theory reflecting the discipline’s roots in the Industrial Revolution (Ritzer 2000, p. 87). While scholars have since debated as to whether the rise of consumer culture was a cause or consequence of industrialization (Slater 1997), Veblen and the subject of consumption continue to be underrepresented in introductory and sociological theory textbooks; for example, several sociological theory textbooks do not mention him or his work (Turner et al. 2007; Scott 2012; Allan 2013), while introductory textbooks typically devote only a few pages to the topic of consumption and consumer culture, or in some cases, none

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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at all (Ballantine et  al. 2015). In fact, one of the bestselling books ever published about the sociology of consumption  –  The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer 2019), now in its ninth edition – nearly went unpublished after the author revealed it was rejected by several publishers who felt the subject matter would not draw sufficient sales, underscoring the degree to which consumption has been viewed as a marginal or questionable subject worthy of sociological study (Rojek 2007).

Theoretical Perspectives Some of the earliest inklings of a sociology of consumption can be found in the work of various members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory as well as in critiques of “mass society” and the middle class in midcentury America. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), Adorno and Horkheimer not only railed against the fascism and totalitarianism of the 1930s and 1940s but also the corresponding “culture industry” that they argued had manipulated the public into a state of contented docility. In a similar fashion, Marcuse’s One‐Dimensional Man (1964) depicted ­consumerism as a form of social control, arguing that authentic human needs of creativity, freedom, and happiness were being supplanted under capitalism by “false needs” for material goods. These themes of mass‐produced media, culture, and commodity fetishism re‐emerge decades later in critical analyses of advertising, media, and consumer culture (Ewen 1976; DiMaggio 1977; Gottdiener 1985). Meanwhile, critics of the American middle class and “mass society” pointed to the growing importance of advertising and public opinion that incentivized what Mills (1951) termed a “salesman ethic” of instrumental attention to and concern with the ideas and views of others, or what Riesman (1950) described as “other‐directedness.” Although neither of these scholars were directly associated with the Frankfurt School, they shared a critical view of consumption and its effect on the public. The work of another person associated with the Frankfurt School  –  Walter Benjamin – is perhaps noteworthy for its dissimilar theoretical orientation. Inspired by French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire’s (1857/1993) description of nineteenth century French urban life and the flâneur, a sort of aimless stroller or window shopper emblematic of the rapidly industrializing European cities, Benjamin’s (1982/1999) writing focused on the “arcades” – glass covered, gas‐lit rows of shops that presaged modern shopping plazas and malls – and the various types of people (e.g. the collector) and forms of interaction (e.g. idleness) associated with them, reminiscent of Simmel’s classic analyses of social types, forms of interaction, and urban life. Concerns regarding mass consumption, deception, and technocracy were also prominent themes in Packard’s bestseller The Hidden Persuaders (1957), which argued that innovations in advertising and psychology were being used to manipulate individuals’ unconscious desires and motives. Today, critiques of advertising and marketing are a staple theme in studies of consumption (Lindstrom 2011; Grimes 2015; MacGregor et al. 2018). Interestingly, Packard’s subsequent books The Status Seekers (1959) and the Waste Makers (1960) and their corresponding themes of consumption as status signaling and consumption for consumption’s sake reflect earlier themes of conspicuous consumption and waste described by Veblen.

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While critiques of advertising, marketing, and the commodity fetishism they promoted characterized many of the early sociological perspectives on consumption in midcentury America, by the 1970s French sociologists were constructing new theories that linked consumption to social stratification. In Distinction (1984), Pierre Bourdieu deconstructed aesthetic differences between high and low culture in French society to demonstrate how variations in “taste” reproduced the social order (for an American perspective on high and popular culture, see Gans 1974 and Peterson and Kern 1996). Specific tastes were not only a means or differentiating oneself within a given “field” (e.g. music) but were also a means of classification (e.g. genres) and community (e.g. bowling leagues). The problem, as Bourdieu saw it, was not only economic but moral; the dominant classes not only had greater opportunities and means of cultivating such tastes but also imbued them with moral and aesthetic values that rendered theirs as being worthy of distinction and designated others as being unrefined or vulgar, demonstrating how consumption can also be a form of cultural hegemony and domination. Like Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard (1998 [1970]) depicted consumption as the new organizing principle or moral system of the modern world. While there are some clear parallels to Marx (e.g. a “reserve army” of needs) and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School (e.g. the role of the mass media), one can also detect the influence of Durkheim in terms of how consumption is depicted as a social fact, transcending the individual and exercising social control through the production of cultural values (e.g. fitness) and social structures (e.g. shop windows) that encourage, if not ritualize, consumption. However, instead of the ostentatious displays of affluence Veblen described, Baudrillard finds elites signaling status through subtle, marginal differences or “inconspicuous consumption” (e.g. monogrammed clothing) as well as “underconsumption” (e.g. frugality) and even “anti‐consumption” (e.g. recycling), all of which he argued were forms of “metaconsumption” since they each essentially served as cultural indicators of class difference. Even the wasting of time becomes an impossibility, Baudrillard argued, because it produces something of value and prestige (i.e. leisure). These theoretical developments significantly influenced the direction of subsequent research on consumption (Rojek 1990; Holt 1998; Ritzer 1999) and are noteworthy in several respects. Whereas previous works had tended to be largely theoretical, Bourdieu’s work was innovative in its use of statistics and in‐depth interviews, while Baudrillard drew significantly upon the work of Emile Durkheim, whose ideas had continued to influence the study of consumption in anthropology (Mauss 1922/1990; Douglas and Isherwood 1979) but which had largely lay dormant within the discipline of sociology. Bourdieu and Baudrillard’s theories also demonstrated how the work of Veblen has either explicitly or implicitly shaped much of the sociological thinking about consumption over time, all the way up to the recent past (Rojek 2000; Ritzer 2001) and near present (Simon 2017; Walters and Carr 2017). It is probably no coincidence that the sociology of consumption significantly gained momentum during the 1980s and 1990s as industrialized nations witnessed a growing cultural emphasis on materialism as well as a proliferation of new forms of media, commodities, and services for scholars to study including music videos (Kaplan 1987; Denisoff 1988), cell phones (Gergen 1991), video games (Panelas 1983; Gottschalk 1995), and the internet (Turkle 1995). The area also attained a



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greater degree of visibility through the publication of several bestselling books (Ritzer 1993; Schor 1998; Klein 1999) as well as a panoply of academic textbooks (Lury 1996; Corrigan 1997; Slater 1997; Ritzer 1999) and edited volumes (Appadurai 1986; Falk and Campbell 1997). Since then, the study of consumption has only continued to flourish. Although more than a half dozen consumption‐related journals had emerged over the years, the founding of the Journal of Consumer Culture (JCC) in 2001 formally created an intellectual home and publication outlet for sociologists interested in consumption, while the publication of several reviews in major journals signaled the accumulation of what had by that time become a substantial literature with a number of distinct subtopics, themes, and theoretical perspectives (Zukin and Maguire 2004; Schor 2007; Warde 2015). Yet, perhaps the clearest indicator of continued growth in the sociological study of consumers and consumption since the previous edition of this book (Ritzer and Rey 2011) was its elevation to an official American Sociological Association (ASA) section in 2013, increasing the number of consumption‐related sessions at national conferences as well as establishing a formal governing body and distinguished publication awards, all of which have served to further enhance the development and visibility of consumption‐related research in the discipline. While this historical narrative of the development of the sociology of consumption is neither comprehensive nor wholly representative of the field, it should help to provide readers with some sense of how the field has developed over time. Although one could argue that the interpretation offered here is overly focused on US contributions and developments, other summaries have focused to a greater or lesser degree on contributions from the United Kingdom (Slater 1997) and Europe (Kravets et al. 2018), illustrating that the sociology of consumption is in fact an international endeavor. The study of consumption is also multidisciplinary, therefore making it difficult to offer a single comprehensive narrative or summary that satisfies all ­audiences. For example, in a recently published edited volume of “canonical authors” on consumption (Heilbrunn and Askegaard 2018), the editors noted that readers might find certain selections “odd” while also admitting that certain canonical authors were missing (e.g. Veblen), simultaneously signaling that certain figures are unquestionably important in the study of consumption while also underscoring the difficulty of determining precisely who ought to be considered part of the canon. However, Kravets et  al. (2018) recently published an excellent multidisciplinary handbook on the study of consumption; numbering well over 500 pages, it offers perhaps the most comprehensive, multidisciplinary overview of the study of consumption to date.

Consumption, Culture, and Society Whereas the previous edition of this chapter focused primarily on research published in the JCC, the following discussion is loosely organized around the topics and themes presented in Wiedenhoft’s (2008) Consumer Culture and Society (CCS) for several reasons. First, it is one of the most recently published books on the sociology of consumption and is more current and timely compared to similar publications (Sassatelli 2007; Stillerman 2015). Second, unlike other recently published

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books organized around conference papers (Belk et al. 2013) or eclectic collections of readings (Heilbrunn and Askegaard 2018), CCS offers a coherent, thematically organized presentation of the field (Schor 2007; Warde 2015). In addition, while several recent books offer perspectives from business (Sherry and Fischer 2017), cultural studies (Storey 2017), and history (Witkowski 2017), CCS provides an overview of the study of consumption from a distinctly sociological perspective, including concepts, theories, and topics relevant to researchers and students of sociology interested in consumption. Award‐winning papers and books are also acknowledged to draw attention to those areas of study that have garnered the most attention and praise.

Objects of Consumption Several recent books examine not only the objects of consumption but their ­relationship to the subjects who use and curate them in their homes. Daniel Miller’s microethnography of household objects in The Comfort of Things (2009) ponders the personal meaning of material possessions and what they reveal about their owners, while Elizabeth Chin’s My Life with Things (2016) is an earnest and engaging diary that intersperses social theory, geopolitics, and history with detailed field notes about doorknobs, nail polish, and other miscellaneous items. One of the novel developments in the study of objects of consumption concerns the hunting industry and the competitive consumption and fetishism of animal trophies (Simon 2017). Unlike most other sports, success in hunting is largely determined by economic resources (e.g. equipment) rather than skill or strength, and is supported by a vast hunting industry composed of sporting goods retailers, firearm manufacturers, and cable television programs that promote seemingly contradictory messages of conservationism and consumerism (McGuigan 2017). Another interesting development concerns the production and consumption of music. Although the Internet and the digitalization of music have radically transformed the music industry, perhaps most notably in the trend of declining sales revenue (Ingham 2018), the vinyl record has reemerged as a growing segment of music sales, driven not simply by nostalgia but its fluid semiotic meaning to audiophiles, collectors, and DJs who use and value records for different reasons (Magaudda 2011; Bartmanski and Woodward 2015; Hracs and Jansson 2017). The academic study of video games has also developed into a burgeoning area of study. In a How to Talk about Videogames (2015), Ian Bogost argues that videogames occupy a peculiar niche in modern life; as much like appliances as they are like art and media, the study of video games invites both serious criticism and self‐ parody, illustrating how the study of consumption and popular culture can occupy a precarious middle ground between legitimacy and satire. Yet the sheer number of academic articles and books on video games suggests that they have indeed become worthy subjects of study and criticism. For example, Crogan (2011) describes how  many of the popular flight simulators, first‐person shooters, and strategy video  games are in fact rooted in Cold War cybernetic weapons systems, linking the video game industry to the military industrial complex, while Consalvo’s (2009) book about cheating and “gaming capital” is a clever extension of Bourdieu’s c­ oncept of cultural capital.



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Subjects of Consumption Many of the recent studies of consumers have escaped the “theoretical cul‐de‐sac” (Schor 2007) of framing consumers as either agents or dupes by revisiting and extending Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field, focusing on the ways in which taste and cultural capital shape specific preferences for art (Daenekindt and Roose 2017), clothing (Steward 2017), fashion (Michael 2015), film (Meuleman et al. 2018), music (Leguina et al. 2017), and beer (Thurnell‐Read 2018) and wine (Maguire 2018). Most notable, however, is the growing focus on omnivorousness (Peterson and Kern 1996), or the way in which elite snobbery has given way to a diverse and eclectic aesthetic that simultaneously draws upon and subverts low‐, middle‐, and highbrow genres (Hyde 2014). For example, Maguire’s (2018) analysis of leading wine magazines finds that while wine has undergone a process of democratization that encourages wine from various regions, hierarchies of taste are still preserved and legitimated through subtle frames that elevate some wines over others, while other studies find omnivore tastes associated with higher social status (Järvinen et al. 2014; Zukin et al. 2017). Research by Dwyer (2009), Schulz (2006), and others also suggests the continuing relevance of conspicuous consumption, emulation, and upscale spending previously emphasized by Veblen (1899) and Schor (1998). For example, Zhang et al.’s (2016) research on neighborhoods and consumption finds that greater neighborhood socioeconomic status is associated with increased material desires, more impulsive buying, and fewer savings behaviors, suggesting that the financial composition of one’s community may create a desire to “keep up with the Joneses.” This is not to suggest that the entire field has moved beyond the theoretical tension between freedom and coercion. For example, Buehler‐Hunter’s (2018) study of “shopaholics” and retail therapy emphasizes a tension between the experiences of agency (e.g. the therapeutic effects of shopping) and constraint (e.g. the addictive aspects of shopping), while McCabe et al. (2017) and Coulter (2018) emphasize the ways in which the advertising and retail industries manipulate women through the commodification of beauty, friendship, and femininity.

Places and Spaces of Consumption Building upon previous research on the branding and theming of various consumption settings such as amusement parks (Bryman 2004) and casinos (Gottdiener 1997), more recent research has extended the study of branding to subjects as varied as international cities and fashion (Skivko 2016), forms of exercise (Powers and Greenwell 2017), political candidates and campaigns (Serazio 2017), celebrity‐ driven international aid and “compassionate consumption” (Richey and Ponte 2011), and even funerals (Sanders 2012), demonstrating the near ubiquitousness of brands in contemporary settings. While books about the “Walmart effect” (Fishman 2006) and the global influence of Walmart quickly became bestsellers (Lichtenstein 2009), the conspicuous absence of articles about shopping malls in the JCC is a telling statement about the effect internet shopping has had on brick‐and‐mortar retail stores. Nevertheless, retail

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stores and shopping malls continue to be a subject of interest to those studying consumption (Williams 2006; Dávila 2016; Corroto and Richardson 2018), as are books about those who invented them (Hardwick 2015; Gruen 2017). Reminiscent of the nineteenth century “dream worlds” described by Williams (1991), Bowlby (2001) and Zukin (2005), offer rich and detailed social histories of the department stores, discount chains, and supermarkets that define modern shopping and consumer culture, while Andrews (2019) and Halebsky (2009) describe the increasing McDonaldization of retail spaces and local efforts to resist them. Studies of racial profiling, gentrification, and discrimination in retail stores also underscore the continuing relevance of physical consumption settings (Bay and Fabian 2015; Pittman 2017).

Money, Credit, and Debt Inspired by Zelizer’s previous award winning book The Social Meaning of Money (1994), Bandelli, Wherry, and Zelizer’s book Money Talks (2017) offers a rich, multidisciplinary understanding of the origins, uses, effects, and future of currencies, with essays ranging from diverse topics such as Bitcoin and digital currencies to those questioning the commercialization of reproductive cells and surrogacy, debunking longstanding assumptions about the fungible and impersonal nature of money. New entrants to the field will find the preface especially useful for its highly readable summary of the literature as well as for its clearly enumerated list of key developments and corresponding themes. Carruthurs and Ariovich’s (2010) primer on the sociology of money and credit is also a useful addition to the field, while Dodd’s The Social Life of Money (2014) is noteworthy for its inclusion of figures not typically considered monetary theorists including Baudrillard, Benjamin, Derrida, and Nietzsche. While Simmel (1900/1978) emphasized many of the positive and useful aspects of money, Rogoff’s The Curse of Cash (2016) makes a provocative argument for the elimination of printed currency, arguing that paper money creates more problems than it solves by facilitating drug trafficking, tax evasion, and terrorism. The book is fascinating not only for its economic history of printed money but also for the way in which it links it to a host of social problems, illustrating how the freedom and flexibility of money can also have negative consequences. In a series of lauded books on banking, credit, and money, Niall Ferguson (1999, 2001, 2008) has produced an impressive history of finance, linking the evolution of credit, debt, and finance to military conflicts and other large state‐driven processes, a theme emphasized more recently by Goeztman (2017). Conversely, Graeber’s prize‐winning book Debt (2011) suggests that debt historically preceded barter or money, noting that credit and debt emerged well before the advent of coinage. Prior to money, Graeber argues, societies were organized around other forms of social currency such as gifts, marriage, slavery, and what he terms “everyday communism,” a concept that bears similarity to Tonnies’ gemeinschaft and Durkheim’s organic solidarity. Kus (2015) provides a useful review of the literature on the sociology of debt, emphasizing not only a demand side view (e.g. culture, income inequality) but also a supply‐side view that emphasizes government policy and social welfare, arguing that



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indebtedness is function of both macro and micro‐level forces. Interestingly, Cohen (2016) finds that rising levels of debt are not being driven by a “culture of consumerism” but by rising prices of basic essentials, with the consumption growth of nonessentials largely restricted to wealthy households, suggesting that the average household is taking on debt for necessary rather than discretionary purchases.

Food Bestselling books by Pollan (2006) and Schlosser (2001) have revitalized public interest in the industrial food chain (Moss 2013) and agribusiness (Belasco and Horowitz 2009) that can be traced back to Upton Sinclair’s muck‐raking novel The Jungle (1906), whose description of unsanitary working conditions in the meatpacking industry caused a public outcry that resulted in landmark legislation regulating the production and distribution of food in America. Accordingly, one major area of research on food and consumption involves commodity de‐fetishization, describing the way in which consumers increasingly want to know where and how their food is produced (Schrank 2014). Closely related to this is a growing concern with gastropolitics (DeSoucey 2016) and the ethics of food production and consumption (Miller 2017; Cairns and Johnston 2018), underscoring the “omnivore’s dilemma” (Pollan 2006), which asks what we should eat and why. Yet another trend concerns what Pollan (2008) calls nutritionism, describing an ideology that frames food consumption in terms of health (MacGregor et al. 2018). While the focus on health is entirely rational, he argues that its embrace results in overly complex, expensive, and often unhealthy diets. Others find concerns regarding food and health linked to social class (Best 2017) or gendered notions of femininity and beauty in which the consumption of food and dieting is a way of expressing freedom and empowerment (Cairns and Johnston 2015; O’Neill and Silver 2017). Another major area of study involving the consumption of food concerns social class, especially omnivorousness and the shift from high‐brow forms of consumption to eclectic tastes that both draw upon and subvert existing genres (Peterson and Kern 1996; Hyde 2014). For example, Maguire’s (2018) study of wine magazines finds that while wine has broadened in region and popularity, markers of distinction are still preserved and reinforced through subtle categories that elevate some wines over others, while Zukin et al. (2017) observe that rankings of local restaurants on social media selectively focus on aspects of restaurants that tend to rate white ethnic restaurants over nonwhite ones. Those seeking a more in‐depth discussion of “foodies” and food culture will enjoy Johnston and Baumann’s (2015) eponymously titled book, which addresses issues of taste, authenticity, social class, and politics. Social class also shapes decisions about whether to focus on efficiency or nutrition when purchasing food. Researchers find that middle‐class shoppers are more likely to prioritize purchasing healthy food, while working‐class and low‐income shoppers are typically more concerned with prices and saving money (Koch and Sprague 2014; Daniel 2016). The problem, however, is that “efficient shopping isn’t necessarily healthy,” especially since many low‐priced goods are on average higher in sugar, fat, and salt content (Koch 2012, p. 108). Income and geography also shape access to food in the form of “food deserts,” or areas where there are few grocery

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stores or supermarkets. Food deserts tend to be located in rural and low‐income areas, meaning it costs more in time and money to access healthy food options (Walker et al. 2010). Supermarkets are also increasingly becoming bifurcated by social class, with discount retailers encouraging shoppers to “do‐it‐yourself,” while pricier chains offer gourmet brands and home delivery service. Moreover, as Andrews (2019) points out, a growing number of supermarket chains have expanded the use of self‐service, ­adding to the “second shift” of unpaid work largely performed by working mothers (Hochschild 1989).

Politics of Consumption Recent publications on political consumerism trace the history of consumer activism back to the eighteenth century when citizens boycotted products and politicized the consumption of goods such as sugar and tea as well as the importation of slaves and slave‐made goods. Glickman’s Buying Power (2009) offers a comprehensive history of consumer activism in America that begins with the Boston Tea Party, while Hilton’s Prosperity for All (2009) offers an international history of consumer advocacy in the postwar era. During this postwar era of the 1940s and 1950s, Cohen (2003) and Deutsch (2010) describe how American consumers were encouraged to shop as part of an economic recovery. Similarly, half a century later, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to shop and spend money, telling families “get down to Disney World in Florida,” underscoring how governments of countries dependent on consumer spending actively encourage consumption (Bacevich 2008). More recently, Lekakis (2017) finds that the economic austerity imposed on Greece following the global financial crisis produced a sort of “economic nationalism” promoting ethnocentric consumption, illustrating that politically consumption can also be mobilized at the grassroots level. Indeed, a growing segment of the literature on consumption concerns “political consumerism,” describing the ways in which the market can be turned into a venue for political action (Micheletti 2003; Micheletti and Stolle 2009). Two of the ways consumers can engage in political advocacy are through boycotts and buycotts; the former involves refraining from purchasing a specific goods or service, while the latter encourages consumers to endorse a particular business or market by consuming specific goods or services. The boycott was a key tactic used to improve the working conditions of female textile workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when the National Consumers League used white labels and white lists to educate workers about companies’ business practices, while boycotts to end racial segregation in several Southern cities sparked the civil rights movement (Cohen 2003; Wiedenhoft 2008). More recently, the Fair Trade label has been used as a buycott to encourage corporate social responsibility (Nicholls and Opal 2005; Raynolds et al. 2007); in 2017, US sales of Fair Trade products surpassed $1 billion, while global sales increased nearly 8% to $9.2 billion (Progressive Grocer 2018). Other examples of political consumption include those which promote supporting local businesses (Kuehn 2017; Kennedy et al. 2018) as well as those that encourage c­ onsumers to “look beyond



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the label” in order to learn where and how their goods are made (Timmermann 2012; Bartley et  al. 2015), much like organized labor did a century earlier (Wiedenhoft 2006). Yet, consumers’ expressed desire for fair and ethical trade does not always result in corresponding behavior. In a series of experiments, researchers found that a majority of consumers prioritized product functionality over ethics, preferring products that met their needs rather than expressing their values, while in another experiment less than 1% of subjects selected the “fair trade” alternative when their choice was unprompted and private (Devinney et al. 2010). Moreover, ethical consumerism requires changing one’s habits and use of time, something that many consumers are reluctant to do, let alone consider, especially when many feel pressed for time (Wacjman 2015; Schoolman 2016). Companies may also manipulate consumers through greenwashing and other forms of advertising that depict certain products or brands as being environmentally friendly or socially responsible when in fact such effects are negligible at best (Krieg 2008).

Collaborative Consumption, Prosumption, and the Sharing Economy One increasingly prominent alternative form of consumption is collaborative consumption, or “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities” (Botsman and Rogers 2010, p. xv). Collaborative consumption is part of the expanding “sharing economy” (Sundararajan 2016) that includes both traditional forms of sharing as well as new forms of entrepreneurship that frequently draw on the internet and digital technology; examples include redistributive markets such as eBay and Craiglist as well as peer‐to‐peer services such as Uber and Lyft. However, because collaborative consumption is based on the coordination and trust of peers who are often strangers, reputational capital becomes an important means of signaling trustworthiness and quality of service (Botsman 2017). While the sharing economy may have elevated the importance of reputational capital, critics argue that it is eroding economic capital in the form of jobs and wages; many of the jobs in the sharing economy are project‐based or on‐demand services, meaning that work becomes more precarious and uncertain (Kalleberg and Dunn 2016), and because more people are willing to offer their services, prices  –  and therefore wages – are driven down (Berger et al. 2018). In this respect, the sharing economy closely parallels the “gig economy” (Kessler 2018) and other increasing temporary forms of work (Kalleberg 2013). Another expanding alternative form of consumption is prosumer capitalism (Ritzer 2015b) or prosumption (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; Ritzer 2015a), a portmanteau that describes the ways in which consumers can simultaneously both produce and consume goods and services. Self‐service is an excellent example of prosumption because it requires consumers to “labor in” by performing unpaid work (Ritzer 1999, p. 60; Dujarier 2016). This is likely one reason why prosumption is expanding; by getting consumers to perform work‐like tasks for free, businesses can further reduce labor costs and increase profits.

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Whether or not this will result in significant job loss, however, is still up for debate. For example, while Ritzer (2015a) predicts that new forms of prosumption will result in businesses with “few, or at least fewer, paid employees,” research by Andrews (2018) and Bessen (2015) finds that self‐checkout lanes and automated teller machines (ATMs) have not significantly reduced the number of cashiers and bank tellers, calling into question whether prosumption will displace or merely supplant existing forms of work and consumption. On the other hand, self‐service and other creeping forms of “shadow work” may explain why so many people report feeling overworked in an era in which many have more leisure time than in previous decades (Andrews 2019).

Conclusion Clearly, the study of consumption has far‐reaching implications, both for individuals and societies. In fact, one could argue that the study of consumption is as important, if not more important, as the study of work; consumer spending comprises a majority of the gross domestic product of most modern economies, and the objects that people consume influence and reflect their health, identity, relationships, and economic and social status. Moreover, the global rate of consumption poses novel risks in the form of pollution and waste, raising questions as to whether existing lifestyles are environmentally sustainable, let alone ethical. In addition, with the blurring boundaries between production and consumption, it is becoming hard to conceptually justify the two as distinctly separate, suggesting that scholars of consumption and work may have more to learn from one another than previously thought. It is not a coincidence that both groups increasingly find themselves preoccupied by the possible effects of automation, the restructuring of the workplace, and the precarious economic position of ­individuals and their ­families. Perhaps it might be better to move forward thinking about work and consumption not as separate spheres but as two sides of the same economic coin, minted, one could argue, with the ideas of many of the same classical scholars.

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22 Digital Technology, Social Media, and Techno‐Social Life Mary Chayko

Introduction In high‐tech modern societies, nearly every aspect of social life is touched by digital technology. Families and friends remain in contact via spirited streams of text messages. Individuals spend countless hours sharing, shopping, playing, and learning online. Organizations develop digital and social media presences and “brands” that are increasingly requisite for surviving and thriving in a digital world. Even those whose access to information and communication technologies (ICT) is limited or who are disinclined to use newer digital technologies are still profoundly affected by living in a world that is computerized, globalized, and interconnected. This chapter looks closely at digital technology and social media and their impacts, and proposes that it is highly useful to think of life in the digital age as techno‐social. “Techno‐social” will be hyphenated here to highlight the equivalent, reciprocal importance of the “techno” and the “social” in a world in which the digital and the physical have become completely and irretrievably enmeshed. The “techno” and

For insightful conversations and helpful suggestions that influenced and improved this work, the author thanks Barry Wellman, Bev Wellman, Keith Hampton, Anabel Quan‐Haase, Nancy Baym, Karen Cerulo, Wayne Brekhus, Evan Selinger, Corey Dolgon, Stephen Barnard, and Whitney Erin Boesel; Rutgers School of Communication deans Jonathan Potter, Dafna Lemish, Mark Aakhus, and Sharon Stoerger, and faculty colleagues, students, and research assistants Shravan Regret Iyer and Diana Floegel; and the wonderful instructors and students of Rutgers’ Digital Communication, Information and Media, and Gender and Media programs. For more on digital connectedness, see the author’s book Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno‐Social Life (2018, Sage).

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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“social” components of modern life will be probed in some depth this chapter, along with the history and components of a digital/social media participatory culture, features of digital environments, and some key issues and impacts. Finally, the meaning and implications of being “plugged in” to one another vis digital technology and social media will be discussed. Digital technology and social media influence all aspects of modern life: how people work, play, think, learn, create, relate, and even fall in love. In the process, social environments, relationships, communities, networks, societies, and even individual selves are created, established, and maintained. Throughout, the technological and the social components of life inform, shape and define one another. While it is impossible to separate the “techno” and “social” components of life practically – hence, the utility of the term “techno‐social” – here we separate them conceptually and analytically, and examine, first, the “techno.”

Understanding the “Techno” Technology is the process or technique of making something that allows human beings to share their knowledge, perform a task, or fulfill a function (see Jary and Jary 1991). It often takes the shape of a tool intended to solve a problem or improve on past understandings of how to do something. ICTs carry ideas from one person to another via devices and applications along networks, allowing people to interact and exchange ideas and knowledge. This process is also called mediation or technological mediation, and the technology itself can be considered a mediator. Every piece of technology reflects and often advances the interests of those who create and fund it and deploy it in the world. It is not neutral – it is never “just a tool” – but rather is something that can disproportionately benefit those who invent it, profit from it, or control its use. Having said that, it is impossible to know exactly how a technology will be used and received once it is unleashed on the world, and thus it is not perfectly “controllable.” It operates in a social system in which all those who contribute in some way to its existence (makers, users, distributors, funders, regulators, etc.) play a part in its eventual development and impact. An ICT is usually considered high‐tech when some kind of machine or modernized industry is involved and is considered to be low‐tech in less mechanized conditions. It can be as fundamental to communication as the process of writing or the invention of the pencil, or more mechanically sophisticated, like a network of computers that connects the globe. When computerization is involved, the communication process is said to have been digitized, for as computers utilize bursts of energy (bits) to encode, store, and transmit information, data are represented and stored by computers as digits, with zeroes representing “off” and ones representing “on.” Media are the means by which these pieces of data are stored and then communicated to others. When shared via computerized networks, the media that aggregate or deliver information are considered digital media. Modern computers, of course, can be large or small, stationary or portable, and take many forms; smartphones and “smart” items in which software or sensors are embedded certainly qualify. Digital media, therefore, is commonplace in a society in which these networks are ubiquitous,



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and is often referred to in the singular (“digital media is ubiquitous” as opposed to “digital media are ubiquitous”). It is common for the word media to be preceded by a qualifier, which can be the type of platform used to deliver it (broadcast, print, digital, mobile, multimedia), its content (news media, advertising media, mainstream media), or its recency (traditional media, new media). Media that enable content to be spread along web‐based networks or apps that enable direct interpersonal interaction can be considered social media. The much‐used term “the media” technically encompasses all these types of media, though it tends to be used as a shorthand for the mass media (media that is spread to large audiences electronically or via print technology, with the internet and digital/social media increasingly considered “mass media” as well). Social media is a type of social network site (SNS) (boyd and Ellison 2007). Networks are sets of individuals (or other units, like groups, organizations, or even nations) that are connected or tied together such that they have some relationship to and influence over one another. On SNSs, users create profiles, personalize their pages or sites, and make contacts and “friends” with whom they can share content. Serving both one‐to‐one and one‐to‐many functions of communication, an SNS can have, simultaneously, both a personal and a mass media feel and function. Material on these sites can be widely shared and reposted, with their data so easily accessed by search engines and “mined” by site creators (and outsiders, including data mining companies) that the collection and sale of such data can be considered another of their key features. SNSs are sometimes called new media, but their social functions are so profound and prominent that they have in many cases become synonymous with social media, especially for those platforms with media‐ sharing capability. Digital and social media easily become embedded in the everyday life of their users. Approximately 2.5 billion people – about one‐third of the world’s population – use social media (Statista 2017b), and when individuals gain internet access, social networking is generally one of the first online activities they undertake (McKinsey and Company 2014). Sixty five percent of the world’s population uses mobile phones, with penetration in developing areas growing at twice the rate as in more developed areas. These networks are used to do work, form relationships, accumulate power, and exchange social capital – resources, opportunities, and information that help one navigate a networked (or information) society (boyd and Ellison 2007; Castells 2011; ITU 2014, 2016; Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project 2012; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Statista 2017a; Zikuhr and Smith 2013). There are limits to technological mediation, of course; not everything can be digitized. Myriad types of interpersonal interaction (like parenting!) and humanity (like love!) cannot necessarily find their fullest form when technologically mediated (although digital technologies that simulate the face‐to‐face experience with ever greater precision  –  like artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual and augmented reality  –  are testing these boundaries). But digital technology and digital/social media are becoming so deeply embedded in so many aspects of daily life that their use has become a hallmark of modern life. Indeed, the term digitality has come to describe all kinds of computer‐influenced phenomena, media, and environments, and now even refers to circumstances and life itself in the age of computing (see Chayko 2018, pp. 5–11).

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Understanding the “Social” Human beings are inherently social. We look to one another to fulfill such basic human needs as safety, shelter, sustenance, companionship, and love. “Left to our own devices, cut off from one another, we would be underdeveloped intellectually and emotionally.” We would be much more vulnerable to danger. The world is better faced in the company of others (Chayko 2018, p. 11). Living in personalized association with others – in relationships, groups and communities – is called sociality. Technological mediation has long been indispensable to sociality. To form social ties and bonds, people must coordinate their actions, and even their thoughts and emotions, with one another. They must get to know one another and determine the extent to which interpersonal similarities, commonalities, and synergies exist. In the digital age, it is not necessary to be physically face‐to‐face with another person for all of this to occur. Digital technology and social media specialize in facilitating the flow of social capital from person to person and from network to network. In the process, common interests and traits are routinely discovered; people get to know of one another and to truly know one another. Often, the result is the creation of bonds and communities that are deep, meaningful, and very, very real. And they may exist solely online, or they may be integrated with one’s face‐to‐face social circles (Chayko 2002, 2008, 2018). Contrary to some assumptions, the use of digital technology and social media does not generally replace or deter face‐to‐face interaction. Rather, digital tech use prompts face‐to‐face interaction and makes it more likely to occur (Chayko 2014). This is a consistent finding that may seem counterintuitive but is demonstrated in a large and growing body of research (see Boase et al. 2006; Chayko 2014; Wang and Wellman 2010; Zhao 2006). Moreover, those who use digital technology most frequently and diligently tend to be those who stay in closest contact with their friends face‐to‐face. They use the technology to check in on friends and family members. They post photos and updates so all can remain “in the know.” They are even more likely to have close relationships and confidants and to form local, neighborhood relationships than non‐internet users (Chayko 2018, p. 12). Not all individuals, however, form digital communities and sociality easily. Some people seem to be more likely than others “to accept online friendship formation as possible, or even desirable,” Tufekci suggests (Tufekci 2010, p. 176, see also Tufekci 2008). She calls those who form online connections less easily and less often the cyberasocial and notes that for such individuals, “face‐to‐face interaction has inimitable features that simply cannot be replicated or replaced by any other form of communication” (Tufekci 2010, p. 176). This does not mean that the cyberasocial refuse to use digital technology but that they may simply be more comfortable it in certain ways, such as to coordinate plans, rather to form social connections (see Tufekci and Brashears 2014). Given the human need for togetherness and the ability of technology to serve as interpersonal mediator, it makes sense that people would turn to digital technology to bring them together so they can experience sociality even (or especially) when they are busy, on the go, or separated by space and time. Doing so has become a routine use



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of digital tech and social media and explains much about their continued expansion, use, and popularity (Chayko 2018, pp. 11–13).

The Growth of a Participatory Culture Digital technology and digital/social media provide numerous spaces or platforms with which people can create and share ideas, information, stories, music, photos, videos, etc. The result is a participatory culture in which members of the public take active part in the creation and consumption of their cultural products and in sharing them, often freely and widely (see Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2006, 2009). A participatory culture is also an economy in which content, goods, time, effort, and money are, to one degree or another, exchanged (for more on the processes of production and consumption (or “prosumption,” see Chapter  21). The word sharing can minimize the extent to which doing so disproportionately benefits the powerful. As people contribute information in digital spaces, they make quite a bit of personal information public and/or traceable and trackable without being compensated in return. Such data, in the aggregate, can be used to target and profile individuals unfairly and often inaccurately, while organizations reap profits at their expense. This participatory culture did not spring forth overnight. From the very early interactive games and web‐based communities of the 1970s and 1980s (EIES, Usenet, multiuser domains (MUDs)) to AOL instant messaging (AIM) and blogging in the 1990s, it was clear that the social and communal uses of digital technologies were their most intriguing features. People wanted to get to know one another, exchange information, and have fun. In co‐creating the pioneering online community the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in 1984, Larry Brilliant had the idea to “take a group of interesting people, give them the means to stay in continuous communication with one another, stand back, and see what happens” (Hafner 1998). Spirited, fun, and interpersonally involving, the WELL would come to influence nearly every form of digitized social networking that would follow. In the very late 1990s and early 2000s, SNSs began to spring up that permitted users to create and customize profiles and pages and locate, connect and share info with networks of followers and friends. The first site generally considered to provide all these functions, and therefore the first full‐featured SNS, may have been 1997’s Six Degrees. While AIM had featured buddy lists, members of Classmates.com could search for people to connect to from their high schools or colleges, and some early dating and community sites allowed the creation and posting of profiles. Six Degrees was the first to combine all these features. It was also, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison opined, perhaps a bit “ahead of its time” (boyd and Ellison 2007). While it attracted millions of users, they were geographically dispersed so widely that it was difficult for people who wanted to also get to know one another face‐to‐face to do so. This turned out to be a fatal flaw. One of the first truisms of online social networking began to become apparent: While people enjoy communicating with those with whom they have something in common, they also, and perhaps primarily, want to use online social networks to maintain and enhance connections with people they also know face‐to‐face.

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Subsequent SNSs were organized around journaling (LiveJournal), community interests (AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet), business (Ryze), virtual worlds (Cyworld), and getting to know friends of friends (Friendster). The initial success of Friendster inspired such sites as LinkedIn, Tribe.net, and MyChurch. Other SNS specialized in the sharing of media, while adding social networking features and thus becoming true social media sites, such as Flickr (photo sharing) and YouTube (video sharing). Today, social media and social networking are often spoken of synonymously, as most SNSs allow (indeed encourage) both media sharing and networking, and users often perform these activities together. MySpace, which was particularly welcoming to music and bands, launched in 2003 as a full‐service SNS. The most popular SNS of its time, MySpace grew in size as its members (increasingly teenagers) encouraged their friends to join. In time, it was sold to a corporation, was implicated in several underage sex crimes and scandals, and it lost much of its status as a top SNS. Other social networking sites, like Friendster, found it difficult to manage growth both in a technical and cultural sense and were unable to sustain their initial success. The decline of MySpace coincided with the rise of Facebook (initially, “thefacebook”), which would eventually become the world’s largest and most influential SNS. Established in 2004 as a Harvard‐only site by Mark Zuckerberg, assisted by other Harvard students, it spread to other colleges and high schools in 2005 and to professionals and then the wider world beginning in 2006. As of this writing, it is by far the most populated and well‐known SNS, with over 2 billion users, but is experiencing serious growing pains, including controversies over the extent to which it is responsible for and should police content and advertising posted on its site (some of it demonstrably false, posted to deliberately spread propaganda under the guise of news). Facebook has also been criticized for developing and using algorithms to manipulate users’ news feeds, encouraging them to become more deeply engaged in the site, and then monetizing their participation – usually through the gathering and selling of their data. (Other SNSs, such as Twitter and Pinterest, do the same.) Or a platform can also make money through selling advertising or stock in its company. Social media and networking sites and blogging sites, some of them doing very big business, are now plentiful. Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and blogging sites like WordPress, Wix, and Tumblr, have become popular and influential, with users numbering in the millions. Social media specialists, designers, writers, and managers have joined computer scientists, information technology professionals, and other tech careerists in becoming a large and rapidly growing sector of the modern workforce. Content is often contributed and shared free of charge in a participatory culture, complicating the situation for those who wish to be paid for such work – especially those who are highly skilled. Instead, “compensation” comes in the form of attention, measured in “likes,” comments, shares, and followers, creating an “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck 2002, p. 3). There is also frequent remixing and reconfiguring of content, including music and video, in a participatory culture. Materials can be easily taken from existing texts, often without obtaining permission to do so, and combined with other content so that new versions are created. Social media then permits the easy posting and sharing of this reconfigured content. Authorship or ownership is difficult to discern, as is the value of all this digital labor. As tech writer Clyde Haberman puts it, we live in a



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“culture of free,” expecting to find free or low‐cost content in digital spaces (2014). Music and publishing industries (including journalism), along with other creative industries, have seen their power, profits, and very existence threatened (Chayko 2018, pp. 33–36). In 2001, the free music file‐sharing program Napster was found to have violated copyright laws and was shut down, and protocols regulating the “culture of free” began to develop. iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, and other music streaming services began to provide models by which music can be both shared and paid for (albeit in different ways). But a tension still exists between individuals who expect to create and use free or low‐cost content and owners of media and technology businesses who are on what media scholar Aram Sinnreich calls a “piracy crusade” (2013). When these owners bring legal action against media makers, it can not only harm them and their businesses, it can do irreparable damage, Sinnreich argues, to privacy, free speech, and democracy itself (Chayko 2018, p. 68; see also Benkler 2014).

Features of Mediated Digital Environments Place and Presence ICTs, and social media in particular, tend to generate a very strong “sense of place” (Meyrowitz 1985; see also Polson 2013). Users can come to feel that they have been “transported” to a common space or environment. Metaphors and symbols reinforce this reality, as does the storytelling function of social media (Biocca and Levy 1995; Gerrig 1993; Hampton 2007; Kim and Biocca 1997; Lambert 2013; Lombard and Ditton 1997; Parks 2011; Radway 1984). Functions like hashtags help people form groups, effectively guiding them into common spaces (Chayko 2018, p. 46). Companions in digital spaces tend to be perceived as “really there.” Those whom we meet online really are met. Our brains do not make a distinction between these different modes in which we “know” others; we can respond emotionally and come to care deeply about people we meet in any context (Chayko 2002). We also perceive them to share space with us (Short et al. 1976). To be socially present to one another even in the absence of face‐to‐face interaction is social presence or perceived proximity and is common in digital/social media use (O’Leary et al. 2014). Ambient copresence – an ongoing but background awareness of the presence or nearness of others – is also common in digital spaces (Ito and Okabe 2005, p. 264; see also Chayko 2008, 2014; Gray et  al. 2003; Quan‐Haase and Wellman 2002). Mobile phones allow users to keep their social media or others digital channels open to one another nearly all the time, checking in on one another in frequent, short bursts. This can intensify social presence and the connections that form. Social media does much to enable a sense of place and presence among dispersed users. It provides unlimited opportunities for individuals to share ideas, enter a conversation, or tell a story, and in the process, gain a sense of the presence of others in the conversation or group. But sometimes, people want to spend less structured time in digital environments, passing the time leisurely by hanging out on social media or some other online site. Some spend large amounts of time in such spaces,

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entire days and nights, just hanging out, checking out what others are doing and saying – not necessarily interacting with them but still sensing others’ presence in an ambient way, feeling a sense of perceived proximity and community with them. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls these kinds of hangouts third spaces (1989). They are places other than homes and workplaces – the first and second spaces – in which people spend time and relax, usually without requirements or an agenda. Hangouts, both physical and digital, are important because they provide a space for people to spend time in the company of others without obligations or pressures. And they permit individuals to engage different aspects of their lives and identities than they do at work and at home. By simply sharing a digital space with those who are like‐minded, simply experiencing a sense of shared identity and culture, individuals can feel known and accepted, and a very strong sense of place and community can develop (Chayko 2018, pp. 51–55). Social media, then, typically acts as a kind of “third space” for users.

Self‐Expression Human beings also have a strong need for self‐expression. Digital technologies, and social media in particular, are frequently used to create personal expressions of all kinds and to edit and manage these impressions as they are communicated to the wider world. In the process, developing and expressing one’s identity (or self) can flourish and even become a kind of project. Some people produce and manage their online identities and “brands” rather strategically, and evaluate others’ identities just as strategically (see Rui and Stefanone 2013). They select and “fix up” profiles, photos and interactions online so as to make them more distinctive and, usually, more flattering. Still, most people want to make sure that their true or authentic selves are represented, both online and offline. As Nicole Ellison and her coauthors explain, “Pressures to highlight one’s positive attributes are experienced in tandem with the need to present one’s true (or authentic) self to others, especially in significant relationships” (Ellison et  al. 2006, p. 417). Because people can control their self‐presentational behavior online, they manage their impressions strategically and make decisions about what to self‐disclose (Ellison et al. 2006). Digital tools provide a relatively controlled space in which to edit and express and explore the self. This is especially valuable when some aspect of face‐to‐face communication is difficult or challenging. People with nondominant backgrounds and lifestyles can discover unique avenues and spaces for self‐expression and connection online that help them deal with offline challenges. In certain spaces, they may even find a sense of safety that eludes them in physical space (Baker 2005; Gajjala 2004; Lin 2006; Mehra et al. 2004; Mitra 2004, 2005 – see Chayko 2018, pp. 118–123).

Watching and Being Watched Social media sites are designed so that people can easily see what others are up to. Users follow one another, read timelines, and get to know a lot about one another, serving “the essential purpose … of seeing and being seen,” says sociologist and social network expert Duncan Watts (as quoted in Cassidy 2006, p. 54).



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Such behavior can be described as gazing, creeping, voyeurism, or, at its criminal extreme, stalking. Sociologist Alice Marwick calls it social surveillance. Watching one another in digital spaces, and being watched, has become an ordinary and expected aspect of the digital experience and, as an interview subject of Marwick claimed, is “not really weird for anyone anymore” (Marwick 2012, pp. 378–379). People generally know that they are effectively being watched when they are on social media sites, Marwick claims. They consider being watched part of the social media experience. They may (or may not) tailor the content they post to certain audiences or particular others they believe will see it, thereby shaping it with the knowledge that social surveillance will take place. Some consider the experience of watching others online less an act of surveillance than an indicator of emotional involvement, pointing out that real emotion and intimacy are generated in the course of digital exchanges (Chayko 2008, p. 177). A surge of emotion often arises when two or more people feel that they “click,” whether online or offline (Baker 2005; Chayko 2008). This feeling can be so strong and satisfying that to obtain it can be central to people’s desire to use social media and can shape the contours and dimensions of the space substantially (Chayko 2008). Watching and being watched on social media can also be difficult emotionally. It is easy to feel judged or rated, especially when being commented upon. Feelings of envy or hurt or being left out are a natural byproduct of seeing things that bring one pain, or comparing one’s life to others’. A fear of missing out (FOMO) on the myriad goings‐on may develop. Some struggle to the point of depression, anxiety, and even suicide, in this culture. Social surveillance can also lead to misunderstandings. Very different audiences are exposed to the content posted on social media platforms. An individual’s audience might consist of both family and work colleagues, complicating the process of deciding what to share, or resulting in embarrassment or trouble. When two or more audience coexisting on social media in effect “bleed into” one another or “collapse” such that it becomes difficult to keep them separate, it is called context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011). To share content on social media is to communicate with a number of audiences, some of which are known and some of which are unknown. Those in a digital environment may “sense their audience at a particular point in time,” as boyd and Heer note, and “they may have no conception of who might have access to their expressions later” (boyd and Heer 2006; see Chayko 2018, pp. 88–91).

Trust and Social Support It is sometimes seen as surprising that people are so supportive and trusting of one another online. But social support is quite often established in digital spaces, both when people have been in contact over a period of time and even among relative strangers who have just “met” (Ellison et  al. 2007, 2011; McCosker and Darcy 2013; Parks 2011; Sproull et al. 2005). Digital environments lend themselves so well to sociality that people often find themselves sharing very real needs (information, interpersonal contacts, even money!) and becoming close in a variety of ways. Some wonder why people spend time, effort, and their own personal funds helping people whom they have never met face‐to‐face. But the relationships that form in digital environments are not only real and consequential, they can easily become

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intimate (Chayko 2002). And even when they are not particularly close, it can be gratifying to be seen and known as someone who knows things and helps others. It can raise one’s status in a group or community. It can make it more likely that the helper may be helped someday in return. But most fundamentally, people often assist one another simply because they want to. It is a very human impulse to care about and aid others – to be altruistic – and this impulse is routinely expressed in digital environments although sadly, as will be discussed next, harsh and harassing behavior is all too prevalent in such environments as well. Some sites exist for the explicit purpose of helping people solve problems or find assistance. People who find themselves in unfamiliar or frightening circumstances often turn to the internet first for information, resources, or supportive groups who can provide support, companionship, information, and resources. Such groups can be indispensable in life’s most worrisome moments. People routinely report being empowered, supported, and embraced in digital spaces (see McCosker and Darcy 2013). It is actually quite common to develop trust in people who are not personally known. We place our trust in those who guide our financial, government, medical, and military organizations as a matter of course. Society “would be imperiled were individuals unwilling to trust the legions of physically absent others on whom they are dependent,” report Gross and Simmons (2002, p. 533), paraphrasing Giddens (1994, pp. 89–90). Of course, not everyone should be trusted, online or offline. But a certain degree of trust in people who are critical to the operation of those institutional systems that undergird our societies is necessary, and this is not so different from trusting people who are encountered in digital/online spaces (see Chayko 2008, 2018, pp. 146–147; Castells et al. 2004; Geser 2004; Sproull et al. 2005; Suler 2004; Turow and Hennessy 2007).

Interpersonal Conflicts and Harassment Despite the generous presence of social support, trust, and friendship found in digital spaces, harassment – from trolling and name‐calling to stalking and threats – is all too prevalent online. This is due in part to the lack of face‐to‐face accountability in digital spaces and the ease with which coarse, cruel comments can be spontaneously shared online. Disinhibition, or the disregarding of norms, which can be associated with anonymity, is also common online (see Suler 2004). Harassment can take place in any online environment, but is increasingly seen on social media, in gaming spaces, and in comments sections of blogs and online communities. In general, those whose lives are more fully entwined with the internet, have lots of information about them available online, promote themselves online, or work in the digital tech industry experience higher rates of digital harassment than those who are relatively less engaged online (Duggan 2017). Digital technology – particularly texting and email – is also used to harass and intimidate in the overwhelming majority of domestic violence cases (89% by one estimate  –  Chemaly 2014). Fully 73% of Americans have seen someone harassed online, while 40% report that it has happened to them, and these numbers are likely to increase as online rhetoric becomes increasingly coarse and harsh (Duggan 2014). It is not uncommon for women and members of nondominant or marginalized groups who express opinions online to be harassed and threatened, often with rape



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and death threats. Young people in general also report higher rates of physical threats and sustained harassment than their older counterparts. Low‐income and disempowered individuals, particularly youth, are at increased risk for harm and harassment in public and private spaces, both online and in face‐ to‐face situations. Frequently surveilled by adults, peers, and institutions, they seek spaces that afford freedom of expression, interest‐based communities, and privacy. When online, they want to create their own norms and carve out spaces in which they can feel comfortable – spaces that can be considered their own (Vickery 2015). Of course, spatially separated members of dangerous or destructive groups can also use digital technology to find one another, gather digitally and physically, and cause harm (Carmichael 2003; Glaser et al. 2002, p. 22; Kjuka 2013). Harassers and abusers tend to operate anonymously or under pseudonyms, while their victims (often women) tend to appear online under their own names, in the context of their professional and personal lives. Online threats often come from a variety of different sources, rather than from a single organization that could be targeted or sued. Policing these behaviors is therefore very difficult and complex. Additionally, the costs are significant  –  for individuals, law enforcement agencies, and society  –  and are both financial and emotional (Chayko 2018, pp. 147–150; Chemaly 2014; Duggan 2014; Hess 2014). People encounter unpleasantness and face problems in digital spaces, just as in physical spaces. Some of that is the result of the open architecture of many platforms. But while accountability is diminished online, there are occasionally positive outcomes of this, as when a shy person finds himself or herself with more confidence to speak and connect online. It will take collaboration and understanding for digital spaces to be provided with the best possible balance of regulation and openness.

Key Issues and Impacts Inaccuracy and “Fake News” A news story is considered to be fake news when it has been deliberately written to spread misinformation, lies, and propaganda; essentially, the story is an intentional hoax. The open architecture of the internet lends itself to such swift, widespread information sharing that there has been sharp uptick in the transmission of inaccurate or “fake” news, facts, and information. Open publishing platforms have made it possible to create websites and social media accounts that look like, or mimic, credible news sites, but are not. They are not operated by trained journalists but by those who seek to perpetrate falsehoods. It is possible to duplicate such sites widely through the use of bots and algorithms that systematically share (and even create) the misinformation in ways that look very real. It is in many cases very difficult to separate legitimate news sites from propaganda. Some consider “fake news” to be simply information with which they disagree. Others claim that we can no longer regulate truth in an era where fake news spreads so easily, and that we therefore live in a “post‐truth” society. But facts are the cornerstone of free, civil debate, and are essential for intelligent decision‐making on the individual, communal, and societal levels.

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The representation of an opinion as “the truth,” while often protected by the First Amendment on free speech, leads to the polarization of differing points of view, generally in the political sphere. The rise and spread of fake news is a major problem, particularly in democracies, which depend on their media representatives to speak for the people and hold governments accountable. Fake news and information cannot be combatted by organizations that privilege balance over accuracy, decline to take responsibility for the speech that occurs in their spaces, or refuse to fact‐ check the texts they present and stories they tell. In a world in which citizen journalism is becoming increasingly common (see below), all must take on these roles and the responsibility to ensure accuracy (Chayko 2018, pp. 81–82).

Data Mining and Online Surveillance As people become increasingly present in digital contexts, online surveillance has become a constant reality. Nearly everything that is done on the internet is tracked, analyzed, and stored, and then used for a variety of purposes (Cobb 2012; Chen et al. 2009; Sengupta 2012). Some organizations specialize in finding or “mining for” these bits of information and using them to make inferences about what people would like to buy or do or even be. This is called data mining, and it is important to remember that it can and likely does happen all the time when we are online. In data mining, information is extracted (“mined”) from a larger body of information in order to uncover details or patterns about the behavior of a person or organization. This can have troubling privacy implications because much of this happens without a person’s explicit permission or even his or her conscious realization. At times, permissions may be obtained, but this often occurs in fairly complex terms of agreements, which people may not read or understand or which may keep changing. Digital technology is intrinsic to the act of modern surveillance. Data related to online behaviors and preferences are persistently tracked when people are online. Habits and behaviors are discerned and individuals’ preferences and lifestyles are profiled. A phone can be wiretapped or can transfer information remotely even when turned off, acting as a microphone and transmitting conversations that take place within its vicinity. GPS systems can track people’s locations as well and in some cases have been placed in people’s cars without their knowledge and even without a warrant (Claburn 2009). Surveillance can also be positive. Surveillance can assist in the rescue of people stranded or lost, as locations can often be remotely tracked via one’s smartphone. It can prompt the suggestion of new information or the introduction of new people into one’s life. And information tracked and compiled via surveillance can help ­people fend off intrusions, attacks, or crimes and make them safer.

Social Organization, Movements, and Activism Digital technology enables people to reach out to one another and organize their actions so that as a group they might make a greater difference. Social media opens up networks and pathways by which messages can be directly sent to those who are in power. Even if recipients do not respond individually or even see every single message, tens or hundreds or thousands of such messages may have a collective influence.



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People who seek information on SNSs are more likely to be politically active, both online and offline (Gil de Zúñiga et  al. 2012). And, interestingly, people who are drawn into mobilization efforts via social media tend to be those who would otherwise not have been active (Vissers and Stolle 2014). Of course, reaching out to others on social media is not the same as doing so face‐to‐face. It can induce what has been called slacktivism or hashtag activism  –  the substitution of talking about doing something (especially on social media) for actually doing something face‐to‐face. The most successful media‐influenced social movements combine online and offline interactions. Potential activists can find one another online, discuss their common cause, recruit interested others, and make plans to meet in person. Efforts to bring about change can gain much widespread steam and publicity online as people solidify their stances, organize groups and rallies, and publicize their efforts. Most politically active students are active both online and offline (Vissers and Stolle 2014). Social media has been instrumental in helping to inspire, jump‐start, spread the word about, and sustain a number of movements. The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, which protested income and social inequality (“We are the 99%!” was the most well‐known of its slogans), and the other Occupy movements that followed were organized and publicized in large part on social media. The Arab Spring protests in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 were called Facebook or Twitter revolutions, as those platforms played such a large role in the events. In 2014, the deaths at the hands of police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City resulted in numerous, massive protests that were organized and documented on Facebook and other social media worldwide. Hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe sprang up on Twitter. And in 2017 and 2018, the groundswell of attention paid to incidents of sexual harassment and assault was the byproduct of the effectively shared hashtags #MeToo and #TimesUp, kick‐starting a movement of astonishing scope and impact. It is hard to imagine any of these movements having anything near their strength without the accompaniment of the power of social media. In a very real way, they are social media revolutions. Social media platforms are often looked to as a kind of lifeline by people who suffer under repressive regimes. Those same authoritarian governments often fear the power of the internet and social media and may attempt to filter it, monitor it, curtail its use, or even shut it down. But increased access to one another and to resources have enhanced the importance of social media in people’s lives and proven especially indispensable in places where people have minimal rights or freedom. When Turkey blocked access to Twitter in early 2014 right before a crucial election, users fashioned highly creative work‐arounds and found their way onto Twitter, exchanging more tweets the day after the ban than the day before. Even under difficult conditions – perhaps especially under them – the power of social media to help individuals gather and fight for their rights has become apparent and has become a primary affordance of social media (Chayko 2018, pp. 107–110; Guillén and Suárez 2005, p. 687; Tufekci 2014).

The Rise of Citizen Journalism Many people use social media and blogs to spread and comment on the news of the day. In doing so, they are essentially taking on tasks previously performed by professional journalists. Gathering and disseminating newsworthy information to a

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large number of people once required the coordinated efforts of trained professionals in organizations both small (local newspapers) and large (the wire services, such as the Associated Press and United Press International). These organizations had tremendous control over the news production process. They even decided what was newsworthy. Today, most anyone with internet and digital media access can post on social media sites or on individual blogs content that will become the “news of the day” and, therefore, can decide what is newsworthy. Citizen journalists produce and spread information throughout social media and other internet networks on their own, without “gatekeepers” to ensure accuracy. At the same time, many news organizations have begun to incorporate the work of citizen journalists into their own professional products. This blurs the boundary between “legitimate” and “amateur” news items and outlets. Many people now turn to Twitter or Facebook for up‐to‐date information on news events or even for breaking news rather than (or alongside) more traditional media outlets like newspapers, television, radio, and the wire services. Citizen journalism can provide a voice for people in societies in which the mass media are not independent of the state or where freedom of the press is limited. In such areas, citizens have special motivation to use social media to share and stay abreast of the news. In China, for example, where the media are state controlled, mobile telephony is the least regulated media space. Texting and social media therefore provide opportunities for citizens to inform and be informed about current events (Wei et al. 2014). Of course, citizen journalists, by definition, are not trained in journalistic techniques as are professional journalists. Unlike the pros, they are not required to obtain multiple credible sources verifying the accuracy of an item before publishing it. Professional news organizations have such standards. They are incorrect sometimes, too  –  they may be in a hurry to be fast (or first) getting a story out and rely on sources that may be wrong or absent, or they may be more interested in the attention‐ getting (and financially lucrative) aspects of a story than the facts. But information provided by professional journalists and news organizations is generally considered to have the edge in accuracy and believability over that of citizen journalists or bloggers (Chayko 2018, pp. 110–112).

Social Media and Politics Barack Obama’s 2007 campaign for the US presidency was the first major national political campaign to utilize social media in a major way. It used Facebook and YouTube to present him to the electorate and provided ways for people to donate small amounts of money to the campaign. The social media component of the campaign successfully introduced him to a large number of potential voters, many of whom were younger and became interested in politics for the first time (Discovery 2012; Katz et al. 2013). The use of social media (particularly Twitter) by President Donald Trump and his campaign in his candidacy during 2015 and 2016 and upon assuming the presidency in 2016 is perhaps an even more dramatic example of the power of social media in politics. Trump uses Twitter as a platform to speak directly to the American voters and populace, sidestepping traditional media outlets and disrupting traditional



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practices of dealing with the press. This change is rather in line with his charge to disrupt longstanding patterns and practices in general. The impact of such major changes will likely be felt for years to come, as candidates with little prior political and governing experience leverage their social media platforms and audiences to meet new aims and new ways. Indeed, methods of choosing and electing candidates worldwide, methods of governing, and even democracy itself, may be in a period of transition and overhaul. Social media, and Facebook and Twitter in particular, are increasingly blamed for allowing the development of polarized rhetoric on their platforms. Those who manage these platforms and sites have sometimes responded by claiming that they cannot be held responsible for the content of those who use the platforms. It has become apparent, though, that foreign entities and computerized nonhuman “bots” have a significant presence on these sites, influencing the conversations and opinions that develop – and, potentially, elections and democracy itself. Facebook seems to be slowly coming to the realization of this influence, and of its responsibility in monitoring and minimizing this presence along with the cruel and hateful speech and harassment on the platform. Twitter and other social media companies must follow suit. The extent of the external regulation that social media companies may face is still unknown. Social media is also used to express political views and to find like‐minded others with whom to engage politically. People are increasingly likely to become enmeshed within filter bubbles and echo chambers, listening to and believing only those who agree with them, and closing their minds to ideas that do not confirm what they already believe to be true. The tendency not to speak up about political or policy issues when it is perceived that one’s audience might disagree with those views is called the “spiral of silence,” and it can spill over from online to offline contexts, making is less likely for people to discuss things that might prove controversial or divisive (Hampton et  al. 2014). This is also an example of confirmation bias: the tendency for individuals to be protective of their initial positions on a topic, even in the presence of contradictory evidence (Leeper 2014; Maximino 2014). Information related to politics and governing is often highly charged and politically skewed; never more so that in the current political and cultural environment (see Campbell 2016; Himelboim et al. 2016). This is all the more reason to educate oneself on various issues and points of view. About 20% of social media users do modify or change their social or political views when exposed to new and different ones in the course of social media use (Anderson 2016). The internet and digital media have the potential to remake political systems and governments in important and consequential ways (Chayko 2018, pp. 172–15), and to present news and information in fair, factual ways, as is the charge of websites such as as The Flip Side (www.flipside. com) and Politifact (politifact.com).

Being Plugged In … To Society In a participatory culture, people spend a great deal of time in digital spaces. They feel the presence of others whom they may (or may not) get to know and trust. As they express themselves, they must deal with FOMO, context collapse, and harsh

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online rhetoric. They can organize themselves on social media to help create the world they want to live in, yet have their every digital gesture tracked and traced all the while. For better or worse, digital technology and social media have reshaped our social landscape Just as surely as cords and chargers plug our digital devices into electric outlets, digital technology helps people become plugged into society. Social media helps us take the pulse of our social world; to become and remain “in the know”; to stay in simultaneous contact with multiple social networks. Literally and figuratively, for better or worse, members of tech‐rich societies are more “plugged in” than ever before. The continued presence of significant others can help us feel “at home in the world” in a way that few other phenomena can (Berger and Kellner 1964, p. 7; see Chayko 2018, pp. 200–202). To be aware of the presence of others in the world via digital technology and social media can help people feel rooted in the world. To build networks and communities of knowledge and understanding makes possible a more connected, bonded, inclusive future. These are the great promises of techno‐social life.

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23 Contemporary Feminist Theory Michelle Meagher

Though the roots of contemporary feminist theory travel through the rich loam of women’s activism, women’s history, and women’s intellectual traditions, feminist theory today is something much more than “a body of writing that attempts to describe, explain, and analyze the condition of women’s lives” (Kolmar and Bartkowski 2005, p. 2). Contemporary feminist theory ought to be explained as a robust body of politically informed scholarly inquiries that collectively sets out to explain – and provide tools to transform – the ways that gender organizes all lives. This field gained momentum from what is often described as the second wave of the women’s movement, which was itself spurred on by a variety of other mid‐twentieth‐ century social justice movements similarly structured around the expansion of liberal rights of citizenship to marginalized peoples: civil rights movements, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the gay and lesbian liberation movement, and antiwar, pro‐peace activism. As I explore in this chapter, feminist theory in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries is not limited to thinking about the lives of men and women and all those in between, but rather, offers explanations of how gender shapes the entire social world.

Second‐Wave Feminisms The term first‐wave feminism describes a set of activist and intellectual practices in the nineteenth century that were organized around securing increasing legal and political recognition of women. Though many women in the West and beyond enjoyed increasing freedoms in the twentieth century, by the mid‐1960s a renewed feminist movement was emerging that was organized around the realization that

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cultural and social constraints kept many women from living lives marked by self‐ determination. Second‐wave feminist theorists set out to explain and analyze the persistence of gender inequalities. Their explanations are often said to be organized around three key approaches: liberal, radical, and Marxist or socialist feminisms. Even those who use these categories are quick to point out their limitations – of note is Rosemarie Tong, who begins the introduction to the most recent edition of her textbook on Feminist Theory with declarations of the diversity of feminist thinking. “I have become increasingly convinced,” she writes, “that feminist thought resists categorization into tidy schools of thought” (2009, p. 1). Indeed, contemporary feminist theory moves beyond these general categories in ways that reformulate the key concerns of both feminist intellectual inquiry and politically engaged activisms. Such reservations noted, I discuss here the evolution and emphasis of these three ­categories  – liberal, radical, and Marxist or socialist. In the sections that follow, my  emphasis is on the contemporary feminist theories that expand, critique, and otherwise engage with second‐wave feminist theories. From a liberal feminist perspective, the legal, political, and economic disadvantages felt by women are the fault of an uneven application of fundamentally liberal concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. The liberal project sets out to ensure that liberal democratic ideals are applied to all – men and women. A key historical liberal feminist thinker was Mary Wollstonecraft, born near London in 1759. Given the custom of her day and time, Wollstonecraft was denied access to formal education by virtue of both her gender and her class. Her largely self‐directed education, coupled with a politically impassioned spirit, drove Wollstonecraft to pen A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. This is a text that enters into lively debates about the value of education for girls and women, for instance, Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762), which includes a section of the education of girls as wives‐to‐be. In the face of arguments like Rousseau’s, Wollstonecraft makes a strong case for women’s capacity for autonomy and self‐direction. She points out that women have been taught to embody those characteristics that would today be described as feminine: emotionality, irrationality, frivolity, and dependence. A central claim in Vindication is that women’s traits, which she describes as faults, are “the natural consequence of their education and station in society” (1988, p. 194). Educated differently, she contends that women will be emancipated and able to contribute to their societies in equal manner to men. Like Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, contemporary liberal feminisms are built on a theory of equality between men and women. Sexual difference, on this view, is merely incidental and the duty of the feminist is to call upon legal, political, and social institutions to ensure that sex and gender are not factors that impede women’s full participation in the social world. Betty Friedan’s approach in The Feminine Mystique is, like Wollstonecraft’s, a classically liberal feminist one. In this bestselling book, the American journalist accounts the deep frustrations and often silent suffering of middle‐class suburban women who felt a strong dissonance between ideal womanhood and their lived realities. Friedan insists that the ultimate solution to “the problem that has no name” is for women to strive for self‐actualization, to search out meaningful work, and to reject the ideological limitations of ideal womanhood (Friedan 1963). From a radical perspective, the liberal concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty are fundamentally structured around male experience, masculine power, and

400 Michelle Meagher patriarchal social formations. Friedan’s liberal feminist solution – that women enter into the public sphere of work and politics – is completely unsatisfactory from a radical perspective because feminist revolutionary politics must tackle the foundations of women’s oppression: patriarchy and patriarchal domination of women by men. A term originally used to describe kinship patterns marked by father‐rule, radical feminist theorists and activists use the term patriarchy to draw attention to the insidious and apparently universal nature of male power. Kate Millett describes patriarchy in her popular and influential Sexual Politics in this way: “The fact is evident at once if one recalls that the military, industry, technology, universities, science, political office, and finance  –  in short, every avenue of power with the society, including the coercive force of the police, is entirely in male hands” (1969, p. 25). Much radical feminist theory emerged from pamphlets, periodicals, and manifestos produced by radical feminist collectives. The manifesto of a New York–based group called Redstockings, for instance, insists that “women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants and cheap labor” (1970, p. 533). Radical feminists aim to revolutionize patriarchal social institutions, but they also recognize that patriarchy intimately organizes women’s lives. Masculine hostility toward women, sexual violence, and the daily and persistent threat of sexual violence are viewed by radical feminists as pervasive social practices that function to reproduce patriarchal social power over women. Millett writes that patriarchy’s “universality and longevity” leads both the majority and minority to believe in the hierarchy, even if they are, to use her language, “plagued” by “gnawing doubts” about their own positioning within the hierarchical system (1969, p. 56). A key political strategy for radical feminism is consciousness‐raising, which compels women to recognize the ways that patriarchy is distributed throughout all facets of society, including ideological subjugation of women and the internalization of this subjugation in feminine unconscious processes. A third approach to feminism understands class as the key explanation of women’s oppression. Marxist or socialist feminism argues that the roots of women’s oppression are economic, drawing on Marxist analysis of capitalism, capitalist ideology, and class distinction to make this point. Though Marx himself had little to say about women, his collaborator Friedrich Engels addressed women’s exploitation directly in his 1884 text, On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Here, Engels points to the rise of the monogamous family as an economic arrangement in which men subjugated women in an early class antagonism. He describes as “absurd” (1978, p. 735) the notion that women have always been subjugated to men, arguing instead that the overthrowing of mother right – matriarchal and matrilineal systems organized around pairing families and communal provisioning for children – was “the world‐historic defeat of the female sex,” which gave rise to the patriarchal family, patrilineal inheritance, and male control over private property (Engels 1978, p. 736). For classical or orthodox Marxist feminism, women’s oppression is a fundamental feature of capitalist economic systems, and would be abolished in the wake of a wholesale economic revolution, under which all women will benefit in the same way that all workers will benefit. The economic revolution foretold by Engels and Marx would, in this view, remedy sexual inequality and male dominance: “After the revolution, when all people would be workers and private property abolished, women would be emancipated



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from capital as well as from men” (Hartmann 1979, p. 3). Many, however, had their doubts that patriarchy and male privilege would dissipate so quickly. Heidi Hartmann insists that it is necessary to recognize that the exploitation of women’s reproductive labor in the home – childcare, food preparation, and emotional labor, among other things – benefits men directly: “Men have a higher standard of living than women in terms of luxury consumption, leisure time, and personalized services. A materialist approach ought not to ignore this crucial point” (1979, p. 7). In other words, it would be foolhardy for women to believe that men – including men of the radical left – who benefit from patriarchal domination of women will be eager to give this up. By using the term materialist here, Hartmann points to the methodological value of Marxism for feminism. Feminist Marxists and socialist feminists, who are increasingly described as materialist feminists, draw on  the historical materialist method to argue for a material base to patriarchy. Patriarchy – understood as systemic male domination  –  is not a historical or biological truth, but rather is materially sustained by “all the social structures that enable men to control women’s labour” (Hartmann 1979, p. 12). Hartmann ­ultimately calls for materialist feminist theory that can analyze capitalism and patriarchy in combination, reorienting an analysis of women’s exploitation by considering the material conditions of women’s lives, which are shaped as much by their relationships to men, children, and reproductive labor in the home as it is to their relationships to modes of production. These three categories are certainly not exhaustive descriptions of the ways that feminists made sense of the oppression of women in the 1970s and beyond, but they are often used as shorthand by feminist scholars and historians to describe the variety of explanations and strategies for social change that were developing and circulating in this time period. Other notable approaches include cultural feminisms and psychoanalytic feminisms. Cultural feminisms, sometimes associated with radical feminism, are less focused on the eradication of gender distinctions than on the celebration of womanhood and qualities associated with femininity. Often associated with lesbian feminism and lesbian separatism, cultural feminism was “a countercultural movement aimed at reversing the cultural valuation of the male and the devaluation of the female” (Echols 1989, p. 6). Lesbian separatism was “a political theory and practice that would ignite and accelerate women’s liberation” by supporting the construction of women’s communities and by experimenting with ways of living, loving, and working outside of patriarchy (Enzser 2016, p. 183). Cultural feminism is characterized by scholarly writing “that valorizes egalitarianism, collectivism, an ethic of care, respect for knowledge derived from experience, pacifism, and cooperation,” all viewed as feminine traits (Taylor and Rupp 1993). Though often denounced for what its critics describe as essentialism, cultural feminists disagree about the origins of the differences between women and men. Regardless, cultural feminism has, as Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp point out, formed the foundation for women’s communities that “sustain and nourish feminist activism” (1993, p. 41). Psychoanalytic feminisms are inspired by the observation made by Juliet Mitchell that Freud’s theories “give us the beginnings of an explanation of the inferiorized and “alternative” (second sex) psychology of women under patriarchy” (Mitchell 1984, p. 26). Mitchell’s earliest work engaged with Marxist perspectives in order to explain the position of women, but she turns to Freud for a more satisfactory explanation of the

402 Michelle Meagher ways in which the power relations within patriarchy are reproduced at a psychic as well as a social level. Other feminist theorists working in this area turn to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s reinterpretations of Freud in order to identify the linguistic and symbolic roots of women’s subordination. From a Lacanian feminist perspective, Western culture is characterized by a phallogocentrism that privileges the word (logocentrism) and the phallus (phallocentrism). Though critical of both Freud and Lacan, the French psychoanalytic feminist theorist Luce Irigaray is inspired by psychoanalytic models. She argues that given the pervasive masculinity of Western culture, language, and symbolic systems, it is vital for women to envision what she calls a “sexuate” culture – one in which femininity would be something more than simply the obverse of masculinity, women would no longer be understood only through their differences from men, and true models of exchange might be imagined and practiced (Irigaray 1985; Jones 2011). The field of second‐wave feminist theory offers cogent, sometimes poetic, often deeply personal explanations for the condition of women, but it often fails to reckon fully with the fact that the category “woman” is hardly a singular one. Indeed, “the initially most visible forms of feminist writing came from a restricted group of women, predominately white, middle‐class, living in colonizing or ex‐colonizing countries” (Lennon and Whitford 2002, p. 3). Contemporary feminist theorists have insisted that feminist writing and theory must recognize and mend its exclusionary tendencies. Intersectional feminists theorists and thinkers  –  members of the Combahee River Collective, feminist theorist bell hooks, and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, for ­instance – insist that a feminism that emerges from white middle‐class women’s specific experiences of oppression can only ever offer a partial  –  at best stunted, at worst ­oppressive – analysis of patriarchal power. Hooks (2000) insists that the radical feminist emphasis on patriarchy is unsatisfactory unless patriarchy is understood as not only sexist but also rooted in white supremacy and capitalism. Transnational and decolonial feminist scholars similarly demand more expansive feminist theories by challenging models of feminism that center on the West or that reproduce settler colonialism. Informed by poststructuralism, as well as queer theory that emerged with force and in relation to feminist theory in the 1990s, transgender theory and transfeminisms similarly insist that feminist theory and theorists re‐examine the exclusionary assumptions of their politics. Also responding to poststructural challenges to conventional patterns of cultural analysis and theoretical production, some feminist theorists reorient their critical practices by turning attention to affect and emotion, or, in the case of posthumanist feminist scholarship, to the limitations of liberation projects that are organized around humans and Enlightenment humanism. Though the remainder of this chapter is organized around several theoretical projects, each of which develop in parallel, and with frequent crossover, to reformulate the key terms of feminist inquiry and activism, I turn now to an overview of key feminist theories of gender and compulsory heterosexuality.

Feminist Theories of Gender and Compulsory Heterosexuality Gender has many definitions and has been a frequent site of feminist and sociological debate and discussion. Loosely, the term refers to the cultural interpretation of sexually dimorphic bodies. Gender can be parsed into different components – gender



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identity (one’s sense of oneself as gendered, that is a man or a woman), gender expression (one’s performance or external presentation of gendered characteristics), gender attribution (the interpretation that we have of the gender of others), and/or gender norms (socially variant expectations that shape and regulate gender identity and expression). Jennifer Germon puts it well when she writes: “There can be little argument that the concept of gender has become essential to the way that English speakers understand what it is to be a sexed subject. Yet gender did not exist 60 years ago – at least not in the way we understand it today.” (Germon 2009, p. 1)” The concept of gender as something divisible and separate from biological sex has its roots in anthropologist Margaret Mead’s descriptions of sex roles. Mead observes that “most societies divide the universe of human characteristics into two, and attribute one half to men and the other to women” (Delphy 1993, p. 57). As Christine Delphy notes, Mead understands these divisions as generally beneficial to societies, cultures, and civilizations; her observation of the existence of sex roles is not directly linked to a feminist impulse to consider the ways that such divisions are linked to systems of power, privilege, and oppression. Similarly disinterested in questions of politics, Anglo‐American psychologists who wanted to explain sex/gender dissonance further developed gender as a concept distinct from sex. John Money, for instance famously experimented – to sometimes disastrous results – with gender assignment, on the assertion that gender identity was virtually entirely learned and thus amenable to social manipulation. What was for psychologists a useful clinical tool became, for second‐wave feminists, an analytic distinction that “sought to weaken biological essentialist arguments that ascribed women’s inferior status to innate biological differences” (Sanz 2017, p. 1). A key figure along these lines is Ann Oakley, who defines gender as “a matter of culture; it refers to the social classification into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’” (Oakley 2015, p. 22). In her groundbreaking text Sex, Gender and Society, first published in 1972, Oakley explores gender differences in terms of personality, intellect, sexuality, and social roles. She concludes that gender differences are largely produced in social relationships, and that they persist because of a shared belief that they are natural expressions of biologically determined distinctions. Writing from a broadly feminist perspective, Oakley refutes the notion that gender‐based role differentiation “­produces greater social efficiency” (2015, p. 5), and concludes that in a patriarchal society, one of the many jobs of the feminist social theorist is to reveal the constructed nature of gender difference in order to defend women against “charges of inferiority” (2015, p. 5). In a 1975 essay, anthropologist Gayle Rubin describes gender as “a socially imposed division of the sexes” (Rubin 1975, p. 179). Drawing on structural anthropology to understand how kinship systems organize sex, sexuality, and gender and on psychoanalysis to describe its reproduction, Rubin insists that the oppression of women is rooted “within social systems, rather than in biology” (Rubin 1975, p. 175). For Rubin, kinship systems organized around the exchange of women between men creates sexism and gender. The exchange of women, which she calls “the traffic in women,” describes a system of obligatory or compulsory heterosexuality that rests on the division of the sexes, the distinction between genders, and the constraint of female sexuality. “The oppression of women is deep;” Rubin explains,

404 Michelle Meagher “equal pay, equal work, and all the female politicians in the world will not extirpate the roots of sexism” (Rubin 1975, p. 198). Indeed, the roots of sexism are complex, but they are, in this view, ultimately organized around kinship systems. American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich further develops Rubin’s concept of obligatory heterosexuality in an influential essay in the long‐running academic feminist journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. In “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980), she argues that heterosexuality is not only compulsory in patriarchal social orders but that it is a violent political ­institution intended to keep women apart from one another. She theorizes a lesbian continuum, which imagines homosocial friendships between women on one end and lesbian sexual love‐based relations on the other. Both are shut down in patriarchal social formations that are organized around male power, male desire, and that are indifferent to women’s pleasures, desires, or capacities for self‐definition. Rich and Rubin’s emphasis on gender as a political category runs deep through feminist theory and theorizing. Like many theorists of gender, French novelist and theorist Monique Wittig argues that a natural division of the sexes does not preexist society. Her contribution is to argue that the category of sex, presumed to give rise to gender identity, is a political, not biological, category; it is a category of dominance, and most centrally, it is a product “of the social dominance of women by men” (Wittig 1992, p. 5). In the essays that comprise The Straight Mind, Wittig proposes a total conceptual revolution, beginning with a critique of the organization of sex and gender into systems of heterosexuality – feminism must call for an elimination of the heterosexual political regime. To do otherwise is to simply rearrange the system (Turcotte 1992, p. xi). In ways that parallel the early work of American theorist and poet Rich’s expansion of Rubin’s concept of “compulsory heterosexuality,” Wittig identifies heterosexuality as a violent social institution that demands the division of sexes and genders. Writing as a lesbian, she argues that lesbians are not women – those who do not fulfill the socially compulsory roles made available by heterosexuality are exiles, escapees, outsiders. Judith Butler, whose groundbreaking 1990 text Gender Trouble has quite profoundly altered the shape and scope of contemporary feminist theory, draws on Wittig in order to argue against the notion that feminism ought to be organized around “a seamless category of women,” understood as a group uniformly oppressed by masculine domination and patriarchal social forces. Butler insists that feminist theory ought to attend to the regulatory norms that discursively produce our gendered subjectivities. Like Wittig and others, Butler argues that gender is not an authentic, essential, inborne quality expressed through our everyday behaviors, but rather, that gender is “a stylized repetition of acts” (1990, p. 140). A frequent misreading of Butler’s description of the performativity of gender is to imagine that the acts that constitute gender are performed by autonomous subjects. On the contrary, when Butler describes gender as a performance, it is not to say that we choose or don a gender, but that gender is an act that all subjects are compelled to do. Gender is performative and normative; it is also constitutive of subjects – in order to “be” subjects at all, we must “do” gender in ways that are socially intelligible. Understood as discourses, sex/ gender systems do more than simply organize bodies; they also function normatively and violently to render some bodies intelligible and others not. Even so, Butler points



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out that the normative demands of a naturalized and c­ompulsory heterosexuality that demands coherently gendered subjects sometimes fail. “Gender discontinuities,” she notes, “… run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, gay, and lesbian contexts where gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire or sexuality generally does not seem to follow from gender” (Butler 1990, pp. 135–136). Heterosexuality, then, and the identity categories sustain it, are on this view “precarious fabrication always potentially at risk” (Hennessey 2000, p. 55). A  key figure in both feminist studies and queer theory, Butler’s recent work moves away from such an explicit formulation of gender theory and instead reveals the ways that the feminist project can, indeed must, contribute to enormous questions about justice and ethical engagements in the contemporary world (Butler 2004).

Intersectionality The term intersectionality is often traced to the work of feminist legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in articles published in the Stanford Law Review (Crenshaw 1993) and the University of Chicago Legal Forum (Crenshaw 1989), but it is a concept with a long history in feminist theory and action, especially in black feminist and woman of color projects. Early versions of Crenshaw’s insistence that race and gender are not merely additive but rather interact to shape black women’s experiences can be found in the writing of nineteenth‐century black public intellectuals including Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Maria Stewart (see Carasthasis 2016, Gines 2014). Cooper, for instance, was a black educator and sociologist best known for her 1892 A Voice from the South, which concentrates on the education of black women. Central to A Voice from the South is the insistence that sexism as it confronts black women in the south is distinct from sexism as it c­ onfronts white women, and that a women’s rights movement must be organized in ways that recognize the different standpoints of black and white women (see Lengermann and Niebrugge 1998). Writing in the context of the modern women’s movement in the United States, members of the black feminist and largely lesbian Combahee River Collective offered their own description of the interlocking nature of both identity and oppression in their groundbreaking 1977 “A Black Feminist Statement.” Circulated as a pamphlet and reprinted in numerous edited collections, the Combahee River Collective’s statement offers a stinging critique of racism in the women’s movement, identified here as a white women’s movement that has “obscured” the participation of women of color (Combahee River Collective 1981, p. 211). It insists that black women’s specific lived experiences are not adequately understood or analyzed by models that simply view racism as an additional challenge faced by black women and other women of color. Making sense of their own identities begin with identifying their struggles “against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression,” all understood as interlocking systems of oppression that demand integrated analysis. The use of the term interlocking is of particular significance here for, as the authors of the Combahee River Collective insist, it is “the synthesis of these oppressions that create the conditions of our lives” (Combahee River Collective 1981, p. 210) As Patricia Hill Collins and Bilge point out, the Combahee River Collective places the everyday experiences of black women

406 Michelle Meagher at the heart of a structural analysis; though the statement draws on personal experience, ultimately a “systematic analysis is central to the Combahee River Collective’s understanding of the compound nature of the oppression they grapple with” (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016, p. 57). Notably, though the statement is critical of white feminism, its rejection of lesbian separatism is particularly strong: “We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism” (Combahee River Collective 1981, p. 213). Intersectional theories of oppression were born of black women’s knowledge that a feminist movement that is structured around white women’s experience, or a black civil rights movement that is structured around black men’s experiences, or indeed any rights movement that refuses to recognize the specific oppressions of black lesbian women is ultimately unable to satisfactorily theorize oppression, much less attain liberation. Writing 15 years after the Combahee River Collective, Crenshaw describes intersectionality an analytic and ontological response to the tendency to treat “feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color” as “mutually exclusive terrains” (Crenshaw 1993, p. 1242). Drawing on the example of women of color who are victims of domestic violence, she carefully explains that the experience of sexual violence is simultaneously racialized and gendered and that responses to violence must thus be distinct for women in different identity groups. White middle class feminist solutions to domestic violence, in other words, have tended to support white victims of domestic violence and have further alienated poor or black or immigrant victims. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins similarly takes up an intersectional approach in her influential text, Black Feminist Thought. Collins relies on a paradigm of intersecting oppressions in her analysis of black women’s experience, knowledge, and feminist thought. As she points out in her concluding section, this approach “reconceptualises the social relations of domination and resistance” (Hill Collins 1999, p. 273). It also “addresses epistemological debates concerning the power dynamics that underlie what counts as knowledge” (Hill Collins 1999, p. 273). Like members of the Combahee River Collective, and like Cooper, Hill Collins insists that black women’s knowledge is systematically subjugated and obscured in patriarchal, racist social formations. The “founding impulse” of theories of intersectionality was to point to the impossibility of disentangling different threads of identity, but Jasbir Puar points out that “the study of intersectional identities often involves taking imbricated identities apart one by one to see how they influence each other” (Puar 2007, p. 211). Puar views this as a betrayal of the original impulse of intersectionality. She also sees it as an inevitable result of the fact that intersectionality is grounded in identity politics. Intersectional analysis requires, she notes, that we know, name, and stabilize our identities (Puar 2007, p. 212). It requires that we stake our claims to rights and belongingness in stable, timeless, coherent, and socially intelligible identity categories. Puar’s analysis is informed by poststructuralist theories of the subject, and especially Gilles Deleuze’s concept of assemblage, which has moved broadly into social theory and cautiously into feminist theory. For many, the appeal of the concept of assemblage is its capacity to encourage relational thinking, as opposed to dualism, and its suitability to theorize adaptivity, multiplicity, and indeterminacy, while also thinking structurally (Venn 2006). For Puar, the concept permits an analysis that enriches, rather than replaces, intersectionality, by positing identity categories not as



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stable attributes of subjects, but as “events, actions, and encounters between bodies” (Puar 2012, p. 58). Though not without its critics, “it is no exaggeration to say that intersectionality circulates today as the primary figure of political completion in US identity knowledge domains” (Weigman 2012, p. 240). For many, the watermark for valuable feminist scholarship, effective organizing, and politically just theory is an engagement with intersectionality and a recognition of the interlocking nature of the relationship between race, class, gender, and other vectors of power.

Transnational and Decolonial Feminisms Dovetailing with women of color critiques of white feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s were transnational feminist critiques of the failure of white feminism to adequately theorize or recognize the experience of women outside of the West, and outside the US borders specifically. Feminist scholars informed by decolonial and indigenous frameworks have additionally challenged what Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill describe as “whitestream” feminism to recognize the ways that it may participate in and reproduce relations of settler colonialism (Arvin et  al. 2013, p. 17). Chandra Mohanty, a key figure in the development of transnational feminism, drew attention to the tendency on the part of Western feminisms to build universalized frameworks – a move that we see early in the second wave with calls for global sisterhood that flatten out difference between women – as well as a tendency to imagine the “third‐world woman” as a prefeminist, oppressed, and fundamentally powerless figure who must be saved by Western feminism. Western feminism is accused of moral superiority and exceptionalism presumed by American women, who imagine that they are in a position to rescue or educate oppressed women ­elsewhere. Implicit here is a sense that American women have solved many of the problems traditionally associated with gender oppression. As a result, the agency and resilience of non‐Western or “Third World” women is ignored. Equally problematic is that the othering of the Third World woman prevents the nourishment of feminist alliances: Western ­feminists and feminism do not consider what might be gained from transnational or cross‐ border relationships that are based in mutuality and equality. For transnational and global feminists, feminist alliances need to transcend borders, not because there is a global sisterhood, but because a Western feminism that reproduces colonialist discourses is also reproducing colonial oppressions. Ultimately, a transnational feminism does not simply note that feminism has a Western set of reference points, or that feminism can be a tool of Western imperialism. It also notes that a transnational perspective – one that crosses borders and expands its view outside of established divisions – can provide rich theoretical tools to address race, globalization, and political economy. Mohanty’s work contributes to the development of transnationalist feminism as a theoretical and activist project that enables feminist scholars to more carefully “analyze the complex effects of ­globalization shaped by neoliberal capitalism” (Beins and Enzser 2018, p. 24). By theorizing feminism without borders, Mohanty suggests a feminist political project that recognizes that we are all, though variously, shaped by the processes of capital, racism, or heterosexist, and nationalist domination. She is interested in drawing attention to the continuities as well as the discontinuities among communities that

408 Michelle Meagher have been economically and politically marginalized or dominated by a “postcolonial trajectory based on the inclusions and exclusions of processes of capital, racist, heterosexist, and nationalist domination” (Mohanty 2003, p. 507). Mohanty imagines alliances that are not built on sex, race, or nationality, but on commitments to common political projects. Decolonial feminisms are similarly wary of the tendencies of feminist theory to reproduce oppressive, and specifically, colonial, logics. Though feminism’s capacity to offer useful theoretical and political support to colonized women is heavily contested, there is an emerging and vibrant critical field of scholarship that reflects on the ways that feminist theory and practice might provide some valuable frameworks for making sense of indigenous women’s experiences in colonized societies. Indigenous feminisms, for instance, argue that multiple and distinct oppressions of women are located in the heteropatriarchal power exerted within white settler colonialism, which is understood not as an historical event but as a “­persistent social and political formation” shaping the everyday lives of indigenous and nonindigenous folks alike (Arvin et al. 2013, p. 27). Settler colonialism and its heteropatriarchal demands are pervasive forces that affect all of us who reside in colonial sites, but indigenous women experience what Joyce Green describes as an “unpleasant synergy” of colonialism, racism, and sexism, which intensifies sexual and symbolic violence and undermines indigenous women’s self‐determination (Green 2007, p. 23). Understood as a conceptual tool, indigenous feminism strives to support indigenous women’s self‐ determination, to intervene in settler‐colonial privilege, and to work toward indigenous sovereignty (Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; Morgensen 2011). Calls for indigenous sovereignty must, from a decolonial feminist perspective, be informed by understandings of localized, as well as transnational, ways in which gender is imbricated in what Maria Lugones describes as “the combined processes of racialization, colonization, capitalist exploitation, and heterosexualism” (Lugones 2010, p. 745). Though this may be accomplished through intersectional analyses of the sort described in the previous section, for Lugones, it is vital to recognize that gender is an organizational category produced by colonial modernity. She argues that, with European colonial expansion, gender classification was imposed on communities across the globe. Here, Lugones expands on colonial scholarship that suggests that European colonization required the invention of racial classifications by insisting also on the application of gender classifications on the bodies of the colonized. In the context of colonial modernity, she explains that gender “… became a mark of the human” (Sirvent 2016, p. 3). Bodies seen not to exhibit colonially determined normative gender are deemed not only nongendered, but not‐quite‐human. Given the racial and colonial violence associated with the term woman, Lugones calls for feminist scholars to drop their “enchantment” with womanhood and turn attention to what she describes as resistant subjectivities that are not structured around gender (Lugones 2010, p. 746).

Transgender Theory In the introduction to the Trans Studies Reader, Susan Stryker describes trans theory as an approach that draws attention to the fact that gender, “as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex and varied than can be



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accounted for by the currently dominant binary sex/gender ideology of Eurocentric modernity” (2006, p. 3). Trans studies is a relatively newly established field that draws much of its theoretical framework from queer theories that emerged in the 1980s. Queer theory is distinct from the earlier established gay and lesbian theories and studies insofar as it is influenced by poststructural resistances to stable ­subjectivity or identity politics. As Stryker puts it, gay and lesbian theories worked toward “a set of protections for specific kinds of minorities that were vulnerable to discrimination,” whereas queer theories are committed to the promiscuous exploration of a broad array of nonheterosexual, nonheteronormative subject positions and social practices (2006, p. 7). Despite the strong influence of poststructural theories that critique stable subjectivity, early work in transgender theory was historical and autobiographical, responding to the pressing need to give expression to lives that had been rendered unintelligible to many. Published in 1994, Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us recounts the author’s struggle with gender, which she describes as an oppressive normative discourse that must be actively resisted. Like Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg offers an intimate glimpse of the embodied and lived struggles of a non‐ normatively gendered person in her loosely autobiographical novel, Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg 1993). In the more scholarly Transgender Warriors, Feinberg describes the effects of a normative and punitive binary sex–gender system on bodies that fail to easily fit within it. Feinberg calls for gender freedom, defined as “the right of each individual to express their gender in any way they choose, whether feminine, androgynous, masculine, or any point on the spectrum between. And that includes the right to gender ambiguity and gender contradiction” (Feinberg 1996, p. 103). Trans theory “challenge[s] the unifying potential of the category ‘woman,’ and call[s] for new analyses, new strategies and practices, for combating discrimination and injustice based on gender inequality” (Stryker 2006, p. 7). Insofar as theories of gender fly in the face of some of the most basic and enduring assumptions of a binary sex–gender system, they align with feminist critiques of this system. Indeed, theorists of gender, feminism, and sexuality have often expressed interest in the transgender question. Some of Butler’s most important observations about the heterosexual matrix and its demand for abidingly gendered selves rely on analyses of transgender, transvestite, and transsexual subjects  –  she considers the trouble that drag causes for conventional views on gender in an essay about Paris Is Burning, a film about drag balls in New York City (Butler 1993), and she considers the case of Canadian patient of John Money, David Reimer, in an essay in Undoing Gender (Butler 2004). For Viviane Namaste, though, much of the theoretical work that incorporates transgender matters circulates in women’s and gender studies journals, conferences, and classrooms and has not adequately addressed its ethical responsibilities to trans women. More troublingly, she writes, “Feminist theory has worsened the situation: the Transgender Question has written the prostitutes and grassroots community organizers out of history, politics, and knowledge itself” (Namaste 2009, p. 28). Moreover, there has been a small but extremely vocal and often vitriolic group of feminist writers who have rejected the suggestion that feminist projects out to include transgender women. Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1974) argues that transgender women (whom she describes as “transsexuals”) colonize and caricature femininity; Sandy Stone’s “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual

410 Michelle Meagher Manifesto” is often described as a founding text in the now‐flourishing field of trans studies. Stone argues against Raymond on multiple fronts, but the paper ultimately is not about Raymond so much as it is a call for a “deeper analytic language for transsexual theory, one which allows for the sorts of ambiguities and polyvocalities which have already so productively informed and enriched feminist theory” (Stone paragraph 46 – see online). Despite the strong insistence by some very public feminist figures that challenge the integrity of trans‐identified people, and especially trans women, the field of trans theory has “completely transformed and enriched debates in Feminist and Queer Studies” (Martinez‐San Miguel and Tobias 2016, p. 5). The emergence of a clearly identified transfeminism is evidence of the valuable theoretical connections between the two fields. Pat Elliot describes transfeminism as “a politics that focuses on the intersections of sexist and transphobic oppression” (2010, p. 387). Emi Koyma defines transfeminism as “primarily a movement by and for trans women who view their liberation to be intrinsically linked to the liberation of all women   and beyond” (Koyama 2003, p. 245). It encourages alliances between trans women and “queers, intersex people, trans men, non‐trans women, non‐ trans men” and others who are sympathetic (Koyama 2003, p. 245). Theorists like Elliott and Koyama promote a form of solidarity between transgender theory and feminist theory  –  alliances between trans communities and feminist political movements  – because we are all together mutually implicated in gender and its normative oppressions.

Feminist Feelings In the last decade, feminist theory has been influenced by what Patricia Clough and others have called an affective turn. For feminist scholars, the study of affect can be organized along two separate, though sometimes overlapping, trajectories. One of these trajectories takes seriously the importance of affect – understood broadly as emotional response  –  to political and scholarly projects. A key figure here is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a literary theorist who lays out a feminist challenge to what she describes as a hermeneutics of suspicion (Sedgwick 2003). Sedgwick expresses frustration and boredom with the conventional patterns of feminist textual and cultural analysis, which she describes as paranoid. Against paranoid readings that are directed toward the demystification of systems of oppression, Sedgwick suggests reparative readings as an alternative that permit us to complement critical analyses with analyses that are alert to individual understandings, surprises, and physical reactions. Ultimately, affect theory as informed by Sedgwick insists not only that our affective responses to the world matter, but also that taking up different moods or affective orientations to the artifacts we study can lead to different, and more generative, and perhaps more satisfying analyses of social and cultural phenomenon. Though the affective turn is a recent phenomenon, it is valuable to view it as part of a tradition of feminist engagement with a politics of emotion. One key example of this sort of engagement is American poet Audre Lorde’s paired essays on anger (Lorde 1979) and the erotic (Lorde 1981). In both, Lorde suggests that strong emotions, so often denied expression or recognition in patriarchal social formations, are



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in fact important and indeed vital resources for revolutionary politics. Lorde insists that feelings of rage, joy, fury, and desire are both personally felt and deeply social; they are sources of knowledge and they can be marshaled as political resources. In a fiery keynote lecture at the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference in 1981, Audre Lorde laid out her approach to anger. The anger that she is most centrally fueled by is an anger against racism, including and especially the persistence of racism in the women’s movement. Significantly, Lorde pushes back against the tendency toward theory and intellectualized approaches to matters of social power, and says explicitly, “I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion” (Lorde 1981, p. 7). An activist, writer, and poet, Lorde called on feminist women to view anger as a “source of empowerment” not to be feared, but to be embraced. These paired essays draw attention to the role that feminism, as a social movement and a theoretical project, “represented a rehabilitation of the senses for the purposes of revolutionary change” (Ferguson 2012, p. 298). Sara Ahmed, writing decades after Lorde, and in the wake of what is often called the affective turn, describes the social forms of emotional management under late capitalism, and purportedly postfeminist contexts. Writing from a queer, migrant, feminist perspective in The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed describes her frequent experience of affective dissonance. She uses the term “affect alien” to describe the feminist, or other politically engaged subject, whose critical consciousness disables them to feel the way that they ought to in social situations (the dinner guest who feels revulsion rather than amusement at a racist joke told around a table) and in the social order (the queer feminist who refuses to couple, marry, procreate, or otherwise play along with heteropatriarchy). Happiness, like other feelings, functions culturally, phenomenologically, and politically to sustain particular forms of sociality. Our emotions – “good” feelings like happiness, “bad” feelings like shame – are “bound up in uneven relations of power and privilege” (Carillo Rowe 2011, p. 256). Ultimately, it draws feeling into feminist theory in order to better understand the ways in which “certain forms of personhood” are rendered valuable, while others are rendered unlivable (Ahmed 2010, p. 11). Though she does not draw directly on Ahmed or Lorde, Canadian indigenous scholar Dian Million provides another justification for the value of integrating feeling into feminist theory. She writes that thinking about the histories and current conditions of colonial oppression is impoverished if feeling is not part of the project. “To decolonize,” she writes, “means to understanding as fully as possible the forms colonialism takes in our own times” (Million 2009, p. 55). Vitally, she points out that colonialism functions not only through social institutions and ideologies but through the management of thought and feeling. Using the example of indigenous colonization and the system of reservations and residential schools in the Canadian context, Millions points to the ways that grasping what she calls “felt knowledge” is a strategy for indigenous survival and regeneration. Another strand or trajectory of feminist affect studies is less organized around phenomenological notion of the lived experience of feelings than it is on affect as an intensity, as an unnameable and unrepresentable “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 240). This branch of affect theory takes up a post‐humanist approach to understanding affect. Here, affect does not tie us together through shared sentiments or feelings, but instead refers to noncognitive,

412 Michelle Meagher nonvolitional expressions of life that signifies the potential to live, feel, and be in new and potentially less oppressive ways.

Feminism After Humanism Posthumanism challenges the sense in which we are autonomous and self‐willed and emphasizes instead the interplay of bodies, of affect, of humans and others as complex assemblages. From this perspective, we are enmeshed materially and affectively with others, with other forms of life, with environments, and with technologies. Italian feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti argues that, given its resolute rejection of Eurocentric humanism’s “abstract masculinity, triumphant whiteness, and hegemonic able‐bodiedness,” feminism is implicitly posthuman (Braidotti 2017, p. 24). A key metaphor for feminist posthumanism comes from American science studies scholar Donna Haraway, who in the 1980s called for a feminist project organized around the cyborg. Haraway’s cyborg transgresses the boundaries between nature and culture, animal and human, male and female, and inspires feminist theories and thinkers to explore other “potent fusions” and “dangerous possibilities” (Haraway 1991, p. 154). In more recent work, Haraway has set aside the cyborg as a feminist symbol and instead developed the concept of companion species. In a small book offered as a manifesto, she explores the long cohabiting of humans and dogs in order to tell intimate stories about “relating in significant otherness” (Haraway 2003, p. 25). In this project, Haraway invites her readers to embrace our companion speciesism (not only with dogs, but with all things), to reject the human exceptionalism and superiority that marks European Enlightenment projects and replace it with heterogeneity, contingency, accountability, and love. Feminist critics like Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway offer, in their posthumanist feminist scholarship, rich and challenging critiques of humanism, understood as a wide‐ranging system of knowledge grounded in a human exceptionalism that views humans as both distinct from and more valuable than environment, nonhuman animals, and technology. There are clear connections here to the logic of critiques lodged by woman of color, transnational, and decolonial feminist theory. This is a point that is made well by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2013), who insists that the origins of posthumanist critiques of the human subject are not only genealogically produced by European poststructural theory, but that these critiques are deeply embedded in the work of colonial scholars – she points to the work of Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter. Indeed, critiques of Western humanism coming from those whose communities have been oppressive by masculine, Eurocentric colonial thought and its exercise of power have often pointed to the contradictory nature of humanism. Reason, tolerance, and democracy have always coexisted with violent domination, exclusion, and terror (Braidotti 2017, p. 24). For feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, the challenge of posthuman feminism is to engage with what she calls natural forces: “We now need to develop a more complex and sophisticated understanding of the ways in which natural forces, both living and nonliving, frame, enrich, and complicate our understanding of the subject, its interior, and what the subject can know” (Grosz 2011, p. 86). This makes room for environmental feminisms and feminist projects organized around relationship



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not only between humans but also sociality between human and nonhuman animals and environments, topics increasingly at the center of contemporary feminist theory.

Feminist Theory as an Expanding Field Contemporary feminism is no longer comfortably organized around “women,” an unknowable and diverse social category, but rather on the broader structures of what Rubin described, in 1975, as a sex–gender system. When Ahmed defines the work of feminist theory, she is purposefully broad, explaining that feminist theory is “a way of generating new insights into how gender works, as a social system, or as a machinery that tends to spit some bodies out” (Ahmed 2017, p. 19). Grosz is similarly grand in her description of feminist theory: “Feminist theory, as the production of concepts relevant to understanding women, femininity, and social subordination more generally, and to welcoming their transformation, is the production of new concepts, concepts outside, beyond, or at the very limits of those concepts that have defined men, women, and their relations up to now” (Grosz 2011, p. 81). Since its emergence almost a half century ago, feminist theory has expanded from a set of inquiries organized around efforts to explain sexual inequality and male dominance to an expansive field of exploration that is ­intersectional, interdisciplinary, and no longer limited to issues of sex, gender, patriarchy, and the oppression of women. Contemporary feminist theory today is a diverse and constantly expanding field that contributes to broader theories of injustice and inequality.

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Jackson, Z.I. (2013). Animal: new directions in the theorization of race and Posthumanism. Feminist Studies 39 (3): 669–685. Jones, R. (2011). Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kolmar, W.K. and Bartkowski, F. (2005). Feminist Theory: A Reader, 2e. Boston: McGraw Hill. Koyama, E. (2003). The transfeminist manifesto. In: Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (ed. R. Dicker and A. Piepmeier), 244–259. Lebanon NH: Northeastern University Press. Lengermann, P.M. and Niebrugge‐Brantley, J. (1998). The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830−1930. Boston: McGraw Hill. Lennon, K. and Whitford, M. (2002). Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology. London: Routledge. Lorde, A. (1979). The erotic as power. Chrysalis 9 (Fall): 29–31. Lorde, A. (1981). The uses of anger: women responding to racism. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 9 (3): 7–10. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a Decolonial feminism. Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Martinez‐San Miguel, Y. and Tobias, S. (2016). Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Millett, K. (1969). Sexual Politics. London: Granada Publishing. Million, D. (2009). Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History. Wicazo Sa Review 24 (2): 53–76. Mitchell, J. (1984). Women, the Longest Revolution. London: Virago. Mohanty, C. (2003). Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Morgensen, S.L. (2011). Review of Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, edited by Joyce Green, Native Americans and the Christian Right, by Andrea Smith, Native Men Remade, by Ty P. Käwika Tengan, and Mapping the Americas, by Shari M. Huhndorf. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (3): 766–776. Namaste, V. (2009). Undoing theory: the ‘transgender question’ and the epistemic violence of Anglo‐American feminist theory. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 24 (3): 11–32. Oakley, A. (2015). Sex, Gender and Society. Farnham: Ashgate. Hill Collins, P. (1999). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2e. New York: Routledge. Hill Collins, P. and Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Boston: Polity Press. Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Puar, J. (2012). I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: becoming‐intersectional in ­assemblage theory. PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2 (1): 49–66. Redstockings (1970). Redstockings manifesto. In: Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (ed. R. Morgan), 533–536. New York: Random House. Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (4): 631–660. Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: notes on the ‘political economy’ of sex. In: Toward an Anthropology of Women (ed. R.R. Reiter), 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. Sanz, V. (2017). No way out of the binary: a critical history of the scientific production of sex. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (1): 1–27.

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Part III Cutting Edge Issues

24 Big Data for Sociological Research Jason Radford and David Lazer

Introduction Big data burst into global consciousness in 2012. The global consulting firm McKinsey published a report titled “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity” (Manyika et al. 2011) that documented the proliferation of data throughout society. Social media platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, and WhatsApp collect (and often resell access to) streams of texts, images, and metadata from people’s engagement with one another via the platform. Companies produce troves of data from internal communications, contracts, financial transactions, and public interactions. Individuals walk around with devices containing gigabytes of personal data with electronic access to yet more data about their friends and family. Sociologists have only begun using this data to study social life. Already, it shows promise for changing the way we understand the social world. It is teaching us new things about human interaction at the level of cities, states, and nations; how meaning is constructed and disseminated among communities; and how we distribute resources to reinforce or undermine established status groups. Simultaneously, this early research is also revealing some shortcomings in the way we approach this data and hidden assumptions about the way society and big data systems interact. Bigger data are not necessarily better data, and people do not always behave in the way we expect. They also present new opportunities for social benefit and potential for harm, leading us to rethink the ethics involved in our research. This chapter is based on our article in the Annual Review of Sociology (Lazer and Radford 2017).

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In this chapter, we detail the early successes of the application of big data to sociological questions. We highlight the kinds of novel insights available to sociologists using big data while also pointing out the shortcomings and pitfalls even the best researchers fall victim to. One of these insights is that what constitutes “big data” is always changing as the size, type, and scale of data evolves. Thus, we conclude by articulating some coming changes in big data likely to reshape sociological research.

What Is Big Data? Humans have kept records of their interactions with one another since the advent of writing. Whether transcribing stories into the Torah or the Odyssey, recording financial transactions in Uruk, or taking a census of the population in China we have attempted to save and transmit social information to others. The digital revolution transformed our ability to record data by making it machine‐readable, enabling humans to process information automatically with computer programs. While psychologists were running experiments in their basement, sociologists reserved theirs for the department’s lone computer. Until the advent of the personal computer, sociologists analyzed data by programming punch cards. The challenges today mirror those of the past: creating computers that can manage the scale of data and building programs capable of processing that data. What makes data “big” is the vastness, variety, and velocity of the information (Laney 2001; Monroe 2013). A generation ago, “big data” meant thousands of surveys or a million records. Today, it encompasses the billions of hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every year and the hundreds of millions of messages posted per day on Twitter. These tweets themselves contain a variety of data, including images, emojis, user geolocations, and a network of social interaction. As data change, so too do sociological methods. Quantitative sociologists have become accustomed to data that exist in a tabular format where each row is an observation and each column a quantitative value associated with it. Qualitative sociologists have become accustomed to data that can be read, coded, analyzed, and collated by a person. These methods are infeasible for big data. Videos, images, text, networks, and streams of bits do not come structured into tables and are too numerous to be processed by even the largest lab of human coders. Today’s big data, as before, in the absence of standardized data structuring techniques, requires new computer‐aided methods of collection, processing, analysis, and visualization  –  a computational social science (Lazer et al. 2009).

Where Does Big Data Come From? The big data revolution is a product of the digital revolution, wherein the activities of human society began to be recorded in bits and bytes on modern computers. Media like film and records were digitized, documents became electronic, and humans began performing more of their social life via computers and then the internet. The spread of computers across the globe, their increasing capacity to store and process vast amounts of digitized information, and the evolution of methods for processing and analyzing this data converged to make big data ubiquitous. Big data comes in three varieties: digitalized life, digital trace data, and digital life.



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Digitalized Life A large slice of big data comes from the transfer of humanity’s vast amount of analog data into a digitized form. Digitization initiatives like Google Books involve scanning books, newspapers, and oral histories to study the social dynamics (Michel et  al. 2011; Rijt et al. 2013). These projects enable sociologists to approach classic data sources with a fresh set of tools for data analysis (Bail 2014; DiMaggio et al. 2013; Earl et al. 2004). Another form of digitalization is the updating of nondigital data collection methods into digital media. For example, the growth of city monitoring feeds via closed‐circuit video recording, sensor technologies, electronic ticketing, and other ensembles of electronic monitors are enabling integrated analysis of urban environments (Batty 2013). Digitizing existing data flows makes them amenable to sociological analysis; however, they also lead to a digital panopticon in which people’s movements, interactions, and activities are always monitorable by the selfsame system.

Digital Trace Data Closely connected to digitalized life is the collection of data generated as a byproduct of systems. When you make a call or send a message via Short Message Service (SMS) on your cell phone, the cell phone carrier records a standard set of information about that communication such as the time of the interaction, the file size of the message, who it was from and who it was to, and the cell phone towers it originated from and was delivered to. This metadata can be used to study social networks (Onnela et al. 2007), predict social behavior (Toole et al. 2015), and even track the spread of diseases (Wesolowski et al. 2012). Trace data was originally considered the refuse of the digital world. Companies and governments held on to these records as a matter of policy but found little value in it. However, researchers, marketers, and political campaigns have begun using in this data to make inferences about individuals, communities, and populations (Bonica 2014; Chetty et al. 2016). What differentiates trace data from digitalized data is that the former is an unintended consequence of digital system while the latter is produced for the system. We count bus passengers with ticketing systems because that is what ticketing systems do. We can use cell phone tower data to measure the movement of people only as a byproduct of how cell phone companies do business.

Digital Life Finally, life is increasingly lived through digital media. We socialize via platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. We record knowledge through Wikipedia and online journals. We find spouses and jobs through mobile applications and websites. Big data generated through digital life is distinct because the digital is the social. Friending someone on Facebook and editing Wikipedia articles are acts of sociality on their own. They do not need to indicate anything about life “offline” to be socially salient.

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Digital life is most often contained within a platform: a service, often a website or application, that provides, controls, and regulates the technical infrastructure upon which users conduct their affairs. For example, Facebook hosts the content generated by users, controls the algorithms and code that determine who sees what and how it appears, policies content deemed against its terms of service, and provides access to slices of this data to different sets of audiences, whether users, third‐party applications, advertisers, or governments. Every platform has a different set of rules guiding who can contribute to the infrastructure, who can provide what content, and who can access any of it. Digital life on these platforms is often viewed in one of two ways. We treat them as microcosms of social life (Tufekci 2014). Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are models of society at large and thus can be used to observe social behavior like political mobilization (Barberá et  al. 2015), price setting (Cavallo and Rigobon 2016), or patterns of social inequality (Edelman and Luca 2014; Greenberg and Mollick 2016; Schor and Attwood‐Charles 2017). Alternatively, we approach them as novel worlds newly inhabited. Platforms enable new social dynamics like the hyperdiffusion of fake news (Vosoughi et al. 2018) or algorithmically aided radicalization (Tufekci 2018). The particular view one takes is likely to depend on the topic of study and nature of the platform.

Digital Instrumentation Big data is not just found. They can be made. All three of these sources of big data can be instrumented. We can build new repositories of data, create applications that collect digital traces, or simulate online social interaction in digital worlds. Sociologists have developed apps that enable us to capture the effects of interacting with people of different political viewpoints online who interact with whom face to face and link that to Facebook data and college course registration (Bail et al. 2018). We can work with crowds online to collect, clean, and code data (Benoit et al. 2016). We can create our own virtual labs where we control participants’ interactions with one another (Centola 2010; Radford et al. 2016; Salganik et al. 2006). This instrumentation enables researchers to bring big data into the lab to enhance our methods of field and laboratory experimentation.

Opportunities Massive, Passive: Behavioral Data at Scale Much of sociology is based on self‐reported data. National surveys, political polls, even the census are premised on people accurately and faithfully remembering and reporting things about themselves (Zaller and Feldman 1992). But people largely do not have stable beliefs, preferences, or attitudes they relay clearly and directly to us in surveys. They misremember whether they talked with a friend about a political subject and lie about all kinds of things like weight and religious beliefs (Stone et al. 1999).



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We also treat questions about core social constructs like political participation, sexuality, and race as if they are straightforward questions about an obvious reality. This is also often not the case. People have sexual contact with members of the same sex but do not consider themselves gay (Humphreys 1971; Silva 2018). People, especially immigrants and the children of immigrants, can identify as different races from one survey to the next (Mowen and Stansfield 2016). In many cases, we care more about what people do than what they say they do. In principle, big data archives contain records of behavior itself. For example, liking a friends’ post on Facebook and sharing a Tweet are social acts themselves. In the study of social networks, using self‐reported data to generate social networks has proven to be a lasting challenge (Bernard et al. 1984; Marsden 1990). Survey researchers generate networks by asking subjects a series of questions – “who did you interact with,” “who do you go to for advice,” “who would you consider to be a friend.” The people we interact with regularly are different from those we consider friends, and both are often substantially different from those we go to for advice. Moreover, our social networks are very large, much larger than we can remember, and our network of weak ties evolves quickly. There are many problems using self‐reported data to observe social networks and these problems undermine our ability to study social phenomena like communities, social movements, and the spread of ideas. Eagle et al. (2009) and Stopczynski et al. (2014) sought to use big data to observe the social networks of university students. Eagle et  al. gave students cell phones programmed to track cell tower IDs, Bluetooth proximity from other phones in the study, and call logs. Stopczynski et al. gave students phones and used GPS, wifi, text messages, and social media data to reconstruct students’ networks. Both compared their data to students’ self‐reported social networks. These studies provide new insight into the ways in which people understand their social networks and where biases in network reporting come from. The students overreported interactions with those they interacted with recently and in general overestimated the amount of time they spent with other people. But, the students were more accurate in recalling the time they spent with people they considered “friends.” Moreover, when two people reported one another as “friends,” they spent time with one another more reliably. The notion of “friendship” thus corresponds to relationships that are more well‐defined in participants’ memory and in their behavior over time. Stopczynski et al. focused on analyzing how multiple methods of data collection intersect. They found that students were in physical proximity of 80% of their Facebook friends during the study but only called 20% of them. In contrast, nearly 100% of people students called were also people they were in physical proximity to at some point. Thus, these different modes of social interaction, while they overlap substantially in some cases, constitute different networks of relations. People’s social media network is not interchangeable with their network of friends or their network of physical interactions. Big data helps us bridge the divide between what people say and what they do. However, big data is not a direct observation of behavior. It, like other forms of data, is mediated by the technologies we use and the concepts that guide our design of the study and interpretation of the results. While big data is providing a vast new world

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of observable behaviors, it has its own set of strengths and weakness. Big behavioral data is not necessarily better data. It is often best when complementing existing approaches.

Nowcasting Contemporary society is built on the monitoring and publication of information about itself. Market actors look to stock indices, consumer prices, consumer sentiment, labor supply and other reports to identify the state of the economy. Institutions like the World Health Organization run surveillance systems to monitor disease prevalence and stymie incipient epidemics. This constant construction of the present is called nowcasting. Nowcasting is essential to society but is largely based on recruiting and managing large networks of participating organizations and having human beings across the globe manually create reports that must be aggregated by some central office. It is expensive and complex, and the results are often very coarse. The explosion of data everywhere presents the possibility that we might mine the data for better insight into the present sociological moment. For example, researchers have used tweets to measure public opinion (Beauchamp 2017; Hopkins and King 2010) and HIV prevalence (Ireland et al. 2015). Google search trends have been used to estimate the spread of flu (Ginsberg et al. 2009), consumer confidence (Choi and Varian 2012), and a movie’s sales at the box office (Goel et al. 2010). Cell phone call data has been used to track movement during disasters (Sekimoto et al. 2016), detect changes in unemployment (Toole et  al. 2015), and model wealth inequality (Blumenstock et al. 2015). These projects demonstrate the ability to approximate the more costly and time‐consuming benchmarks. And, they have produced new insight into fundamental social dynamics. One of the most successful and influential cases of nowcasting is the Billion Prices Project. Cavallo, Rigobon, and their colleagues (see Cavallo and Rigobon 2016 for an overview) collect the price of a range of goods from online retailers’ websites across the globe. They use these prices to estimate the value of currencies, consumer prices, and inflation. Their method acts as an automated replacement of the current method of having field researchers go into stores across the country and record the prices of a “basket of goods.” In 2013, the Billion Prices Project showed that Argentina’s official estimate of inflation had likely been manipulated starting in 2007 (Cavallo 2013). Using big data to depict the present moment has several unique advantages over traditional methods. Data often update more frequently than traditional methods and can offer more geographic precision, measuring unemployment or disease prevalence for small, rural cities or at the neighborhood level. Because this is behavioral data, it can capture new, unmeasurable social states and dynamics. However, nowcasting is often dependent on the systems from which they draw data. For example, Google Flu Trends capably predicted the prevalence of flu in the United States as capably as national surveillance agencies. However, as Google changed its search algorithm, Google Flu Trends’ performance began to become biased, overestimating the prevalence of flu (Lazer et al. 2014). While nowcasting systems can perform just as well as current systems, they are most useful when fused with current systems.



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Data on Social Systems Nowcasting is about defining a narrow piece of the sociological present. A subset of goods is used to estimate prices or a sample of mobile phone data is used to estimate one indicator. A separate opportunity arises from our ability to observe and visualize social systems as a whole. Historically, sociology has attempted such holistic research through community studies  –  a broad‐based, often mixed‐methods approach to studying a quasi‐bounded set of people (Allan and Phillipson 2008; Crow 2000). Today, big data provides easy access to comprehensive data about physical and digital communities on local, regional, and even global scales. Early work mapping the structure of the internet involved automatically crawling all of the webpages in a domain such as. edu or. com and tracking the hyperlinks between those web pages. This work showed the unequal distribution of connections between websites mapped onto common properties found in other large‐scale networks (Adamic et al. 2000; Barabási 2009; Barabási et al. 2000; Watts and Strogatz 1998). Large‐scale social networks demonstrate “small‐world” properties (Travers and Milgram 1969). Even with billions of individuals and hundreds of billions of connections, any two people are, on average, four degrees from one another (Backstrom et al. 2012). Individual platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer somewhat self‐contained social systems. Researchers at Facebook have examined the spread of news on Facebook to understand the extent to which users live in filter bubbles, insulated by information that supports their worldview (Bakshy et al. 2015). They find there is some filtering based in part on personal preferences and the Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm. Dodds et al. (2011) use Twitter data to identify annual emotional cycles around the world, from religious holidays to national events. Golder and Macy (2011) use Twitter to identify diurnal patterns of wakefulness and affect finding seasonal changes to mood and sleeping patterns across the planet. One important dimension where big data is providing new insight into social systems is in transportation and mobility. Understanding the physical movement of people in the course of a day, week, year, or lifetime is essential to understanding a wide variety of sociological patterns like cultural change; access to social opportunities; social segregation, isolation, and inclusion; and the diffusion of ideas. Traditionally, the study of human mobility has been limited to administrative data like the census or tax records (Kawabata and Shen 2007) and travel diaries (Axhausen et  al. 2002). These studies are often small in scale or only cover specific kinds of mobility like migration or the commute between home and work. Several sources of big data have been used to provide more comprehensive and higher resolution accounts of human mobility. Cell phone data has been used to identify patterns of mobility and social interaction among people within a country (Onnela et  al. 2011) or in regions where data is often limited, such as Estonia (Toomet et al. 2015). These studies are able to track movement beyond just where people live and work and the actual interactions between people. Wang et al. (2018) use 650 million geotagged tweets from the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States to study income‐based, ethnic, and racial differences in mobility. They find little difference in the distance people in poor and rich neighborhoods travel or the number of neighborhoods they visit. They also found

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little differences by race and ethnicity. However, they did find substantial differences in the racial and economic makeup of neighborhoods that people traveled to. Specifically, people from black and Hispanic neighborhoods, whether poor or not, were much less likely to visit white and nonpoor neighborhoods. People from poor, white neighborhoods were also slightly less likely to visit nonpoor neighborhoods. The sheer size and complexity of social systems have made them largely intractable as sites for social research. Big data systems do not make society small or simple. Instead, they provide large, complex data sets on which we can build an understanding of society that captures their complex, emergent behavior (González‐Bailón 2017). As we argue later, these data sets are not necessarily comprehensive, representative, or neutral. But the prospect of gaining further insight into the complexities of social system presents a new frontier for sociology.

Making Big Data Small The most useful data sources within the oceans of big data are the small data – the rare and infrequent data that often goes unnoticed in smaller data sets. “Making big data small” (Foucault Welles 2014) is about leveraging the large amounts of data to find these rare cases. For example, surveys of nationally representative samples of Americans often involve less than 3000 individuals. Since only 0.5% of the population identifies as transgender (Crissman et  al. 2017), these surveys capture fewer than 15 transgender respondents, preventing any analysis of the opinions, demographics, or behaviors of people based on their transgender status. Big data provides a way to study small populations that have largely only been studied qualitatively or through targeted analyses. For example, Twitter has become a venue for studying the dynamics of mental health, including post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and addiction (Coppersmith et al. 2014; De Choudhury et al. 2013, 2016). Another way in which big data is made small is by identifying emergent communities and collective action whose transience and ephemerality undermine comprehensive study. Historically, studying social movements at scale has been challenging (Earl et al. 2004). Movements typically emerge organically, making them difficult to identify. Many act at the local level, rarely leaving traces of their existence besides coverage of a protest in newspapers. And, many are transient, offering only a short amount of time for in situ study. As such, the study of social movements has been relegated to those movements that have gained substantial participation and resources and managed to sustain themselves over long periods of time. Public social media platforms like Twitter, and the advent of hashtags, have fundamentally changed the study of social movements and redefined the horizons of political sociology. Social movements now use social media to frame their issues, recruit participants, and mobilize using hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #MeToo (Gallagher et al. 2018; Jackson and Welles 2016; Jackson et al. 2018). Scholars of social movements can now search for, collect, and analyze communications at scale to understand the dynamics of social movements. The results offer new insight into the network structures underlying movements. Barberá et al. (2015) find that successful protests depend on second‐order recruitment – those who were initially recruited by core members recruited further people to



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participate. Jackson et  al. (2018) show how transgender activists are using social media to build long‐term mobilization networks without formal social movement organizations. Ince et al. (2017) and Ray et al. (2017) both show how frames evolved around the Black Lives Matter movement in conversation with bystanders, participants, and against opposition from conservatives. Beyond studying small populations and identifying emergent phenomena, big data contains many small samples that can be used to better estimate complex models. This strength of many small samples is best known in machine learning where information‐processing algorithms are used to synthesize complex signals into accurate predictions (Evans and Aceves 2016). Although models may be complex, the principle is simple. Even though platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Xbox Live are overwhelmingly dominated by young white men, the fact that they have tens and hundreds of millions of users means that they have tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are old or female, or people of color. By being able to create strong statistical estimates for these diverse subsamples, the overall model can be more robust. For example, Wang et  al. (2015) used surveys of Xbox users to predict the presidential polls and votes in 2012 for all 50 American states using multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP). While causal analysis focuses on the average effect for the whole sample, a new set of models are being proposed to inductively identify heterogenous treatement effects: the subsamples where causal effects are particularly weak or strong (Athey and Imbens 2016; Green and Kern 2012; Imai and Ratkovic 2013; Taddy et  al. 2016). The challenge in using the many small samples found in big data is our ability to find statistically significant differences at every turn because of the sheer size of the data. Moreover, the many small samples present us with a larger garden of forking paths from which we can find statistically significant results by chance (Gelman and Loken 2013). These models attempt to offer statistically principled ways to navigate the many small samples in big data.

Natural and Field Experiments Causation is at the heart of sociological theory but there are relatively few ways of studying social processes causally. While observational data can provide us approximations of causation, these so‐called quasi‐experimental methods cannot replace experiments. The main method of causal study, laboratory experimentation, has as its primary flaw its artificiality. We construct social situations to study the impact of specific interventions but these situations are often highly stylized, telling us little about behavior in situations outside the lab. Natural and field experiments propose to overcome this artificiality by observing interventions in the social world. Natural experiments occur when some exogenous event or arbitrary distinction in the social world selects people into different groups in a quasi‐random or random way. These experiments are arguably the most realistic given the lack of any intervention by a researcher. However, they are very hard to find and often do not reflect the assumptions of the theoretical models being tested. The proliferation of digital tracking systems and access to archival data are providing sociology with more and more data from natural experiments.

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Hobbs and Burke (2017) look at the impact of unexpected death on people’s friendship networks on Facebook. Phan and Airoldi (2015) studied the effects of Hurricane Ike on people’s social networks using Facebook. Ayers et  al. (2011) study the influence of tax increases on tobacco cessation. Moreover, big data systems can become the instigators of natural experiments when they change the way they operate. Brown et  al. (2010) found that when eBay began hiding shipping prices, revenue increased for cheap shippers but decreased for those with large shipping costs. When big data platforms instigate experiments knowingly, they move into the realm of field experiments. For example, researchers working with Facebook have manipulated people’s feeds to examine the impact of positive and negative posts on users’ moods and of get‐out‐the‐vote campaigns on people’s likelihood of voting (Bond et al. 2012; Kramer et al. 2014). In both cases, researchers were able to identify and estimate the effects of exposure to particular types of messages on people’s subsequent feelings and behaviors. Field experiments, where researchers intervene in an existing social setting and observe the results, provide a real‐world setting to test causal claims. However, field experiments suffer from many logistical challenges, including ethical and technical limits on the kinds of interventions we can perform and a lack of control over the interaction between subjects in different experimental conditions. Big data platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer unprecedented control over the social environment they support, broadening the variety of interventions that sociologists can design. Further, as Kramer et  al. (2014) argued, the size of the population on these platforms also enables us to detect effects of small or weak interventions, which are less likely to harm subjects. Yet, we still should resist the desire to expose large numbers of subjects to experimental manipulation. As Salganik argues (2017, p. 319) “Even though some researchers have an obsession with making their studies as big as ­possible, research ethics suggests that researchers make their studies as small as possible.”

Vulnerabilities Generalizability and Representativeness The ubiquity of big data and the amount of data on the even the most mundane aspects of social life incline us to think we have all the data we need or all the data there is worth having. To have the call records for every person in America suggests we can map the country’s entire social network. Via access to all tweets ever tweeted through the Twitter “Firehose,” every newspaper story in the world at EventRegistry, or snapshots of every website via the Internet Archive intimates we can now trace every twist and turn in recent human history. Big data gives off an air of completeness that constantly misleads us about the representativeness and generalizability of our research. In one form, this illusion of completeness comes in the many convenient censuses that big data provides. To have all of the data from Facebook or Twitter is to have a census of social life on those platforms. This completeness is valuable, as we have



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stated. Tufekci (2014) analogizes this as the social sciences fruitfly or roundworm – the model organism we study to provide insight into other organisms that are more difficult to study. Sociologists study these platforms because the data is there – hence, they are convenient censuses. However, there are several critical problems in analyzing these censuses. First, platforms change rules or code over time and it can be difficult (usually impossible for an outside researcher) to keep track of them all (Tufekci 2014). Some data may not be available for everyone at ever time, and the meaning of data points may have changed over time. The data we have at any one point in time is not necessarily commensurate with data we would have at another point in time (Healy 2015). Second, people’s behavior on different platforms is different from their behavior on other platforms because each has its own features, rules, mechanics, and norms. Facebook is a closed network where the norm is to communicate only with preapproved “friends.” Twitter, on the other hand, is an open network where the norm is to communicate in public. What people do and say to whom on these networks should be fundamentally different (Tufekci 2014, p. 507). Finally, these platforms have their own populations of users. Some skew young. Some skew female. These population biases affect the norms that emerge (Hargittai 2018; Perrin 2015; Pestre et al. 2016). The illusion of completeness takes another form in attempts to gather all the data that exists of a certain kind. Many programs crawl the web to capture all of the websites, news, or research published. The explicit goal is to record everything. For example, EventRegistry scrapes published news sources to identify global events in real time (Leban et  al. 2014). Its promise is a census of events. But no census is complete. Observations are inevitably missed. The US Census misses tens of millions of people each year. The problems lie not only in the fact that the data sets are incomplete but that for these big data vacuums, we have no way of estimating the extent of their incompleteness. Many lack sampling frames that would provide us with ways to estimate how unrepresentative they are (Japec et al. 2015; Meng 2018). The problem is what we call “big data hubris,” the belief that more data will solve whatever empirical problems we face (Lazer et al. 2014, p. 1203). Whether it is the attempt to gather all the data there is or the presumption that we already have all the data from a particular platform, big data hubris can blind us to issues of generalizability and representativeness. We must have well‐defined expectations about who or what is missing from our data, the differences between the data we have, the many ways the social construct we are studying occurs, and the rules and procedures we and these platforms are using to create, collect, and cache their data.

Too Much Big Data The unprecedented explosion of methods and modes of social interaction leads to another critical problem with big data – there is too much information. The average American uses three social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) regularly (Smith and Anderson 2018). People can make phone calls on a landline, cell phone, or voice‐over IP (VOIP) system such as Skype, Google Hangouts, or Zoom. People send private text messages via mobile phone providers’ traditional SMS, messaging platforms like WeChat, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, or as part of broader services (like Twitter’s direct messages). Finally, people access all of these on

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a variety of devices, from mobile phones, computers at home and work, and an increasing variety of smart devices. The proliferation of platforms means that even trivial questions like, “What news does a person consume in a given day?” become difficult to answer. You can collect their social media data, messaging logs, and browser history and still not capture the news they hear on the radio or see on television. For scholars interested in media, the divergent sources of news has come to be understood as a media repertoire (Taneja et al. 2012; Yuan 2011). Stopczynski et al. (2014) attempt to identify the overlaps among individuals’ social networks to identify who interacts with whom. They find some networks are more comprehensive than others, but subjects use different platforms strategically. There are important reasons why people interact in person but not on Facebook. To study human social behavior comprehensively would mean mapping social interaction across all of these platforms. Instead, we need a “Rosetta Stone” to ­translate the data into social constructs (Margolin et al. 2013). For example, though people do not have a clear definition of what makes someone a “friend,” they do treat people they consider friends in a stable way that can be predicted in data. Eagle et al. (2009) find that the people we would name as friends are people we tend to be in physical proximity to on a regular basis outside of work. It is this combination of routine physical proximity outside of work that distinguishes our friends from our other social ties. With this observation, we do not need everyone’s data from every platform to figure out who people are friends with. We could use Facebook data, messaging logs, or phone call data to identify this pattern of regular physical proximity outside of work.

Anomalies: Artifacts, Reactivity, and Confounding Big data systems are not neutral substrates through which humans interact. They choose how to create data, what data to store, and what data to make available. Oftentimes, there are errors in this process. For example, Google’s character recognition engine misreads “s” as “f” for a variety of documents published in the eighteenth century. In Google’s Ngram project, the word “fuck” appears to be a commonly used term until the nineteenth century. This misleading result is an artifact − an anomaly produced by errors in the system (Pechenick et al. 2015; Sullivan 2010). Artifacts can also result from the way data is recorded, stored, and retrieved. Over time, big data repositories change their data. As data is added, recoded, or taken away, it can give a false impression that behavior changed when, in reality, only the data‐recording process changed. For example, for every tweet posted, Twitter creates a variety of metadata, including the location of the tweet, the time of the tweet, who it was in response to, and whether it was a retweet. However, while the first retweets started occurring in 2007 (Seward 2013), retweeting was not an officially‐recorded phenomena on Twitter until 2009 (Stone 2009). Thus, it appears that retweeting was invented overnight when, in reality, people had been copying others’ tweets and Twitter simply started counting it. Finally, artifacts can come from the removal of data from these platforms by their operators or censors. Platforms in the West remove content deemed harassment or violations of copyright. Governments in Europe have strong hate speech laws



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requiring social media sites to suppress (though not delete) the data for users in these countries. The Chinese government censors messages attempting to mobilize its citizens to collective action (King et al. 2013, 2014). Systems can also produce anomalies when they change the way they operate. Reactivity occurs when behavior on a platform changes in response to changes on the platform itself rather than as a result of any underlying change in human behavior. For example, a change to Twitter’s interface for posting tweets substantially reduced the number of tweets with geotags overnight in 2015. Google’s continuous tweaking of its search interface changed the way people searched for health information, eroding the predictive performance of Google Flu Trends until it eventually became wildly inaccurate (Lazer et al. 2014). Oftentimes, the behavior of big data systems continues to change as the algorithms underlying them evolve, a phenomenon dubbed algorithmic confounding (Chaney et al. 2018). For example, search engines use data from what search results their users’ selected to improve the relevance of search results for future users. Thus, a search algorithm on a hiring website can begin returning male candidates for searchers like “computer scientist” if users are biased. This is the suggested mechanism behind Sweeney (2013) and Hannák et  al.’s (2017) work on bias in search results. As Chaney et al. (2018) argue, algorithmic confounding produces a feedback loop, learning implicitly from initial users and then magnifying it in practice. As more data is saved over time or as the quality of data being saved changes, the divide between the data at the time it was created and the data at any given time grows. As big data platforms change the way they operate, the conditions in which data were generated and the conditions in which they are generated diverge. Thus, the maturation of data sources and data platforms presents a liability for sociologists attempting to understand their history or trace social processes in big data over time.

The Ideal User Assumption Perhaps the most widely republished New Yorker cartoon is Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon depicting a dog at a computer telling a second dog, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This iconic cartoon presents an early view of the public use of the internet as an anonymous society. Today, it offers us a different message – the people we meet on the internet or who get caught in our big data trawlers are very often not people. They are robots, companies, state actors, fake news organizations, or sock puppets. The problem is not that these other forms of agents exist, but that sociologists often fail to consider this when analyzing big data. We often assume that the information produced in big data systems comes from a certain kind of ideal user  –  a single person expressing himself/herself honestly through a unique account. The most common and well‐studied violation of this assumption is robots. Robots are often benign social creations like nonplayer characters in video games or robot‐making automated telephone calls and text messages (Gupta et  al. 2015; Lee and Ramler 2015). Robots, however, can be malignant attempts to pass as humans to perpetuate misinformation, influence elections, and manipulate markets (Ferrara 2015; Ferrara et al. 2016). Increasingly, there is a merging of humans and robots online, as human beings interweave automated and personal content on their personal accounts (Chu et al. 2010).

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Second, we often mistakenly assume that participants are individuals when, in fact, they are groups or organizations. Companies, governments, and civic organizations are all present in big data systems and use these in very different ways than individuals (McCorriston et al. 2015). Not accounting for these accounts can lead to a variety of biases and spurious results for a range of questions including information and news dissemination, mobility, and emotions. Further, human beings misrepresent themselves in a variety of ways, violating our assumption that people are acting in good faith (Wang et al. 2006). Chinese state employees run social media accounts attempting to distract the public from controversial issues (King et al. 2017). Badawy et al. (2018) document how Russian agents spread partisan content and misinformation on Twitter to interfere in American elections. These surreptitious and disingenuous accounts have come to be called trolls (Bu et al. 2013; Zheng et al. 2006). However, there are a variety of benign reasons users can have accounts in which they do not express their full or authentic identity, including comedic accounts, artistic personas, and noms de plume. When we are using big data, our assumptions about who is creating the data for what purpose must be validated. Porous platforms like Facebook and Twitter are open to a wide variety of alternative users with a variety of agendas. Yet even tightly controlled platforms and data sources can be targeted for appropriation, manipulation, or dissimilation. Different platforms present different opportunities and incentives for people to use them in ways that violate the ideal user assumption. The perennial challenge is being able to detect and account for these issues in the particular data being used. And, we must not forget that these alternative uses of big data platforms are themselves valid forms of social behavior worthy of study.

Research Ethics Big data provides us with new ways of conducting research with human subjects and new kinds of data we can collect about people. Many of the most basic questions have yet to be resolved. But new policies and norms are beginning to emerge. In the United States, research ethics revolve around the Common Rule, which identifies what constitutes human subjects research and what protections should be given to those who participate. Researchers and universities who violate the Common Rule risk losing funding from the government. The Common Rule was changed in 2017 to reflect the growing using of public and secondary data sources typical of big data. The rules relaxed the definition of what counts as human subjects research and added many common social science tools like surveys and benign behavioral interventions to the list of exempted methods if the data collected is not readily identifiable. However, serious issues remain. First and foremost, subjects are regularly identifiable in big data. We use our real names, talk about our family and residence, and give out other important personal information on social platforms. Even in anonymized data, researchers are able to identify large parts of a sample with only a few data points (Sweeney 2002) – there are only so many single females under 30 who own a house in Boone, North Carolina.



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Data that are public are not considered human subjects research. However, leaked data like the Panama Papers, user data from the adultery website Ashley Madison, or the Democratic National Committee’s emails fall into a gray area. In addition, the definition of a “benign” behavioral intervention is less clear in big data platforms where millions of people can receive an intervention. For example, since Facebook skews younger, and younger people tend to vote for Democrats, the Get‐out‐the‐ Vote experiment, which turned out an estimated 340 000 more voters, may have swayed several elections (Bond et  al. 2012). Although the Facebook experiment intervened in 60 million individuals’ account, they utilized data from the remainder of Facebook users to estimate the effect of the intervention on everyone. These uninvolved people are called secondary subjects and the Common Rule leaves open the question of what obligations we have to secondary subjects on platforms where people share personally identifiable information. Increasingly, researchers are getting around the Common Rule by gathering data directly from big data sources. Data that has already been created has long been exempt from review. Instead of getting consent from subjects to access their data, you can go directly to the data host. This direct access is important for large‐scale studies where asking billions of Facebook users for consent would be impossible. However, it raises the question of when it is ethical to circumvent individual consent. It also presents the possibility that only certain kinds of well‐connected researchers will be able to perform research with such data. Finally, big data systems offer us the ability to experimentally intervene in people’s lives at a scale heretofore unimaginable. For example, a month‐long experiment on Wikipedia’s navigation bar would affect hundreds of millions of people. By affecting more people, we open ourselves up to creating larger, negative effects on someone’s life. The distinct ethical implications of big data experiments extend beyond their size and scope. The complexity of these systems and human interaction on them make it more difficult to assess the potential risks to subjects ahead of time. Salganik (2017) builds on Russell and Burch’s (1959) principle of these three Rs: reduce the number of participants, replace the experiment with a less invasive method, and refine the treatment to be least harmful.

Future Trends More Data Will Be Coming Big data will continue to reach into all corners of society shedding new light on the ways we interact and make meaning. The continual expansion of the “Internet of things” will provide us with high‐resolution information on the minutiae of everyday life. Big data will also continue to reach back in time, as hard copy archives from libraries, newspapers, publishers, and museums become digitized, centralized, and indexed. Companies are also beginning to provide access to their data, giving researchers unprecedented access to valuable, but historically inaccessible, data sources. For example, Facebook is providing some data to academics through its Social Science One partnership (King and Persily). However, as more data becomes available; on the whole, platforms are making it more difficult for researchers, or anyone else, to access their data (Freelon 2018).

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This data will compound upon itself as we begin linking these data sources to one another. We will be able to tie population data to historical events at a local level. We will be able to tie income to transportation patterns to political attitudes. Driving this will be the centralization of knowledge, exemplified by wikification. Wikification is the process of linking the subjects of documents, whether places mentioned in a diary entry or pictures of people in news article, to their data in Wikipedia (Mihalcea and Csomai 2007). Thus, a tweet mentioning “Benjamin Netanyahu” can be recognized as also about Israel, government, politics, and Jewish people.

Different Data Will Be Coming Big data analysis to this point has largely been relegated to text data. Even geo‐location data relies on location being translated into latitudes and longitudes to be machine readable and analyzable at scale. However, algorithms for processing images, audio, and video into computationally tractable features are becoming commonplace. Services like Google Cloud Vision API enable researchers to upload images and get back a spreadsheet of features found in the images. This is opening up whole new lines of big data research on platforms like YouTube and Instagram and media like the visual arts, talk radio, and podcasting. In addition, the falling price of genomic sequencing and prevalence of biomarker data are allowing sociologists to incorporate large‐scale, dynamic data about human beings’ bodies (National Research Council 2001).

Models Will Become More Generic Google Cloud Vision API uses a deep learning model that has already been trained to identify objects and characteristics in millions of images to classify the content of any image you give it. This is what we call a generic model. Generic models enable researchers without computational expertise or a background in a particular domain of machine learning to give structure to big data. There is a long tradition of creating and sharing models, particularly dictionary‐ based models like Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010). Moreover, some machine‐learning methods like deep learning are only appropriate when used on very large data sets, which few people have access to (Jozefowicz et al. 2016; Pennington et al. 2014). Model standardization has its drawbacks. Generic models are good for many different applications, but not the best for any particular one. They may also be biased. Having been trained on biased data, these models produce biased results. For example, when Google Translate translates from gender‐neutral languages (like Turkish, Hungarian, or Finnish) into gendered languages (like English, Spanish, or French); genderless pronouns are assigned in sexist and heteronormative ways. “Onu seviyor,” which directly translates into “they love them,” is translated by Google as “she loves him” (Morse 2017). These biases can go unnoticed in the absence of social theory.

Data from Multiple Platforms Will Become Standard As the number of archives publishing historical texts or platforms for instant messaging grows, the data between them become complimentary. Combining data enables sociologists to analyze the commonalities and differences between sources.



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For example, the CrowdBerkeley project provides sociologists with data from a variety of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Using this data, we can examine whether the same kinds of projects prevail across platforms, if the rules of different crowdfunding websites impact projects differently, and observe aggregate effects across markets such as the effect of the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession. Even now, parallel analyses of the same question from different data are driving new insight into political partisanship. Bonica (2014) used donation data from the Federal Election Commission to estimate the partisanship of various political actors in the United States based on whether they received money from conservative or liberal donors. Barberá (2015) looked at the network of Twitter followers for political actors on Twitter to see whether elites were followed by more liberal or conservative Twitter accounts. Lastly, Gentzkow et  al. (2016) use the text from ­congressional floor speeches to see if liberal and conservative members of Congress used different language.

Qualitative Approaches to Big Data While processing big data inevitably involves quantitative methods, this is often in service to qualitative analysis – the development of meaningful summaries of what this information is about. Unsupervised text analysis methods like topic models and clustering provide a high‐level view of what is contained within a corpus of documents. Dynamic topic model methods allow us to view the evolution of topics over time (Blei and Lafferty 2006; Roberts et al. 2016). Structured text analysis methods can supercharge our traditional coding methods, enabling us to code a small subset of documents and then apply that coding to a much larger set (Nelson et al. 2018). Nelson et al. (2018) has argued for a strong qualitative and inductive approach to big data given the novelty of the data and the lack of standardization of computational methods required to process them. She recommends using computational methods to get a sense of the data, using your judgment and sociological expertise to interpret these summaries and develop new hypotheses, and then testing these new hypotheses more formally. While the final analysis may sometimes be quantitative, at its core, Nelson’s inductive formula revolves around using qualitative analysis to drive our understanding of big data.

Methodological Integration The strengths and weaknesses of big data differ from those of traditional data. Big data complements and is complemented by traditional methods of sociological research like fieldwork, surveys, and the close reading of texts. Moreover, the lines between these methods will continue to blur as we survey panels of social media users, study how participants use big data in our field sites, and use conversational bots to conduct interviews at scale. As such, the research defining the twenty‐first century will fuse these various methods into a single analysis. Sociology has lagged other disciplines in incorporating big data and computational methods into the field. Now that the strengths and weaknesses of big data

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have become clearer, sociology is well‐positioned to take advantage of big data to advance our understanding of society. This promise will only grow as more data becomes available and new methods of analysis honed and made broadly accessible. Finally, the need for a sociological explanation only grows as big data continues to mediate and reshape the way humans interact with one another and our core social institutions.

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25 Toward a Sociology of Debt Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy

Introduction The significance of debt, especially in the United States, became alarmingly evident in the fallout of the 2008 Great Recession. The collapse of the housing market proved how dependent our economy is on debt and exposed the social consequences of indebtedness. Banks that were deemed “too big to fail” witnessed the value of their investments drop perceptibly and had to be bailed out by the federal government to avoid bankruptcy. Many homeowners were not so fortunate. While some lost their homes due to foreclosure, others found themselves trapped by underwater loans with mortgage payments that exceeded the value of their homes. This economic crisis left many questioning who was to blame. Predatory creditors who approved subprime loans to individuals without secure incomes or greedy debtors who borrowed more money than they could realistically pay back? The government for deregulating the finance industry, establishing the opportunity for investors to profit from buying and selling debt? The sentiment informing these questions is not new. Historically, debt has played a critical role in most if not all societies. Recognizing the social basis of debt is important because credit preceded tangible currency and was more widely and frequently practiced than barter (Graeber 2011). David Graeber (2011) describes the past 5000 years of debt, arguing that debt essentially constitutes society because social relations and morality are built on it. Nietzsche (2006, p. 45) made a similar observation in On the Genealogy of Morals, stating that “the oldest and most ­primitive personal relationship” is “the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor.” Rabelais suggested that debt could build solidarity and economic harmony between lenders and borrowers, which could transcend even the most

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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entrenched religious differences (Ruggiero 2017, p. 23). According to Graeber (2011, p. 91), “all human relations are based on some variation on reciprocity,” but unlike Rabelais, he argues that the variant based on debt exchange is suffused in violence and quantification. Debt is a distinct form of obligation because it can be quantified and requires money (Graeber 2011, p. 21). Though early monetary exchange required social trust, particularly when hard currency was scarce, as capitalism developed these exchanges became increasing rational and impersonal, which threatened the very sociality of human interaction (Simmel 1990). The interpersonal bonds of trust that characterized credit–debt relationships in the past have eroded as moneylending has become increasingly depersonalized. Modern financial instruments have reconfigured debtors into abstract, quantifiable numbers, reduced to the value of their credit scores. These credit scores have broader implications than simply being approved or denied a loan. One’s reputation, job prospects, ability to rent an apartment, and even social media networks are directly connected to creditworthiness (Lohr 2015). But, being reduced to a credit score does not mean that the subjectivities of debtors have been completely erased. The ­algorithms creditors construct to determine creditworthiness are based on specific identities, especially race and gender, that produce and reproduce social inequality and life chances (Fourcade and Healy 2017; Joseph 2014). Thus, there is nothing neutral in the generation of an apparently abstract numerical value or the social stratification it sustains. Indeed, credit scores have become a new form of “classification with powerful stratifying effects” (Kus 2015, p. 218). Just as creditor–debtor relationships have changed over time, so has the discourse and practice of debt. This chapter will explore why this has happened and discuss its social implications, especially in contemporary society where both private and public debt have reached record levels. Much of the discourse surrounding debt has been centered on if it is productive. This chapter begins by examining how religious authorities conceptualized debt as sinful because they considered it unproductive, demonizing moneylenders or creditors who profited from usury. The discourse on debt shifted in Europe during the Reformation, when money started being understood as something that was productive. Credit was necessary to fund trade and economic development, and though creditors may indeed profit from lending the capital required for both, it was not a guarantee. Risk came to inform the discourse on debt, and usury became viewed as a form of compensation to creditors for their risky investments (Brook 2007; Mann 2002). Thus, profit from lending money was just as productive and legitimate as profit from more concrete economic activities, but was still deemed sinful if it exploited the disadvantaged. Eventually, this perception changed as the actions of debtors became viewed as more immoral than those of creditors. Adam Smith (1976, p. 379) referred to debtors who borrowed money to indulge in immediate consumption as “prodigals,” while “sober” debtors obtained loans “to make a profitable and advantageous use of it.” Today, debtors are often blamed for their indebtedness because they consume beyond their means or do not responsibly budget their money (Atwood 2008; Schor 1998; Warren 2004). Debt is not only economically productive, but is politically productive as well. Debt has been practiced as a technology of power by sovereigns to control populations, manage labor shortages, wage wars, and build nation‐states. The creation of public or national debt provided the opportunity for investors to not

446 Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy only profit from the purchase of government bonds, but also exert their power in the political arena. While some politicians, like Alexander Hamilton, viewed public debt as a virtue that was productive because it could build the nation, others, like Thomas Jefferson, alleged it was a vice that would be detrimental to the financial well‐being of future generations (Wright 2008). More recently, debt has been understood as productive because it is a form of power that constitutes subjects (Du Muzio and Robbins 2016; Mahmud 2012). These subjects can be controlled and disciplined via indebtedness. Though debt may be “an instrument of oppression,” it also produces new forms of transgressions and resistance (Balibar 2013). Just as the bourgeoisie produces its own proletariat gravediggers, creditors produce debtors that may structurally transform society, or at the very least demand that some of their debt be canceled. Even if debtors fail to resist or revolt, social change may occur if large numbers of debtors default on their loans because “without the debtor to generate the return on capital, there can be no creditor” (Du Muzio and Robbins 2016, p. 136).

Debt as Sin Major religions from around the world have considered financial debt sinful and condemned usury (Atwood 2008, p. 48). Islam still does. Until relatively recently, much of the discourse surrounding the sinfulness of debt has situated the creditor as the malefactor more so than the debtor. According to Le Goff (1998, p. 10), the development of the monetary economy in the thirteenth century “threatened old Christian values” and the practice of usury became highly contested. On the one hand usury was viewed as a sin against nature (Le Goff 1998, p. 27). Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle’s belief that money was infertile and should only be used as a medium of exchange, not profit, claiming that “nummus non parit nummos,” or “money does not reproduce itself” (Geisst 2013, p. 19; Le Goff 1998, p. 29). Thus, usury was also understood as sinful because it was unproductive, wasteful, and could not regenerate itself. In addition religious authorities condemned usury as a sin because it was a theft of God’s time. English theologian Thomas of Chobham stated in his Summa Confessorum (1216) that the usurer “sells only time, which belongs to God. He cannot, therefore, make a profit from selling someone else’s property” (Le Goff 1998, p. 39). If paying interest on the principal of a loan was not sinful enough, compound interest, or paying interest on both the principal and accumulated interest, was exceptionally so. Perhaps most importantly, usury was considered a sin because it was a theft against justice (Le Goff 1998, p. 27). In the words of Aquinas, “Making a charge for lending money is unjust in itself, for one party sells the other something non‐existent, and this obviously sets up an inequality which is contrary to justice” (Le Goff 1998, pp. 27–28). At the time Christianity was suspicious about the accumulation of money unless it was shared with the community (Geisst 2013, p. 22). The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, emphasized that helping the poor with charity – not exploiting them with usury – was a moral act. Likewise Judaism stressed the Israelites should help alleviate the suffering of the poor, which included prohibitions on charging them interest on loans (Ihssen 2012). Worshippers are advised in the biblical book of Exodus (22: 24) that “if you lend money to one of your poor neighbors, you shall



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not act like an extortioner to him by demanding interest from him.” Jesus implored people in the Sermon on the Mount to “not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you” (Ihssen 2012, p. 80). The gospel of Luke (6: 35) even went so far as to counsel “lend; without expecting to be repaid in full” (Le Goff 1998, pp. 21–23). Lending without expecting repayment was rare; however, lending without interest was observed more widely among lenders and borrowers of the same religion. The Old Testament prohibits the practice of usury between people of the same faith, but not between creditors and debtors of different faiths. Coupled with discriminatory laws that prevented Jews from owning land, many became merchants and moneylenders to Christian borrowers. Florence even “imported” Jews because Christians were forbidden from conducting credit transactions there (Jafri and Margolis 1999, p. 372; Tawney 1954). According to Geisst (2013, p. 5), borrowers often preferred Jewish or foreign lenders because if they defaulted on their loans they did not fear reprisal or risk tarnishing their reputations within their own communities. However, it is more likely that Christians preferred Jewish creditors because owing debt to an outsider offered the opportunity to refuse repayment with little threat of retaliation. Durant (1957, p. 728) explains: [T]he collection of debts owed by Christians to Jews was uncertain and hazardous; ecclesiastical authorities might declare a moratorium on debts as in the Crusades; kings might, and did, lay confiscatory taxes upon Jews, or force “loans” from them, or expel the Jews and absolve their debtors, or exact a share in permitted collections.

Consequently, debt was used to establish and reinforce group boundaries. In cases when an in‐group owes a large sum of money to an out‐group, killing one’s creditors “remains an available though morally repugnant way of cancelling your debts” (Atwood 2008, p. 147). One of the most controversial aspects of charging interest to non‐Jewish individuals surrounds debt cancelation or forgiveness. Mosaic law set the precedent that debts should be forgiven every seven years during the sabbatical year, which is stated in Deuteronomy (15: 1–2): “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release… Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbor release it.” At the end of 7 sabbatical cycles, or 49 years, a Jubilee year was to be declared that freed debt peons, restored property that was confiscated as debt repayments, and canceled any remaining debt. However, Deuteronomy explicitly maintains that debt cancelation does not apply to loans made to “foreigners,” or those outside of one’s community. This has been referred to as the “Deuteronomic Double‐Standard” and was practiced not to oppress “the other,” but for “economic self‐preservation.” It helped establish the distinction between business loans negotiated with foreigners for profit and interest‐free consumption loans made to those within the community (Ihssen 2012, pp. 70–71). Islam is the only major world religion that continues to prohibit usury, or riba. According to Sharia law, profiting from riba is immoral because it undermines community welfare (Ali et al. 2013; Geisst 2013). Moreover, the Koran states that risk must be shared between creditors and debtors – otherwise, it is speculation or gambling, which is considered a sin (Geisst 2013, p. 278). For example, Islamic home loans are structured so that the lender technically owns the house and rents

448 Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy it to the borrower, who, sans interest, acquires ownership of more of the house with each mortgage payment. Thus, lenders share the risk with borrowers if the housing market declines. Likewise, Muslim investors share risk through Islamic bonds called suku, which are invested in tangible assets, not interest‐bearing debt. Investors share ownership of these assets and revenues generated from them (Verde 2017). The foundations of Islamic ethics stress generosity, obligations to others, equity, and responsibility, which inform all aspects of daily life, including economic activities. Muslim business owners guided by these ethics will lower the prices of their goods for poor consumers and pay higher prices to suppliers who are experiencing financial struggles (Ali et  al. 2013, p. 471). Sharia law further prohibits Muslims from investing in companies that trade in haram, or forbidden goods like alcohol, tobacco, and pork. Muslims can consult regulatory agencies, such as the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions, or the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index to certify that their investments are Sharia‐compliant (Verde 2017). Official religious doctrine did not and does not necessarily determine practice. Bankers in Renaissance Venice and Florence devised ways to evade usury prohibitions, including lending money for nothing and then charging “damages for delays in repayment, with a tacit agreement that repayment would be delayed as a condition of the loan” (Jafri and Margolis 1999, p. 374). Today, top Islamic scholars are paid generously to certify financial products are Sharia‐compliant, though the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Finance claims that 85% of sukuk are noncompliant (Geisst 2013, p. 281). Furthermore, contradictions surrounding debt are present in religious doctrine itself. While general debt forgiveness is the moral lesson from Matthew’s Parable of the Debtors, he advocates in the Parable of the Talents only forgiving debt that has been invested in productive economic activity (Ruggiero 2017, p. 18). A broader paradox involves the notion that sin itself is a debt one owes to God and that penance for a sin includes donating money to the Church (or in the past purchasing an indulgence). In this scenario, “God [is] like a debt collector working on behalf of the Church” and though he does not collect interest, failure to pay is steep (Ruggiero 2017, p. 17). Understanding debt as sin has not vanished, though who is considered the sinner has shifted primarily from the creditor to the debtor. The following section discusses how this shift originated during the Protestant Reformation in the work of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Unlike the Catholic Church, Luther did not view usury itself as sinful, but was critical of how it was practiced. He was opposed to high interest rates and believed that they should be low as to not extort debtors. His conception that moneylending, like other professions, should be conceived as a calling from God if performed with integrity was “a revolutionary change in attitude,” as was his interpretation of interest as a “payment for delay beyond a stipulated time… for actual damage or injury” (Cleary 1914, p. 148; Jafri and Margolis 1999, pp. 374–375). John Calvin agreed with Luther’s position on usury. In opposition to Aristotle’s interpretation that money is sterile, Calvin believed that money had intrinsic value and therefore could be exchanged for profit (Cleary 1914, p. 150). Furthermore, he recognized that extending credit was “indispensable” and boldly stated that “the financier is not a pariah, but a useful member of society” (Jafri and Margolis 1999, p. 375 originally in Tawney 1954, p. 95).



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Debt as Risk The discourse on debt shifted during the Reformation when Protestantism permitted that investing money could be a moral activity if it was conducted prudently (Botterill 2010, p. 7). Borrowing money to invest was also tolerated on condition that the debtor paid back his debts on time and saved or reinvested his earnings. But, concerns over the productivity of usury remained (Brook 2007). It was one thing to make money by investing it in a business or real estate, but was making money from lending money productive? And, if it was, what was an acceptable price for usury, and should it be regulated? The answer to the first question involves changing perceptions of time, risk, and the linguistic turn from usury to interest. The answer to the second question also involves risk in addition to the role the state should play in regulating the market. Before usury was accepted as a legitimate practice, it was differentiated from the concept of interest. Interest became the favored term to refer to legal loans, while usury was reserved for unscrupulous or illegal loans that charged high rates. Interest was, and continues to be, “defined as the rental price of money,” and is most simply money that a debtor pays at a specific rate for money that he or she has borrowed (Perksy 2007, p. 227). Initially, interest was considered “compensation for a loss that a creditor had incurred through lending,” not as profit (Brook 2007, p. 14). Compensation came to encompass the creditor’s time when charging interest became accepted as a “penalty for delayed repayment of a loan” (Brook 2007, p. 14). The longer it takes a debtor to repay his or her loan, the more interest a creditor can collect to compensation for the loss of time his or her money could have possibly made if it was invested elsewhere. Clearly, time was not the exclusive possession of God anymore after it was transformed into a commodity. By 1500, even the Roman Catholic Church recognized “the necessity of charging interest for loans if capital was to expand enterprise and industry” (Durant 1957, p. 15). A creditor’s risk was also considered a legitimate reason for charging interest. Adam Smith (1976, p. 378) wrote in The Wealth of Nations that a debtor was “obliged to pay, not only for the use of money, but for the risk which his creditor runs by accepting a compensation for that use.” Riskier debtors could be charged higher interest rates, or be forced to pay off their interest before their principal loan, to compensate creditors for uncertainty. But, how high could this interest rate be without it being defined as usury? One of the most provocative debates on a fair interest rate occurred between Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham (Perksy 2007). Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that the state needed to regulate interest rates to protect the risk of creditors and support the productive potential of debtors. Smith feared that investors, who he referred to as “projectors,” would be victimized by creditors who demanded high interest rates to fund “productive inventions” (and possibly wild speculation schemes) if the government did not cap interest rates (Perksy 2007, p. 230). According to Smith, “the legal rate” of interest “ought not to be much above the lowest market rate” to encourage “sober people” to borrow money and employ “a great part of the capital of the country” to its best advantage (1976, p. 379). Jeremy Bentham thought otherwise, questioning in Defense of Usury (1816/1787) why lending money at interest should be regulated when exchanging other forms of

450 Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy capital, like land or a house, had no fixed price controls (Perksy 2007, p. 232). While Smith was suspicious of the productive nature of many projectors, Bentham fully embraced them as key actors who generated economic growth by taking risks to fund innovations. Bentham argued, “It was just for investors to receive interest for the risks they took,” and reasoned that the greater the risk, the higher the rate of interest they should pay (Botterhill 2010, p. 9). Conceptualizing debt as an investment that entails time and risk was a fundamental development that encouraged it to be recognized as a productive economic activity. As such, it became a critical component of the growth of capitalism and a source of profit. If, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, time could be money, then so too could credit (Weber 1992). Though Max Weber did not fully address debt in his work, his explanation of how the Protestant ethic transformed making money from a sin into a vocation or calling is certainly applicable to how debt became legitimized as productive (Botterill 2010). During the Industrial Revolution, worries about the sinfulness of debt gave way to “concerns over property rights, contractual freedom, economic growth, efficiency, choice, and exploitation” (Kus 2015, p. 213). Prodigal debt continued to be stigmatized, but over time the democratization of credit – even to high‐risk borrowers – was encouraged by government policies as a mechanism to achieve structural economic growth and individual social mobility (Fourcade and Healy 2017, p. 32). Mass consumer society would have been impossible without widespread access to credit cards, automobile loans, and home mortgages. However, the liberalization of credit resulted in the problem of how to manage the increase of risk associated with it. Credit ratings were invented in the United States during the nineteenth century to provide creditors with sufficient information to manage risk (Carruthers 2013). Third‐party rating agencies collected information on potential borrowers, which was quantified and presented in easy‐to‐read tables. Classifying risk as ordinal data made it simple for creditors to determine the probability that a borrower might default. By reducing the “innumerable qualitative differences between borrowers,” credit ratings made debtors “comparable” so that “they could be ordered … categorized, labeled, and counted” (Carruthers 2013, p. 527). Correspondingly, they generated a hierarchy of potential debtors in terms of risk. While initially used to determine the creditworthiness of firms engaged in trade, today credit scores are also used to establish the creditworthiness of governments and individuals. As market transactions grew more impersonal, credit ratings became an important financial instrument to infer a potential debtor’s trust and reputation. No longer could most creditors hear the sound of a debtor’s “hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night” to ensure he was working diligently to pay off his loan. Nor could a creditor see if a debtor was wasting his time and money gambling at a billiard‐table or drinking at a tavern (Franklin quoted in Weber 1992). Now, a credit score signifies a debtor’s character and shapes her life chances, including how high her interest rate will be (Fourcade and Healy 2017). These scores have become critical techniques of power that control debtors, which is examined in the following section. The deregulation of the market and the resulting rise of finance capitalism in the 1970s created the conditions for substantial profits to be made from high‐risk investments in stocks and bonds (Balibar 2013, p. 1). Banks shifted “their risks through new forms of securitization and financialization” once legislation was passed that



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allowed them to carry lower levels of depository insurance (Kus 2015, p. 217). At the same time government policies, like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, encouraged banks to provide access to credit to consumers that had faced discrimination, including women, people of color, and those with low income (Marron 2015). Credit cards became more profitable after the Supreme Court ruled in Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First National Bank of Omaha that nationally chartered banks would no longer be subject to usury regulations where their credit card holders resided, but where their headquarters were located. Not surprisingly, many banks that issue credit cards relocated to states with lax usury laws where they could charge high interest rates, like Delaware and South Dakota. They also initiated clever advertising campaigns and innovative tactics, like introductory 0% interest rates, cash‐back bonuses, and frequent‐flyer miles, to entice more individuals to apply for and use credit cards (Vyse 2008, p. 50). This, in tandem with stagnant wages and neoliberal policies that weakened the welfare state, have resulted in widespread indebtedness. Soederberg (2014) uses the term debtfare to describe how more individuals are being forced to rely on their credit cards to make ends meet because of the reduction of government spending on public assistance and the growth of low‐wage work. The securitization of debt using new financial instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps, allows investors to profit – some immensely – from buying and selling debt. Interestingly, credit rating agencies considered CDOs equivalent to traditional bonds and rated them accordingly, which helped to legitimate them in the eyes of investors (Carruthers 2013, p. 541). CDOs pool different kinds of debt, such as home mortgages and auto loans, into tranches that are sold to investors. The obligation that debtors will pay off their debt is the collateral. While the upper tranches receive high ratings because they are deemed relatively safe and low risk, lower tranches are more likely to contain so‐called bad debt that is at a higher risk for default, and therefore rated lower. Historically, investors viewed home mortgages as basically risk free because most debtors reliably paid them. However, this was no longer the case during the housing bubble in 2006, when banks started approving home mortgages to individuals who were more likely to default because of a lack of steady income. This bad debt was pooled with good debt into CDOs, which went undetected by most investors, who did not realize the high risk of the lower tranches until the housing bubble burst and the economy sank into a recession in 2008. The few investors that recognized the risk of these CDOs accrued substantial earnings by insuring them through credit default swaps. By 2006, the value of the derivative market on securitized debt reached $400 trillion (Ferguson 2008, p. 6). Ironically, even though market deregulation has provided the opportunity for creditors to engage in high‐risk speculation that may result in great profits, the most powerful have been able to protect themselves against financial loss by shifting their risk to the state and ultimately taxpayers. Government bailouts of investment banks and favorable loans to corporations have caused the “privatization of profits and the socialization of losses” (Balibar 2013, p. 1). At the same time, the government is weakening and in some cases cutting public services to its citizens, who are absorbing much of the risk of creditors – and accruing none of the profits. Clearly, debt is not economically productive for everyone.

452 Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy Debt as Power Debt has been used as an instrument of power since at least 1752 bce when the Code of Hammurabi was enacted in Mesopotamia. Most notably, this code sanctioned debt bondage or slavery to pay a loan. A male debtor could sell his wife, children, and even himself to a merchant in exchange for money to pay off his debt (Atwood 2008, p. 56). The Roman Empire used debt to control its population and not only permitted debt bondage but allowed “creditors to execute insolvent debtors” (Graeber 2011, p. 201). Male debtors in nineteenth‐century England could be imprisoned for defaulting on loans, and though their wives and children could not be sold into debt slavery, many had no choice but to live in prison with him and find work or starve (Atwood 2008, p. 128). Indentured servitude was a common form of debt bondage in the United States until the late eighteenth century due to labor shortages and was not declared illegal until 1867. Today, individuals with mortgages on their homes could even be understood as debt peons who owe their income, thus their labor, to lenders less they forfeit their houses (Killick 2011, p. 363). Though this may be a bit of an exaggeration, government policies promoting homeownership in the United States and the United Kingdom have been influenced by the idea that owing property binds citizens to the state and reduces the likelihood of revolt (Ferguson 2008, p. 247). Public or national debt is a powerful tool that can be used to wage wars, expand empires, fund public works, and, if managed properly, reinforce political stability (Du Muzio and Robbins 2016; Wright 2008). Before prospective state revenues served as security for national debt, it was a sovereign ruler’s personal responsibility to raise money for wars and pay the subsequent debt he incurred (Tilly 1992, p. 74). Since these monarchs could not be sued, lenders tended to demand high interest rates on loans and require that they be backed by collateral, such as royal land or jewels (North 1981). If an absolute monarch found himself unable to pay his debt, he could use force to execute his creditors, declare a debt cancelation, or simply default without fear of reprisal. However, more commonly he would find alternative sources to borrow from, including the collection of taxes from his subjects (Atwood 2008; Ferguson 2008; Graeber 2011). The power of taxation became a new form of collateral that investors or public creditors viewed as relatively secure because the state could back these loans with coercion if necessary. The Dutch state was the first to borrow in the name of the nation to fund its war of independence. These loans were transferable and fueled the market for government debt because investors “did not fear repudiation as long as their government remained free” (Wright 2008, pp. 20–21). The creation of the Bank of England in 1694 instituted what would become a normalized practice of having “national debt capable of being serviced by the ever‐ growing regressive taxation on the public” (Du Muzio and Robbins 2016, p. 31). Owned by private shareholders until it was nationalized after World War II, the Bank of England provided a “regular source of revenue to pay for war loans” that “influenced and then determined the relationship between the state and the private sector” (North 1981, p. 140). The economic power of public creditors increased the role of the private sector in state affairs, giving them access to political power. According to Adam Smith (1976, pp. 444–445), the low risk associated with national debt ­coupled



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with the augmentation of trade and production during wartime made merchants and manufacturers both able and willing to lend to the state. However, he was critical of the speculation involved in profiting from public debt because he thought it diverted capital from productive labor and manufacturing (Preda 2009, p. 32). Marx agreed, stating that public debt not only encouraged speculation but also enriched the “aristocracy of finance” at the expense of productive capital and gave rise to what he called “stock‐exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy” (Davanzati and Patalano 2017, p. 56; Marx 1979, p. 919). Of course, the proletariat suffers the most from this arrangement, because the government increases taxes on its labor to service public debt. Though in principle anyone can purchase public debt through buying government bonds or contributing money to a pension fund, historically the ownership of it has been concentrated in the hands of the elite (Ferguson 2008; Hager 2016; Streeck 2014). This is especially the case today in the United States, where the federal government “has come to rely on borrowing from wealthy households and large corporations instead of taxing them” (Hager 2016, p. 11). According to Hager (2016), the concentration of the ownership of public debt has resulted in and reinforced inequality because the less taxes the wealthy pay, the more money they have to purchase increasing amounts of public debt, particularly risk‐free US Treasury bonds that have witnessed record levels of returns since the 1980s. At same time that the elite has successfully pressured the federal government to lower its taxes, less‐affluent citizens are living paycheck to paycheck with little or no savings (Soederberg 2014). Thus, not only do ordinary citizens have less financial power, they also have less political power. Streeck (2014) warns that the ascendency of what he calls the “debt state” threatens democracy because it privileges the interests of public creditors, including both foreign and domestic owners of public debt. Austerity measures enacted in several European countries in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession support Streeck’s position. The case of Greece is particularly poignant. The Greek government was forced to service its debt from successive bailouts to international creditors at the expense of the interests of its citizens, who were forced to pay higher taxes, endure cuts to their pensions, and suffer from a reduction in public services (Bantekas and Vivien 2016). Most recently, the Greek government agreed to additional stipulations from its international creditors to receive more loans, including that it curtail benefits to large families and restrict trade unions (Kitsantonisjan 2018). The absurdity of this situation is that Greece is trapped in a cycle of perpetual indebtedness as it attempts to avoid insolvency by securing new loans from its creditors, who are not only profiting from Greece’s debt but controlling its internal affairs. The power of Greek’s international creditors to stipulate domestic policy has its historical precedent in the context of decolonization in the Global South. Many newly independent states were deeply impoverished, which hindered their efforts at economic development and threatened their stability. Western countries feared that these new states would be vulnerable to the “menace” of communism, so they provided loans with specific conditions to ensure that they would establish capitalism (Peet 2010; Toussaint and Millet 2010). Some of these loans were bilateral and others commercial, but most were allocated by the IMF and the World Bank, which set the terms of loan conditions. Referred to as structural adjustment programs, these conditions forced

454 Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy debtor countries to implement policies favorable to capitalist development, including trade liberalization, direct foreign investment, privatization of state services, and the reduction of public expenditure. Unsurprisingly, these loans failed to alleviate poverty, leaving the ordinary citizens of these debtor countries unemployed with higher taxes, fewer state resources, and no representation (Peet 2010). Many government officials and local elites, however, prospered from this public debt as did Western lenders and multinational corporations that took advantage of structural adjustment programs to expand their operations into the Global South. Predictably, these countries experienced difficulties developing their economies as a result. Similar to the situation today in Greece, the public debt of many of these countries was larger than their gross domestic product and Western lenders made it clear that servicing their debt took precedent over domestic spending. Du Muzio and Robbins (2016, p. 77) refer to this unequal relationship between international creditors and  indebted countries as neocolonialism, or a “system of indirect domination that cedes political independence in order to preserve economic dependence and exploitation.” Like public debt, personal debt is also a form of power. In contrast to the hard power that rulers used to punish debtors in the past, today finance capital and the debt it is based on are new techniques of power created by creditors to produce “market‐based subjects” that can be disciplined via “the creation, exchange, and management of financial instruments” (Du Muzio and Robbins 2016, p. 16; Joseph 2014, p. 2). Instead of being governed exclusively by the state, these market‐based subjects are monitored by financial institutions that categorize them via quantification to better monitor and control. As mentioned earlier, financial institutions have created credit scores to rank the risk of debtors in an orderly and hierarchical fashion. Debtors internalize these scores as representations of their success (or failure) at managing their personal finances and ultimately their self‐worth (Joseph 2014, p. 98). In this way debt can be considered productive because it “breeds, subdues, manufacturers, adapts, and shapes subjectivity” (Lazzarato 2012, pp. 38–39). At present personal debt is being used to create neoliberal subjects who are uniquely responsible for their own condition. These neoliberal subjects assume “the costs and risks externalized by the State and corporations” and discipline their conduct to “honor their debts” and maintain their creditworthiness (Lazzarato 2012, pp. 46;51). Balibar (2013, p. 12) explains that the neoliberal subject’s “obligation to repay becomes the primary mechanism of dependency.” Because debt is internalized and therefore unavoidable, Lazzarato (2012, p. 52) argues that these subjects are governed extensively at work and home and intensively via their relationship to the self. Insolvency is not understood as a structural issue caused by economic inequality and government policies, but a personal trouble that is the result of poor decision‐making and lack of self‐restraint. Aside from a small number of “lumpenscoretariat,” who escape or defy the gaze of the credit score, the democratization of credit exercises power via inclusion, not exclusion (Fourcade and Healy 2017; Mahmud 2012). Mahmud (2012, p. 447) describes that though this inclusion may appear to free individuals by giving them more financial choices, it in fact subordinates them to the demands of creditors and the financial institutions that they control. Extending credit to previously excluded groups, including women, people of color and the poor, has created a new form of



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stratification or “class situation” within the marketplace. Those with low to moderate credit scores are often exploited by fringe or alternative financial services, offering them access to credit with high interest rates. Individuals with the highest scores experience the liberating effects of credit and “get better treatment, better service, and all kinds of side material benefits” (Fourcade and Healy 2017, p. 44). Paradoxically, those who most need favorable financial terms pay more for them (Baradaran 2015). A nationwide study conducted by the Brookings Institute (2006) on the household spending of low‐income consumers found that they spend more on food, automobiles, mortgages, insurance, and tax refund services than the more affluent.

Debt and Social Change Debt produces new techniques of power not just for creditors, but also for debtors. While it is quite straightforward to witness how debtors are disciplined and controlled by creditors, the power of debtors is important to recognize as a possible form of resistance and force of social change. Mann (2002) reminds us that debt is the antithesis of independence and when indebtedness becomes widespread it threatens societal breakdown. In ancient Greece, debt reform came from below after debtors rebelled to abolish debt peonage and more recently Greek trade unionists have initiated strikes on the transportation system to protest the latest round of austerity measures (Finley 1982, p. 162; Kitsantonisjan 2018). Though it may prove challenging for millions of isolated debtors to become a “class for itself” and realize solidarity with one another, it is possible. Du Muzio and Robbins (2016, p. 139) suggest that debtors engage in a debt strike by withholding payments from creditors to compel financial reforms. Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee are two campaigns that emerged from Occupy Wall Street that are attempting to build a debt resistance movement in the United States (Ross 2014). Strike Debt’s Debt Resistance Operation Manual offers advice to debtors on how to fight the disciplinary power of creditors and explains how debt is a structural  –  not individual  –  problem. Rolling Jubilee procures funds from sympathetic donors to purchase debt so that it can abolish it. So far, it has raised over $700 000 and abolished almost $32 million of debt (http:// rollingjubilee.org). Both campaigns emphasize that individuals should not be forced to finance basic social goods (e.g. health care, education, and housing) with debt. Though personal debt relief has been practiced periodically for centuries, more recently Jubilee 2000 set the precedent for sovereign debt cancelation. An international coalition of faith‐based organizations, academics, celebrities, and social activists, Jubilee 2000 challenged wealthy creditors in the global North to forgive or cancel debts owed to them from governments in the global South (Mayo 2005). In addition to requesting cancelation of bilateral loans from Western nation‐states, the coalition asked the IMF and the World Bank to provide debt relief on loans they made to impoverished countries that realistically could never be repaid in full. Jubilee 2000 raised awareness in the global North about how the debt of developing countries was exacerbating poverty, which defeated the original intent of these loans. Money that could have been used to improve public services, like education and health care, was being diverted to pay Western creditors. Framing the

456 Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy debt of the global South as a human rights issue, Jubilee 2000 publicized that “the rights of creditors, shareholders, or speculators are insignificant in comparison with the fundamental rights of five billion citizens” (Toussaint and Millet 2010, p. 240). Though critics stress that the approximately $100 billion in debt relief promised by G7 countries to the world’s most impoverished countries did not solve the structural causes of indebtedness, Jubilee 2000 did garner popular awareness of the problems caused by global debt and provided a model for subsequent debt cancelation movements that are active today, including Jubilee South and the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt. Legally, public debt is governed by the doctrine of pacta sunt servanda (pacts must be repaid). There is no bankruptcy mechanism for public debt, making it intergenerational (Wong 2012). Future generations are obliged to service the debt of past regimes, even those that were despotic or corrupt. Opponents have had some success contesting pacta sunt servanda with the doctrine of odious debt. Odious debt is defined as debt that is received without the consent of the nation and spent in ways contrary to the wellbeing of the nation with the further stipulation that creditors are cognizant of these practices (Boyce and Ndikumana 2012; Wong 2012). Wong (2012, pp. 7–8) describes how the doctrine of odious debt became popularized with the defeat of Saddam Hussein, which left the Iraqi citizens with $200 billion in sovereign debt. A broad coalition of national and international actors led by the Bush administration evoked the odious debt doctrine to secure the cancelation of 80% of this debt. However, proponents of the odious debt doctrine acknowledge that it is difficult to prove, especially in cases where state succession does not exist (Wong 2012, p. 13). One tactic that is being used to try to prove odious debt is a public debt audit, which may be conducted by citizen groups, government officials, or both. Public debt audits seek to discover and disclose the conditions of loan agreements and hold creditors accountable for their lending practices (Boyce and Ndikumana 2012; Chasaide 2012). The Ecuadorian government created a commission to conduct a public debt audit in 2007, finding “a litany of lending failures and exploitative loan contracts” from foreign creditors and refused to repay global bonds worth $30 million (Chasaide 2012). Public debt audits are also being conducted by citizens to hold their own governments accountable for how loans are being expended. The Spanish Citizens’ Debt Audit Platform (PACD) was organized in 2011 to educate the public about how the Spanish government was using international loans to bailout financial institutions while simultaneously spending significantly less on social services. While not odious, PACD has deemed this debt illegitimate because it has not benefitted ordinary Spanish citizens and therefore ordinary citizens should not be required to pay it back (Malinen 2015; Resnillo 2013). If debtors fail to mobilize and demand social change, then the irrational consequences of debt may become too difficult for creditors to manage and force them to change. Debt as a mechanism of economic growth may be reaching its limits in terms of future spending. Currently, consumer spending in the US accounts for almost 70% of the GDP at the same time credit card debt is at record high of $1 trillion. Combined with a record‐level of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, one must question if consumers will have the spending power to generate future economic growth. Recent tax cuts by the Trump administration coupled with little reduction in government spending are predicted to add over $100 billion to the federal deficit in



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2018 and $1.5 trillion by 2027. Experts expect that this will cause interest rates to increase as the government searches for more borrowing sources, which will raise the cost of corporate borrowing and the price of consumer loans (Phillips 2018). With the productivity of debt at risk, creditors may find canceling at least some debt to make economic sense. A few may even agree with Graeber (2011, p. 90) that canceling debt makes moral sense to not just “relieve much genuine human suffering,” but to restore freedom and democracy.

Conclusion In neighborhood pubs regular customers are often permitted to drink “on the books” or keep a running tab until pay day (or they receive their government checks). Traditionally, the record of these tabs was recorded on a slate – and when this slate became too dirty with debt, it was a sign that it was time to wipe the slate clean. Both creditor and debtors were held liable for a dirty slate. Regulars were expected to pay some of their tab, while the pub owner was expected to write off some of the unrestrained debt (Atwood 2008, p. 80). Accordingly, debtors have some responsibility for their indebtedness, but creditors must be held accountable too. Of course, most of us do not have the personal relationship with our creditors that regulars at a local drinking establishment do. In fact, many of us may be uncertain whom our creditors even are, making indebtedness less proximate and therefore seem nonnegotiable. The physical and social distance between creditors and debtors complicates the shared accountability that should be the basis of their relationship. Recognizing the shared accountability between creditors and debtors is an important step in moving beyond questioning who is to blame for debt and establishing a more balanced if not equitable relationship.

Acknowledgment Special thanks to Mindy Peden, who helped construct the framework of debt used in this chapter.

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Mayo, M. (2005). Global Citizens: Social Movements and the Challenge of Globalization. London: Zed Books. Nietzsche, F. (2006). On the Genealogy of Morals and Other Writings. In: (ed. K. Ansell‐ Pearson). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, D. (1981). Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: W.W. Norton. Peet, R. (2010). Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank, and WTO. London: Zed Books. Perksy, J. (2007). Retrospectives: from usury to interest. Journal of Economic Perspectives 21 (1): 227–236. Phillips, Matt. 2018. “Why the Tax Law May Make Your Car Payments Go Up.” New York Times, March 16. Preda, A. (2009). Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Resnillo, Iolanda. 2013. “We Don’t Owe We Won’t Pay.” Red Pepper. February/March. Ross, A. (2014). You are not a loan: a debtors movement. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 6: 179–188. Ruggiero, V. (2017). Dirty Money: On Financial Delinquency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schor, J. (1998). The Overspend American. New York: Harper. Simmel, G. (1990). The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge. Smith, A. (1976). The Wealth of Nations (ed. E. Cannan). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soederberg, S. (2014). Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry. London: Routledge. Streeck, W. (2014). Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso. Tawney, R.H. (1954). Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Mentor Books. The Brookings Institute. 2006. From Poverty, Opportunity: Putting the Market to Work  for Lower‐Income Families. https://www.brookings.edu/wp‐content/uploads/ 2016/06/20060718_PovOp.pdf. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Cambridge: Blackewll. Toussaint, É. and Millet, D. (2010). Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank. New York: Monthly Review Press. Verde, Tom. 2017. “Investing Along Religious Guidelines.” New York Times July 2. Vyse, S. (2008). Going Broke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warren, E. (2004). The over‐consumption myth and other Tales of economics, law, and morality. Washington University Law Review 82 (4): 1485–1511. Weber, M. (1992). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge. Wong, Y. (2012). Sovereign Finance and the Poverty of Nations: Odious Debt in International Law. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Wright, R. (2008). One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson and the History of What We Owe. New York: McGraw Hill.

26 Sociology of Sport Alan Tomlinson

Introduction This chapter is neither a conventional overview nor a comprehensive evaluative review of the sociology of sport. Rather, it seeks to combine a personalized narrative of the emergence of the sociology of sport in the 1960s/1970s in North America and the United Kingdom with a selective commentary on synthesizing texts that represented the state‐of‐the‐art a half century later. Sandwiching these sections are a preamble on the past and an argument for future work, both of these assuming and confirming the role of sociological scholarship in understanding the socio‐cultural significance of sport in contemporary life, cultures, and societies. Neither is the chapter an attempt at authoritative bibliographic compilation. For this, readers are referred to the 5863 references that Jay Coakley has generously gifted the field via the Creative Commons (Coakley 2018). These are the sources that Coakley chose to use in his work on the 11 editions, up to 2016, of his classic textbook Sport in Society: Issues & Controversies. Given that no textbook covers all relevant sources, and Coakley’s focus has consistently been on issues‐based topics that can directly inform teaching, his own choice of relevant sources is itself an individual selection, and so is an indication of the extensive scope of the field. From the interdisciplinary perspectives and cultural historical leanings informing this chapter, the outcome is necessarily even more selective. Many state‐of‐the‐art reviews have offered personal narratives of trends within the emerging field or subdiscipline, as Malcolm (2014) has shown. This chapter is of that genre in one sense, in that the themes covered here are personal and may to some border on the idiosyncratic, but it does not aspire to the label of a state‐of‐the‐art review. It is a modest attempt to combine historical

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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reflection and ongoing reflexivity concerning the nature of sociological work on sport, society, and culture.

Sociology of Sport: Origins During the years following World War II in the middle of the twentieth century, most countries would have deemed a sociology of sport to be a distraction, an irrelevance in a time of postwar reconstruction framed by the financial readjustment to a peacetime economy and labor force. In everyday economies of many of both the victorious and the defeated countries, austerity was the order of the day. Getting back to work, rebuilding communities, reestablishing relations between nations in a new international order – these were the policy imperatives of the moment. Sport was something on the side, a form of recreation that kept people out of harm’s way, with a few health benefits thrown in. But if a team of trained observers of society and its institutions had taken a close and sustained look at the cultural practices of the time, at the leisure activities of communities and populations, an embryonic sociology of sport would have not been difficult to justify. Take a few indicators in the United Kingdom in the decade from the end of the war in May 1954, when England’s Roger Banister ran his way into athletic history by posting the world’s first four‐minute mile. The previous year, New Zealander Edmund Hillary, with Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, scaled the summit of Everest, the world’s highest peak, hailed in the United Kingdom as a British sporting achievement as the two heroes were part of Britain’s ninth Everest expedition, with New Zealand, though independent since 1947, still recognizing the Queen of England/the United Kingdom as its head of state. Just three years after the end of the war, London had also staged the comeback, or “Austerity” Summer Olympic Games and, as Martin Polley has confirmed, made this work through a mix of military precision, political patronage, and private sector/market support (Polley 2011, p. 129). And then, in Britain, particularly for the men, there was football (association football, or its abbreviation “soccer”). Professional soccer provided avenues of social mobility for predominantly working‐class males who sought a career as a professional player, and pleasurable focus for increasing numbers of spectators that turned to the drama and excitement of live matches at the weekend. Industrial workers had benefited from a cut in oppressive working hours after World War I, and soccer matches became more fully institutionalized on Saturday afternoons. National ­legislation in 1938 introduced holidays with pay for some workers, symbolizing the  emergence of leisure and consumer markets targeting people beyond just the  privileged social classes (Tomlinson and Walker 1990, p. 222). In the season 1949–1950, the English Football League First Division achieved an average match attendance of 40 702 per game (Fishwick 1989). This remains an all‐time peak for the top‐tier of the English professional game, in its long history from the formation of the professional league in 1888. In the English Premier League (EPL) in 2016– 2017, the average attendance was 35 822 (World Football 2018). Of course, hundreds of millions more would now be watching in homes, clubs, bars, and public houses across the world. In that record‐setting season, though, in a country still rooted in austerity and rationing of goods after World War II, professional football

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was a vital cultural form offering sources of regional identity and pride, cultural ­legacies from a formative phase of industrial culture, and an expression of class solidarity. In the absence of sociologists, the novelist’s keen eye sometimes spotted the sociological significance of the game, and J. B. Priestley, in The Good Companions, published in 1929, wrote, of the working‐men who would find the money to get to a Saturday afternoon football game in his fictional industrial town of Bruddersford, that for their money they were offered “Conflict and Art” (Priestley 1929). Priestley cataloged the transformative possibilities of this art; it could turn you into a critic, a partisan, a member of a new community. His passage identified sport as of sevenfold significance. It expressed local identity; provided a vehicle for collective social relationships; created a sphere separate from other spheres of social life; compensated for the bad times; generated interpretive and discursive reflection; created masculinist cultures beyond the home and the workplace; and animated the everyday rhythms of urban and industrial life (Horne Tomlinson and Whannel 1999, p. 46). Yet despite the widespread recognition of the social and cultural significance of sport, a sociological perspective on sport was slow to emerge in the British context. An honorable exception might be the case of the anthropology‐inspired Mass‐ Observation (M‐O). The Mass‐Observation movement had published a collection of pieces that included a focus on the popular culture of the working‐class through the study of everyday behavior. It was a kind of science of the everyday in which sport and leisure practices were given an attention widely absent in the work of formal social science. The book Britain by Mass‐Observation was published in 1939, stimulated by a sense of the vulnerability of the democratic system to breakdown: “It is because of this situation – the urgency of fact, the voicelessness of everyman and the smallness of the group which controls fact‐getting and fact‐distributing – that this book came to be written” (Madge and Harrison 1939, p. 9). The book included a chapter “All‐In, All‐Out” that provided an account of an evening of free‐wrestling matches – usually four matches on one billing  –  in Worktown (Bolton, Lancashire), England. The account comprises a vivid description of the “shabby elegance” of Worktown Stadium, its seating arrangements (hierarchically arranged by price and the target class‐based audience), and the ring in the center of the hall. Mass‐Observers heralded this as “the only all‐the‐year‐round popular sport in Worktown and over the whole country” (Madge and Harrison 1939, p. 138), and the study conveys the commitment of spectators to this regular sporting spectacle. We see here the germ of a sociology of sport rooted in the everyday cultures of local communities and ordinary people, documented in ways that are in practice progenitors of qualitative sociological analysis and interpretive methodologies pivotal to the study of sport cultures. Another Worktown sport covered by M‐O was crown‐green bowls, a northern English variant of the flat‐green mainstream form of lawn bowls. Observers of matches on a green located behind a pub could compare the “sympathetic magic” through which players talked to and urged on their bowls; the researchers likened this to forms of magic and ritual in anthropological studies of tribal societies (Mass‐Observation 1987 [1943], p. 297). Such practices have been seen as examples of the agency of local people in actively making and participating in their sport and leisure practices (Snape 2016, p. 40).



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In the United Kingdom, arguably the first explicit recognition of sport as a serious sociological topic came from the Polish economist and sociologist Ferdynand Zweig in his essay on “ideas of sportsmanship,” published in 1952. In his observations on the everyday life of the British worker  –  collected during three years of research/ travels across Britain at the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s – Zweig noted what he presented as the neglected significance of sport, in relation to both watching and doing, spectating and competing. Zweig’s social‐scientific grounding was in economics, but he was drawn to the study of human nature through a combination of economic, psychological, and social dimensions; looking to “strike a sound balance between” these “aspects of men’s minds and behaviour” (Zweig 1952, p. 18). He emphasized too the need to strike another balance in the interpretive process: that between the potentially “contradictory acts” of “identification and detachment” (p. 17). In conducting this work, Zweig prioritized what he called type‐situations over and above a search for hypothetical averages, believing that the “clinical, situational approach is much more fruitful than the statistical one” (p. 18). Though Zweig was at the time plowing a lone furrow in pointing to the importance of an observational, interpretive sociology of working life and leisure cultures, his method underpinned his analysis of the “ideas of sportsmanship” that he recognized as central to the everyday culture of the British working‐class male. He reported that for the British worker, “sport has an indescribable fascination … it captivates his imagination, refreshes and comforts him; it gives him courage and amusement, excitement and beauty” (p. 124). There is a mini‐manifesto in Zweig’s observation that the “sociology of sport has not yet been written,” and his accompanying comment that if it had it would have shown sport as a “power for national unity” and as a meritocratic challenge to class formations (p. 125). It is more than likely that most countries will have similar genealogies of sociological understandings of sport, predating a professionalization of the area of study. Mass‐Observation noted that in “America, much survey work has been done by the Universities, so that ‘sociology’ is rapidly becoming more than a name for a science not yet born” (Madge and Harrison 1939, p. 9). Indeed, the hugely influential Chicago School of sociological study and research was pioneering an ethnography of urban life and culture from the 1930s, and one of the most groundbreaking methodological and subcultural studies in the genesis of sociology was William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society (Whyte 1943). Whyte conducted four years of a Junior Fellowship at Harvard University for the study, gaining fellowships at the University of Chicago for his writing‐up stage, and acknowledges W. Lloyd Warner’s “Yankee City” study, much of which was published after Warner moved to the University of Chicago in 1935, as a major influence, along with other sociologists who had been in Warner’s research team. Street Corner Society confirmed the importance of leisure‐based subcultures as a source of hierarchy and status in a community, specifically an Italian slum from 1937 to 1940. Bowling was fundamental to the young male’s status or ranking within a particular gang or group, and Whyte participated in the gang’s sport activities – baseball and softball as well as bowling – to gain an informed and directly experienced understanding of the nature of the group. The study showed sport to be no mere epiphenomenon to the overall culture of the group studied; rather, sport practices embodied, symbolized, and reproduced the culture. In any national context, such forerunners of

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nascent fields such as a sociology of sport warrant recognition. Yet despite the presence of prominent studies showing the importance of sport to a society and its culture, and to intrasocietal relations, it was not until the late‐1960s and the early‐ 1970s that a sociology of sport emerged in the United States. It is to that emergent phase that we now turn.

The Sociology of Sport in the United States/North America Jay Coakley links the growth spurt in the sociology of sport in the United States to the broader social and political context characterized by “calls for reform in all major institutional spheres of American society … American sociology of sport was heavily influenced by the extent to which sport was related to the social issues attracting the attention of liberal reformers” (Coakley 1987, p. 76). Early influential studies therefore focused on athletes’ rights, gender equity in physical education, and issues of race discrimination. Harry Edwards (1968) produced The Revolt of the Black Athlete, going on to publish Sociology of Sport (Edwards 1973), recognized by Coakley as “the new field’s first American textbook” (Coakley 1987, p. 66). Jack Scott’s The Athletic Revolution (Scott 1971) and Paul Hoch’s Rip Off the Big Game (Hoch 1972) were exposés of dominant sport institutions, combining activist and journalistic polemic in a challenging form of interventionist critique. Along with these activist influences, the early sociology of sport also drew on the contributions of physical educators and, to a lesser extent, leisure and recreation policymakers. It established early on, in ways comparable to later developments in the United Kingdom, a broad church of scholars, researchers, and activists, still reflected in the composition and mission of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS). In the absence of a research base or an accumulated academic literature, the early sociology of sport frequently drew on a range of sources: journalists, practitioner athletes, writers, coaches, sports buffs. Charles H. Page, recognizing that “the social world of sport and agonistic behaviour … has long been the province of non‐sociologists,” added that to neglect such sources in an anthology on sport and society, to restrict the collection to the output of “professional” sociologists, “would not only make for a dreary book but would be an exercise in sociological provincialism” (Page 1973, pp. 13–14). This judgment was prefaced by Page’s essentially interdisciplinary rationale for sociology as a “global enterprise” geared to the study of “interhuman relationships, social behavior, and group life … ubiquitous features of the human scene.” Such features are also, he noted, the “field” of not just sociologists but also of poets, fictionists, journalists, educationalists, philosophers, politicians, and theologians, plus “numerous breeds of social and psychological scientists” (p. 13). Page certainly recognized specialized excellence, lauding Gregory Stone’s writings as “a model of a sociology of sport of high calibre” (p. 12). But it was from a broad, cross‐disciplinary and interdisciplinary base that Page, with co‐editor John T. Talamini, produced the influential collection Sport and Society: An Anthology, published in 1973 not by some specialized academic press but by the big North American publisher Little, Brown, and Company. Page’s five pervasive sociological themes for the study of sport were suitably broad as an opening up of the field: sport, society, and culture; sport in “mass society”; sport and social differentiation; organization of sport and



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the thrust of bureaucracy; and the culture of sport. This latter referred to sport’s ­distinctive “world,” its customs, values, social rules, its myths, legends and lore, its own rhetoric or argot, its own lifestyle. Page’s conceptual and empirically focused agenda comprised a compelling framework for a sociological understanding of the cultural nature and significance of sport. Page concluded his overview of core themes with this wise observation: … a full‐bodied sociology of sport (which no sociologist has yet attempted) would include an analysis of the frequently noted interconnections between sport and the demi‐worlds of gambling and hustling as well as the more inclusive world of commercial entertainment. … such well‐known types of cultural figures as the sportsman‐gambler, the skilled performer‐hustler (as in pool, bowling and golf), and, on a huge scale, the athlete/entertainer. The serious study of these representatives of interrelated subcultures and of the roles they play in both the social world of sport and in society at large remains a significant and challenging task for the sociologist. (Page 1973, p. 37)

Two of the leading journals in the sociology of sport have their roots in North America – Sociology of Sport Journal (SSJ) (the journal of NASSS, first published in 1984, a joint US/Canadian venture) and Journal of Sport and SociaI Issues (published from 1977, initially based in Boston, Massachusetts, in Northeastern University’s Institute for Sport and Social Analysis). The International Review for the Sociology of Sport was first published in 1966, launched in Europe, and soon published a pioneering bibliography by Gunther Lüschen. Lüschen’s background was an interdisciplinary one, and he spent more than 20 years in the US university system, from 1966, after his early years in Germany. In Canada, a critical sociological framework for sociological research on sport was emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Queen’s University, where Richard Gruneau’s work blended sociological and cultural theory in a sophisticated theorization of sport as a cultural  –  and potentially critical – practice linked to socio‐political processes (Gruneau 1976; Gruneau 1983; Gruneau and Albinson 1976). Sociological debates, such as the structure‐agency dynamic, pervaded such developments and transcended relatively sterile debates between structural‐functionalism and conflict theory. Recognition of the constant remaking of the structure‐agency process in the reconstitution of societies and cultures (Giddens 1984) enabled sociologists to dispense with either/or theories or frameworks and aspire to more holistic studies of sport’s place in modern societies and cultures. But from whatever paradigm or perspective, numerous scholars formed the field in lively debate and argument, creating a professional “community of practice” (Wenger 1998) focused on the sociological significance of sport. This network of scholars constitutes a roll call of pioneering names: Snyder and Spreitzer, John Loy and Gerry Kenyon, George Sage, M. Ann Hall, Susan Birrell and Marie Hart, and Andrew Yiannakis, to name just a few of this influential generation.1

The Sociological Study of Sport in the United Kingdom In the United Kingdom, the earliest influence on explicitly sociological debate concerning the social meaning and significance of sport came through the work of Eric Dunning and his mentor Norbert Elias. In the edited volume The Sociology of

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Sport: A Selection of Readings (Dunning 1971) Elias provided a foreword in which he argued for the recognition of “a ‘sport continuum’ spread between two poles.” These were, first, “high achievement sport, such as that practiced at the Olympic games,” performed by both professionals and amateurs, though Elias noted that amateurs appeared to be “losing out”; and, second, “leisure sport with its two subdivisions, spectator sport and active leisure sport” (Elias 1970, p. xiii). He added that between these poles there were many intermediary forms, and the selections of Dunning amplified this. The contents of the book were organized into three parts: “some” concepts and theories; the development of sports and games; and selected “aspects of sports” in modern society, a very generalized category allowing the inclusion of pieces on socialization, class and race, occupational sport cultures, and issues of conflict and social control. This structure, for Dunning, represented “central problem areas in the field” (Dunning 1971, p. xv), and he could state with confidence that “coverage in the Reader is fairly comprehensive” (p. xvi) and that the text was also underpinned by both a comparative and a developmental emphasis that provided historical understanding and included cross‐cultural cases and perspectives. Dunning’s contribution, anchored in the strong sociological base of the University of Leicester’s sociology department, was critical to the emergence of the sociology of sport, though Stephen Mennell recalls that many sociologists were skeptical, almost sneeringly dismissive of sociological work on sport (in Dunning’s case, football). Such “mainstream” sociologists implied “that real men, or real sociologists, study important things like social stratification, not frivolous things like football. That in itself is some measure of the extent to which Eric became the founding father of the entire burgeoning sub‐discipline of the sociology of sport” (Mennell 2006, p. 515). Three decades after the publication of his prescient contribution, Dunning teamed up with Jay Coakley, and the groundbreaking Handbook of Sport Studies was published (Coakley and Dunning 2000). In the intervening years, the sociology of sport had continued to expand, and research in the field was stimulated by the growth of undergraduate courses and the emergence of research programs on sociological issues about sport at all its levels across the continuum referred to by Elias. Publishers also recognized the potential of journals, monographs, and teaching texts in the emerging field. The Handbook of Sport Studies comprised 44 chapters, structured in four parts: seven chapters covered “major perspectives in the sociology of sport”; seven chapters examined “cross‐disciplinary differences and connections” – politics, economics, geography, history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy; 18 chapters focused on “key topics”; and in the final part 12 chapters looked at the profile of and possibilities for the sociology of sport in selected countries – “sport and society research around the globe.” The continuities in Dunning’s vision were clear to see, in his commitment to a comparative and developmental approach to understanding sport, blending classic sociological themes (class, status, power, social control) with new and focused interventions and debate – on body cultures, feminist theory, cultural studies – and a wide range of “key topics” in the longest section/part of the book. Although “sociology” was not in the title of this internationally influential text, sociology was without doubt pitched as the major disciplinary influence in the “sports studies” field. The work of John Hargreaves (1986) placed concepts of power at the heart of the sociological analysis of sport, and blended historical, political, and sociological



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­ erspectives, drawing too upon socio‐cultural theories from the works of Gramsci p (on hegemony) and Foucault (on the circulation of power). Such theories also informed the influential feminist work of Jennifer Hargreaves (1984). As textbooks (Cashmore 1990; Horne Tomlinson and Whannel 1999; Jarvie 2006) appeared for burgeoning courses, expanding publication lists were characterized by multiple sociological perspectives and theoretical orientations that could be brought to bear on the study of “sport worlds” (Maguire et al. 2002). The sociology of sport began to look like a much more open field than in its earliest days, with paradigm wars replaced by a focus on the illumination of the nature of sporting practice, its institutional features and excesses, and its potential as an agent of cultural change.

The Sociology of Sport at 50 In 2015, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport marked its 50th year of publication with a special issue. Titled “assessing the trajectory and challenges of the sociology of sport,” the double issue brought together 50 pieces “to ensure that a diversity of voices was heard, not only on a range of themes, theories and methods, but from diverse identities and locales” (Pike et al. 2015, p. 357). The editors also added that there are two overarching challenges for the field: (i) to address the global dominance of the English language in sociology of sport scholarship; (ii) to embrace interdisciplinarity and engagement with research from fields beyond the sociology of sport. These challenges were seen as vital for a broadening of dialog that could contribute to future progress in and sustainability of the field. In bringing together 50 pithy statements on aspects of the overall field, the editors are to be congratulated; they asked individual contributors to be selective in their specialist overviews, and numerous contributors make comments on the broader field and the status of the sociology of sport as a whole. David Andrews, for instance, talking of the “hopes and fears for the sociology of sport in the US,” discusses how “we can allow impressive levels of research productivity” to “blind us from the institutional marginality of the field,” a situation in which those in the field could “be accused of sleepwalking into academic oblivion” (Andrews 2015, p. 372). In the United States, in this scenario, the sociologists of sport are increasingly isolated, perilously so as Andrews depicts things, hanging on inside kinesiology, sport science, or sport management programs, or as outsiders cum eccentrics in some other disciplinary framework or intellectual base. Andrews notes that outside of the United States, one can find “sizeable and productive assemblages of sociology of sport‐related scholars” (p. 370) in the university sector: in Canada (Queen’s, Alberta, British Columbia, Toronto); New Zealand (Otago, Waikato); and the United Kingdom (Bath, Brighton, Loughborough). But he paints a gloomy picture of the future, wondering whether “the scenario within the US may presage that within the rest of the sociology of sport world” (Andrews 2015, p. 371). What is especially interesting about the collection of articles, the 50 commissioned 2000‐word pieces, is their methodological and theoretical diversity. As the editors put it, calling on the spirit of C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination:

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… the articles in this issue present research and perspectives that are both global and local, both macro and micro, both qualitative and quantitative, and, perhaps most significantly, both contextually relevant and publicly accessible. (Pike et al. 2015, p. 359)

Important and pressing sport‐related issues in contemporary society have been, without doubt, illuminated by the work of sociologists of sport, and such work directed toward the media and wider publics. The editors’ list of such issues warrants recognition: • • • •

Corruption in the organization of institutions and major events Inappropriate expenditure of public monies Huge pay rises for sport stars and exorbitant profits for some sports Discrimination issues in the treatment of athletes, in the spheres of sexuality, ethnicity, disability, identity • Threats to athletes’ well‐being with the emphasis on achievement and performance • Sport’s potential to challenge and contest extensive social inequalities This is no mean achievement for any subdiscipline or field, and the key themes of the 50 contributions, as again identified by the editors, concern “identity politics; deviancy; capitalism and the commodification of sport; politics, power and control; national identity and globalisation” (Pike et al. 2015, p. 361). With exploration of social issues of serious import, as listed in the bullet‐points above, and with themes of such incontestable significance as those characterizing the International Review for the Sociology of Sport (IRSS)’s special issue, the sociology of sport can hardly be accused of hiding behind some fading intellectual or academic bush. On the contrary, it is a bold, international, and global agenda. The previous year, Routledge published the Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Sport (Giulianotti 2014). Forty‐four chapters covered theories and approaches in part one, interdisciplinary perspectives in part two, social divisions in part three, and issues in part three. Headings within the first part included functionalism, interpretivism, Marxism and neo‐Marxism, post‐structuralism, post‐colonial theory, and three names: Elias, Bourdieu, and Luhmann. Equipped with this theory armory, the reader could move on to interdisciplinary possibilities though invited in to essentially monodisciplinary discussions of anthropology, economics geography, history, philosophy, politics, psychology, and leisure. Part three prioritized consideration of social divisions, the hardy perennial of the sociological project, with chapters on class, gender, race, and disability. In the final set of readings, the sociological gaze ranged widely across topics: the body; health; risk; doping; fan cultures; violence; social interventions; urban settings; the environment; migration; the corporate world; media and new media; and globalization. The handbook is a monumental accomplishment and certainly shows that there is a well‐established body of scholarship in the field. The collection exhibits a depth of research and scholarship, a range of applications of sociological analysis to important social questions and issues, and a welcome focus on how sport in its various forms and manifestations reproduces or potentially challenges deep and embedded inequalities. Comparing such work and its profile in the publishing world with the situation



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half a century earlier, there is an undeniable buoyancy of activity in research and scholarship in the field. Jon Dart has provided a content analysis of more than 1900 research papers that have appeared, over a period of 25 years, in the IRSS, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues (JSSI), and the SSJ. In his intriguing results he shows that overall it is only a minority of papers that identify a theory/theorist: 23% in the IRSS, 13% in the JSSI, 27% in the SSJ. Feminist theory is among the most popular in all three journals, as are the theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. This suggests a substantial presence of critical theoretical work in the field, but also a persisting dominance of a relatively a‐theoretical research, or empirical work not explicitly linked to theoretical debate. Nevertheless, Dart can conclude that from the overall sample the “sociology of sport” has addressed a wide range of issues, with strong showings from politics, economics, education, sex and sexuality, race and ethnicity, governing bodies, organizations, and media. This is evidence, he adds, that researchers have “engaged in the classic sociological tradition in identifying and discussing how power and ideology are manifested in difference and inequality” (Dart 2014, p. 662). So what’s the problem for the field? Perhaps the sociologist of sport needs to be more confident and assertive in his/her profile within the cut‐and‐thrust and cutthroat world of academic career building. In his time at the University of Texas (Austin), Ben Carrington was in a sociology department of 40-plus sociology academics; of these only one, Carrington himself, worked on sport. His move to the University of Southern California then took him to the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism  –  no mention of sport here though all of Carrington’s formative work is on the sport‐race connection, whether in richly illuminating ethnographic work on the cultural dynamics of a black cricket club in the north of England (1998), or in sophisticated theorizing, including “diasporizing sociology,” on the sporting black diaspora (2010). Career movements such as Carrington’s may well, though, be pivotal for the enhanced credibility of a sociology of sport in the eyes of more mainstream sociologists or those sociologists whose sub‐specialisms simply got in there earlier.

Whither the Sociological Study of Sport?: An Integrated Future for Ongoing Work2 Current trends in sport are often discussed in relation to the global economy and the international media landscape.3 Consequently, much attention is paid to the political economy of high‐profile, mediated, and intensifyingly commercialized sports, to sport as commodified spectacle in an increasingly globalized economy and culture (Robertson 1992). Miller et al. (2001, p. 4) offer an inelegant acronym for an influential process – GGATaC, claiming that: … the move towards a global sports complex is as much about commodification and alienation as it is to do with a utopian internationalism. We discern five simultaneous, uneven, interconnected processes which characterize the present moment in sport: Globalization, Governmentalization, Americanization, Televisualization, and Commodification (GGATaC). (Miller et al. 2001, p. 4)

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Miller and his cowriters recognize that globalization has not always made things the same, or acted as an homogenizing force, yet globalization features and components are “common across sites, leading to the acceptance of certain governing rules, media norms, and economic tendencies.” This is an important emphasis, and it is generally the case that as sports have become increasingly international in profile and, more importantly, ambition and aspiration, they have become standardized. There is good reason why we need a political economy – an approach combining a sensitive analysis of political, institutional processes integrated with an awareness of the economics and finances shaping those institutions – in order to account for the shape of contemporary sports. A political economy approach is critical to any understanding of the framing forces of high‐profile sports and sports mega‐events, and to any comprehension of the trends that underlie and will continue to inform the future of sports, but that approach alone may overlook the core meanings, in cultural terms, of the sporting experience. Much as we know that these determining influences are at work, that the GGATaC is a driving force, there is something else that makes sense of sport’s continuing profile in our culture: its capacity to generate passionate experiences and deep meanings that have their own base and momentum. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has recognized this in his notions of “focused intensity” and “presence” in the performer‐fan dynamic (Gumbrecht 2006). And these experiences and meanings are not restricted to large‐scale high‐profile performance sports and their spectator bases. They can be much smaller‐scale than that, the stuff of everyday life and sport practices and cultures far removed from the performance levels of champions. Does what we know about ritual, for instance, in relation to the different dimensions and manifestations of sporting culture, offer any useful ways in to thinking about the social significance and future of sports as a sphere of lived, everyday and culturally distinctive human activity? The concept of ritual has been usefully reviewed for its potential relevance to the study of sport (Birrell 1981) and brilliantly applied to phenomena such as the Olympics (MacAloon 1984, 2008). In general, “ritual” refers to recurring activities or behaviors, in predominantly collective settings, that highlight activities and/or feelings that have the effect of reinforcing how one lives or what one believes. Ritual symbols have the power to express values claimed to be of widely collective significance: in Victor Turner’s formulation (Turner 1997 [1969]) they can unite a multitude of sources of meaning into a single expression of thought and feeling, expressing a sense of collectivity embodied in his concept of “communitas.” Anthropologists have recognized the widespread significance of forms of secular ritual, in activities and institutional settings such as politics, health, music, tourism, and sport. Rituals might be reinforcing, confirming the stability of a culture, the nature of a group and the sources of its identity. In a more particular sense, a ritual might also be a rite of passage for an individual, confirming entry to another status within the group. Ritual has been studied at the level of the local culture and a sport’s contribution to traditional values; at the level of institutions such as schools in which conceptions of the preferred curriculum construct particular understandings of the body; and at the level of mediated sport, in which ritual may give way to or operate within ceremony or spectacle. At all these levels “sports are extremely rich in symbolization and … can function to symbolize or encode preferred views of the social order and thus



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legitimize power relations” (Hargreaves 1986, p. 12). Hargreaves’s recognition of the capacity of sport to symbolize and encode values points to the social significance of sporting practices as forms of ritual. Such values might be the embedded patriarchal values of male knur‐and‐spell players in Colne, Lancashire, in the 1930s (Tomlinson 1992); the community and class dimensions of the football club in a mid‐twentieth‐ century border‐country Welsh village (Frankenberg 1957); the male domination of sport in the everyday practices of a village cricket club in Yorkshire in the 1980s (Middleton 2007 [1986]); or the sexist dismissal of female athleticism and physicality in the sport of stoolball in an English village in Sussex in the late 1970s (Prendergast 1978). Such research has shown the value of detailed studies of distinctive case studies and of a qualitative, and, where appropriate, ethnographic approach to such studies. In this way debates about community, class, gender and inequality can be tested out in the real‐world laboratory of everyday cultural life, and contextualized in relation to broader social and political‐economic trends and frameworks. Why then, and how, have particular (sporting) cultural practices evolved, declined, or revived? Is there a place for a continuing or revitalized contribution of local sporting cultures to the future of sports at a time when the spectacularization of sport seems to know no bounds? These are questions that must be answered in as informed a way as possible, not by general theory or overelaborate data‐gathering (this latter is a form of what C. Wright Mills (1959) called abstracted empiricism). Sporting values are not simply shared, automatically transmitted from one context to another. The history of sport is incontestably a history of cultural contestation and negotiation, of the play between entrenched power interests and challenging interventions and reinterpretations. The rituals of sport are carriers of meanings intertwined with dynamics of status, gender, and class; they are located in particular interpretive legacies, resonant of place and time. Cases cited above have been of sports in small‐scale communities, where cultural sociologists/historians and anthropologists felt able to talk in informed and ethnographically comprehensive detail of sport’s place in the specific culture. Some would argue that these village and community studies have little to tell us of the here and now and the future of sports. Yet they have reminded us of the deeply rooted meanings and aspirations that sport can convey, in the everyday life of the local culture. In his seminal study of the making of modern sports, Allen Guttmann (1977) framed his analysis in the formulation of an historical process of the move “from ritual to record.” Tiring of the compromised rush for records, skeptical of the motives of top‐level performers, marginalized by the extraordinary riches available to performing elites, disillusioned at the tawdry hypocrisy of Olympic torch relays, might future sporting publics and sports practitioners be increasingly drawn back to the rhythms and rituals of the smaller‐scale, to the attraction, in all its contradictions and power plays, of the lower‐profile or more localized sporting ritual? The future of sport in its broadest sense may need the renewal of sporting ritual at the micro‐level, with some forms of this opened up in more inclusive ways, so that the sporting agenda is not wholly dominated by a GGACaT process that has the potential to define away, or at the very least marginalize, so much of sport’s meanings and values. And an accompanying sociology of sport framework must include political economy, cultural history/sociology, ethnography and semiotic analysis in

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order to understand past influences, current patterns and emergent trends in any integrated and holistic analysis. To conclude this chapter, the unfulfilled potential of sociology as a form of critical practice is considered.

Public Intellectuals and Active Scholars: Entering and Reshaping Sporting Discourse and Practice Max Weber noted that the greatest advances in the social sciences are “tied up with the shifts in practical cultural problems” (Weber 1949 [1904], p. 106). Sociology is not a form of remote social theory − it addresses problems and issues; it seeks to affect the world, even transform aspects of it (Carter et  al. 2018). Work on the value of interventionist sport initiatives in divided societies (Sugden and Tomlinson 2018) has been conducted as a form of critical pro‐activism, designed from its inception to feed into the reform of the very processes that it seeks to understand. Research on the escalating ethical crises and corrupt practices of organizations such as the governing body of world football, FIFA (Sugden and Tomlinson 2003, 2017; Tomlinson 2014), has fed into international discourse, informing journalists, commentators, and administrators about the corruption and hypocrisy in such bodies. An investigative sociology of sport (Sugden and Tomlinson 2002) has shown that social and cultural change can be a feasible goal for particular sociological issues and questions probing the core issue of power (Tomlinson 1998); and an investigative model also employing forms of discourse analysis can be a riposte to what Coakley calls the “Great Sport Myth”  –  “the pervasive and nearly unshakeable belief in the inherent purity and goodness of sport” (Coakley 2015, p. 403). Continuing investigative work on sexual harassment and abuse in sport cultures, as they are embedded in forms of exploitation as revealed by sociological studies (Tomlinson and Yorganci 1997; Brackenridge and Fasting 2002; Falkingham 2018) is surely necessary in the wake of continuing revelations such as in the case of the USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, jailed with multiconvictions for serial sexual abuse of children, and labeled a “master manipulator” (of parents, police, authorities as well as of the child victims themselves) by Judge Rosemarie Aquilina (CNN Staff 2018; Ellis 2018). If a pessimistic reading of the state and status of the sociology of sport is the field’s future, and shrinkage of teaching programs were to undermine the sociological dimensions of sport science, sport and leisure studies, physical education, and recreation management, the problems that a sociology of sport helps illuminate do not go away. Although sport might not feature in any substantial way in sociological textbooks (e.g., Ritzer 2013), its omniprescence in all societies of the world, its profile in everyday life, its contribution to identity politics, its significance to the globalization process, and its prominence as a form of consumption in lived and mediated forms, continue to demand sociological attention. Jules Boykoff (2018) noted that in recent years it has been “an extraordinary time” in which “to be doing sport ­sociology,” as either public intellectual or scholar‐activist. If the subdiscipline of a sociology of sport fades in the academy, its research profile will be sustained by the recognition across many related disciplines and interdisciplinary fields that a sociological understanding of sport is crucial to any adequate holistic grasp of the nature of modern societies and cultures.



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Notes 1  See Coakley (1987) for an overview of these foundational studies, collections and texts. 2 This section draws on Alan Tomlinson, “Sport as Ritual: Extant and Emerging Forms,” a presentation made to “The Future of Sports” event, Cambridge‐Stanford Colloquium, Stanford University, April 10–12, 2008. 3 See Coakley (1987) for more information.

References Andrews, D.L. (2015). Assessing the sociology of sport: on the hopes and fears for the sociology of sport in the US. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50 (4–5): 368–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690214543125. Birrell, S. (1981). Sport as ritual: interpretations from Durkheim to Goffmann. Social Forces 60 (2): 354–376. https://doi.org/10.2307/2578440. Boykoff, J. (2018). Riding the lines: academia, public intellectual work and scholar‐activism. Sociology of Sport Journal 35 (2): 81–88. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2018‐0017. Brackenridge, C. and Fasting, K. (2002). Sexual harassment and abuse in sport: the research context. Journal of Sexual Aggression 8 (2): 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13552600208413336. Carrington, B. (1998). Sport, masculinity, and black cultural resistance. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 22 (3): 275–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/019372398022003004. Carrington, B. (2010). Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora. London: Sage. Carter, T.F., Burdsey, D., and Doidge, M. (eds.) (2018). Transforming Sport: Knowledges, Practices, Structures. London: Routledge. Cashmore, E. (1990). Making Sense of Sports. London: Routledge. CNN Staff. 2018. “Read Prosecutor’s Statement at Larry Nassar Sentencing.” CNN (online), 24 January. Coakley, J. (1987). Sociology of sport in the United States. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 22 (1): 63–77. Coakley, J. (2015). Assessing the sociology of sport: on cultural sensibilities and the great sport myth. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50 (4–5): 402–406. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1012690214538864. Coakley, Jay. 2018. Sport & Society: Issues and Controversies Master Bibliography, 1994–2018, Creative Commons. Coakley, J. and Dunning, E. (eds.) (2000). Handbook of Sports Studies. London: Sage. Dart, J. (2014). Sports review: a content analysis of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and the Sociology of Sport Journal across 25 years. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 49 (6): 645–668. https://doi. org/10.1177/1012690212465736. Dunning, E. (ed.) (1971). The Sociology of Sport: A Selection of Readings. London: Frank Cass. Edwards, H. (1973). Sociology of Sport. Homewood, Ill: Dorsey Press. Edwards, H. (2018 [1968]). The Revolt of the Black Athlete. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Elias, N. (1970). Foreword. In: The Sociology of Sport: A Selection of Readings (ed. E. Dunning), xi–xiii. London: Frank Cass.

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Ellis, Ralph. 2018. “Nassar and Former USA Gymnastics Trainer Indicted for Alleged Sexual Abuse at Karolyi Ranch in Texas.” CNN (online), accessed 30 June. Falkingham, Katie. 2018. “Gender‐based Violence in Sport: Researchers Call for ‘Urgent Attention’.” BBC Sport (online), accessed 8 August. Fishwick, N. (1989). English Football and Society, 1910–1950. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Frankenberg, R. (1957). Village on the Border: A Social Study of Religion, Politics and Football in a North Wales Community. London: Cohen and West. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giulianotti, R. (ed.) (2014). Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Sport. London: Routledge. Gruneau, R.S. (1976). Sport as an area of sociological study: an introduction to major themes and perspectives. In: Canadian Sport: Sociological Perspectives (ed. J.G. Albinson), 8–43. Don Mills, Ontario: Addison‐Wesley. Gruneau, R.S. (1983). Class, Sports and Social Development. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Gruneau, R.S. and Albinson, J.G. (eds.) (1976). Canadian Sport: Sociological Perspectives. Don Mills, Ontario: Addison‐Wesley. Gumbrecht, H.U. (2006). In Praise of Athletic Beauty. Cambridge, MASS: Belknap/Harvard University Press. Guttmann, A. (1977). From Ritual to Record: The Meaning of Modern Sports. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts. Hargreaves, J. (1984). Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sports. London: Routledge. Hargreaves, J. (1986). Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hoch, P. (1972). Rip off the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books. Horne, J., Tomlinson, A., and Whannel, G. (1999). Understanding Sport: An Introduction to the Sociological and Cultural Analysis of Sport. London: Routledge. Jarvie, G. (2006). Sport, Culture and Society: An Introduction. London: Routledge. MacAloon, J.J. (1984). Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Conference Presentation). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. MacAloon, J.J. (2008 [1981]). This Great Symbol: Pierre Coubertin and the Origins of the Olympic Games. London: Routledge. Madge, C. and Harrison, T. (1939). Britain by Mass‐Observation. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Maguire, J.A., Jarvie, G., Bradley, J., and Mansfield, L. (2002). Sport Worlds: A Sociological Perspective. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Malcolm, D. (2014). The social construction of the sociology of sport: a professional project. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 49 (1): 3–21. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1012690212452362. Mennell, S. (2006). The contribution of Eric Dunning to the sociology of sport: the foundations. Sport in Society 9 (4): 514–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430430600768728. Middleton, A. (2007 [1986]). Marking boundaries: Men’s space and Women’s space in a Yorkshire Village. In: The Sport Studies Reader (ed. A. Tomlinson), 329–333. London: Routledge.



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Miller, T., Lawrence, G., Mckay, J., and Rowe, D. (2001). Globalization and Sport: Playing the World. London: Sage. Mills, C.W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Observation, M. (1987 [1943]). The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study by Mass Observation. London: Cresset Library. Page, C. (1973). The world of sport and its study. In: Sport and Society: An Anthology (ed. J.T. Talamini and C. Page), 1–39. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Pike, E.C.J., Jackson, S.J., and Wenner, L.A. (2015). On the trajectory, challenges, and future of the field. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50 (4–5): 357–362. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1012690215574127. Polley, M. (2011). The British Olympics: Britain’s Olympic Heritage 1612–2012. Swindon: English Heritage. Prendergast, S. (1978). Stoolball: the pursuit of vertigo? Women’s Studies International Quarterly 1 (1): 15–26. Priestley, J.B. (1929). The Good Companions. London: William Heinemann Ltd. Ritzer, G. (2013). Introduction to Sociology. Los Angeles: Sage. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Scott, J. (1971). The Athletic Revolution. New York: Free Press. Snape, R. (2016). Everyday leisure and Northenness in mass Observation’s Worktown 1937– 1939. Journal of Cultural Research 20 (1): 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585. 2015.1134058. Sugden, J. and Tomlinson, A. (eds.) (2002). Power Games: A Critical Sociology of Sport. London: Routledge. Sugden, J. and Tomlinson, A. (2003). Badfellas: FIFA Family at War. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Sugden, J. and Tomlinson, A. (2017). Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting “Badfellas”, the Book FIFA Tried to Ban. London: Routledge. Sugden, J. and Tomlinson, A. (2018). Sport and Peace‐Building in Divided Societies: Playing with Enemies. London: Routledge. Talamini, J.T. and Page, C. (eds.) (1973). Sport and Society: An Anthology. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Tomlinson, A. (1992). Shifting patterns of working‐class leisure: the case of knur and spell. Sociology of Sport Journal 9 (2): 192–206. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.9.2.192. Tomlinson, A. (1998). Domination, negotiation and resistance in sports cultures. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 22 (3): 235–240. Tomlinson, A. (2014). FIFA: The Men, the Myths and the Money. London: Routledge. Tomlinson, A. and Walker, H. (1990). Holidays for all: popular movements, collective leisure, and the pleasure industry. In: Consumption, Identity and Style: Marketing, Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure (ed. A. Tomlinson), 150–163. London: Routledge. Tomlinson, A. and Yorganci, I. (1997). Male coach/female athlete relations: gender and power relations in competitive sport. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 21 (2): 134–155. Turner, V. (1997 [1969]). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti‐Structure. Piscataway, N.J.: Aldine Transaction. Weber, M. 1949 [1904]. ‘Objectivity’ in social science and social policy. In The Methodology of the Social Sciences, (trans. and ed. E.A. Shils and H.A. Finch), 49–112. New York: Free Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Whyte, W.H. (1943). Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. World Football. 2018. http://worldfootball.net, on “Premier League 2016/2017 attendance.” Accessed 7 May 2018. Zweig, Ferdynand. 1952. The British Worker. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

27 From Fordism to Brexit and Trump Is Authoritarian Capitalism on the Rise? Robert J. Antonio and Alessandro Bonanno

Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s strong run in the 2016 Democratic primary mobilized populist sentiments expressed powerfully a few years earlier in the “Occupy Wall Street” protests (Levitin 2015). Occupy and Sanders attacked neoliberal policies for sharply increased economic inequality and decreased employment opportunity, security, and mobility for average workers. Left‐leaning American grassroots protests (e.g. gun control, youth movement) are surging again in response to President Donald Trump and conservative policies (Jordon and Clement 2018; Levitz 2018). However, rightwing populist parties, grassroots organizations, and protests have been especially noteworthy in recent years. The white nationalist Charlottesville rally and “alt‐right” battles with antifascist opposition on or near college campuses captured national attention. The 2016 British referendum to leave the European Union (Brexit), Trump’s election the same year, and extreme‐right activism and electoral politics in many countries raised worldwide concerns about populism. The consequences of populist anti‐globalist moves such as Brexit and the Trump administration withdrawal from the Trans‐Pacific Partnership and Paris Accord are still unfolding, but they have yet to substantially alter global capitalism. Following promises to serve the “forgotten” working‐class and “drain the swamp,” Trump appointed a bevy of Wall Street advisors, supported an enormous tax cut for corporations and top income earners, increased military spending, and altered the focus of regulatory agencies – accelerated neoliberal business as usual. Yet Brexit, Trump, and ethnoracial populism manifest an emergent legitimacy crisis of neoliberalism and liberal democracy. Neoliberal globalization arose in the late 1970s and early1980s and was consolidated in the 1990s “Washington consensus.” Its legitimacy began to erode with the dotcom crash, early 2000s corporate scandals, and especially the 2008–2009 financial crisis, government bailout, and deep recession. More open, redrawn, and

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contested national borders, reduced national sovereignty, loose regulation, financial instabilities, forced immigration, terrorism, and civil and regional wars cast doubts about the supposed superiority of neoliberal globalization and stirred populist ­discontent. Ethnoracial populists claim to provide the alternative to the hegemonic neoliberal regime and relief from its harsh socioeconomic impacts  –  a sweeping, largely unfulfilled promise thus far. Right‐wing populists have had some success, however, in reducing the flow of immigrants and refugees, drawing out and manipulating their avid followers’ authoritarian‐dominance orientation toward ­ targeted minorities, and generating doubt and dismay about democratic institutions.

From Market Liberalism to Social Liberalism Market liberals and social liberals have long debated redistribution and regulation. Market liberals argue that unregulated markets self‐correct, expand, and foster abundance, freedom, and human flourishing (e.g. Hayek 1972 [1944], 1980 [1948]; Friedman 1982 [1962]; Marshall 1997 [1920]). They contend that free‐market policies allow supply and demand to spontaneously reach equilibrium, overcome occasional economic crises, and generate long‐term growth. Embracing unrestricted property rights, market liberals favor minimal regulation, redistribution, welfare provision, and public goods. In major economic contractions when productive forces are grossly underutilized, they argue, market‐induced price drops automatically stimulate demand and a new cycle of economic expansion. Market liberals want to limit political intervention and taxation to provisioning the social, legal, and material infrastructure needed for sustaining markets and the overall productive system. Broader state intervention in the political economy reduces economic efficiency, violates liberty, and undermines socioeconomic progress, market liberals contend. Social liberals reject the tenet that free markets spontaneously re‐equilibrate and argue that if equilibrium is reached in long severe crises absent state intervention, it comes at the cost of painful, dangerous economic and sociopolitical damages. Keynesian social liberals advocate state regulation and public investment in health, education, and welfare (e.g. Keynes 2009 [1936]; Krugman 2013; Stiglitz 2017). Post–World War II Keynesians contended that comprehensive state intervention was necessary for recovery and to avert a return to depression and fascism. In the wake of the 2008–2009 financial crisis, they argued, immediate state intervention was essential to halt the financial meltdown and redistribution and re‐regulation were needed to curtail misery, spread costs fairly, and avert another market failure. The actual market‐liberal intervention saved the finance industry and its big investors but provided little help for average people hurt by the crisis and did nothing to stem growing inequality, underemployment, and corporate and government corruption. These unfair policies and consequent dislocations became prime targets of populists left and right (Stiglitz 2010, 2011; Milanovic 2016, pp. 204–211). Neo‐Marxian and other left‐leaning “post‐capitalist” thinkers call for comprehensive public planning to guide extensive regulatory and redistributive policies, which they contend require fundamental transformation of capitalism as we have known it (i.e. based on unplanned, exponential growth) (Harvey 1990, 2017; Foster et al. 2010). However, they have yet to develop a determinate alternative vision to the neoliberal regime



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that could help forge a counter‐hegemonic bloc and cope with changes wrought by globalization and especially with the economic and ecological contradictions of the growth imperative presupposed by left and right.1 The 1920s market‐liberal regime could not address the mounting contradictions engendered by market failure and political failure and consequently stirred the rise of virulently anti‐liberal, far‐right movements across Europe. The Roosevelt administration initiated the New Deal to avoid the same fate in the United States. Both the nascent social liberal and new far‐right regimes depended on extensive state intervention, but the latter dumped democratic institutions along with free markets. Today’s ethnoracial populists and alt‐right thinkers echo this earlier opposition to liberal democracy and sometimes even display World War II–era Fascist or Nazi poses, symbols, and propaganda online and in public events. Averting the authoritarian threat, New Deal social‐liberals created the “Fordist” market‐social, redistributive‐regulatory state, but market‐liberal political opposition and the war sharply limited its development. Postwar capitalist leaderships agreed that market‐liberalism could not meet the demands of rebuilding the infrastructure of war devastated nations, providing for masses of immiserated survivors, and avoiding a return to depression and fascism or a drift into Stalinism. They legitimated Fordist state intervention as the necessary democratic response to effectively speed postwar reconstruction and meet basic needs. Postwar social‐liberal governance generated widely shared economic growth and greatly extended the welfare state and public goods via progressive taxation. Social liberals instituted the postwar “capital‐labor accord,” which ensured a modicum of distributive justice and relatively stable social and industrial relations.2 The Fordist state was the agent of both capitalist accumulation and economic mobility, opportunity, and security. American social liberalism was not as robust or comprehensive as the European versions, and the benefits of the US regime came later and more unevenly to minorities and women. However, Fordism helped facilitate working‐class and middle‐class affluence and security and increased inclusion, along with steady and substantial corporate profits. Postwar social‐liberal nations experienced nearly continuous, robust economic growth for more than two decades and distributed the increased income, benefits, and public entitlements in a manner that enhanced the wartime trend toward income convergence, or unparalleled reduction of economic inequality (Piketty 2014; Streeck 2016). Fostering easily visible material progress (e.g. expanded middle class, suburban complexes, consumer life styles), American social liberalism was portrayed by liberal intelligentsia as prima facie realization of the democratic ideals of abundance, justice, and equality. While they celebrated a new era of permanent economic growth absent class conflict, left critics argued that minorities and women were left out and that affluence undermined the collective will to create a genuinely just society. However, increased inflation, taxation, and international competition plagued mature American Fordism. Fallout from the highly unpopular Vietnam War, ghetto uprisings, oil crisis, and Watergate scandal generated distrust in government, polarized social groups (e.g. black and white, young and old, blue‐collar workers, and professionals), and ultimately undermined support for social liberalism. By the mid‐ 1970s, many US corporations suffered a profit squeeze from much‐increased international competition, failure to invest adequately in new technologies, substantially

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increased costs of wages and benefits, higher energy costs, and other problems. Declining accumulation motivated capitalists to withdraw from the capital‐labor accord. Bitter splits over bussing and affirmative action, fears about waning US economic and military power, and especially stagflation (i.e. high inflation and high unemployment) generated a terminal legitimacy crisis of social liberalism. Other wealthy capitalist nations also faced increased problems maintaining capital accumulation while raising social spending in an increasingly competitive international economy. Progressive taxation and public entitlements were attacked in the United States and in other nations that shared a strong market‐liberal heritage (Harrison and Bluestone 1988; Harvey 1990; Streeck 2016).

Returning with a Vengeance: Neoliberal Market Fundamentalism Reformulated in the1970s by conservative think tanks (e.g. American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute) and Chicago School economists and buoyed by the Thatcher and Reagan elections and a reinvigorated capitalist class, market liberalism returned with a vengeance. Advocating sole reliance on self‐ regulating markets liberated from the grip of state bureaucracy (which they treated as the exclusive locus of repressive power), “neoliberals” launched a “market fundamentalist” rollback of social liberalism’s workplace, consumer, financial, and environmental regulations, shrinkage of its welfare state, privatization of its public goods, and removal of its trade barriers (Stiglitz 2010, p. 220; Bloch and Somers 2014, p. 101, 150). They contended that socioeconomic problems, including poverty and unemployment, were pathological effects of social liberalism, which undercut personal responsibility, individual enterprise, and human freedom and spur economic inefficiency, torpor, and stagnation. They held that market fundamentalism would restore growth, increase employment, eliminate waste, and revitalize sociocultural life by empowering and enriching capitalist entrepreneurs and investors, disciplining workers, and cutting “job‐killing” regulation and taxation. Because of divergent abilities and drive, they argued, unequal outcomes are inevitable and desirable; economic inequality and a minimal safety‐net discourages slackers and free‐riders, enhances worker motivation, and consequently increases output, reduces entitlement costs, and creates savings to increase capital and rewards for talented, ambitious investor‐class “makers” or “job creators” who drive growth and progress. Neoliberals held that deregulated markets and cost–benefit analyses deliver the best possible allocation of human and natural resources and means to solve socioeconomic problems. Although assertively advocating “small government,” neoliberals sought state intervention and public investment to enhance corporate power, increase capital accumulation, redistribute wealth upward, and impose market‐liberal rules and routines as broadly as possible. Rather than creating a depoliticized society based on natural, spontaneous “free markets,” neoliberals re‐embedded and re‐regulated economic activities in a new set of market‐liberal cultural, legal, and political arrangements reshaped for global capitalism (Friedman 2000; Stiglitz 2003, 2010; Ackerman and Heinzerling 2004; Harvey 2005; Quiggin 2010; Block and Somers 2014).



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By the late 1980s, center‐right and center‐left political parties converged in support of neoliberal globalization, which was reified or naturalized as the economy. Neoliberals embraced the Thatcherite mantra that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to market fundamentalism while discouraged progressives lamented the rise of New Democrats (Clinton) and New Labor (Blair) as “the end of right and left” or “the end of alternatives.” The neoliberal Washington consensus ruled globally via US‐led transnational economic governance organizations (e.g. International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Economic Forum) and national finance ministries. As developing countries found new opportunities to escape subsistence living, in the United States, social‐liberal regulation and welfare were “reformed” (i.e. shrunk or eliminated). Firms outsourced production to less costly, politically convenient overseas locations. Stable, full‐time, well‐paid industrial employment shrank sharply, and “flexible” low‐wage, low‐benefit, part‐time jobs proliferated. Growth in public spending in support of the lower classes and middle classes was cut, as such expenditures were disparaged as wasteful and unsustainable, while corporate profits soared via restructuring, outsourcing, deregulating, deunionizing, financializing, and securitizing, all enabled by the neoliberal crony state (Stiglitz 2003). The robust social‐liberal version of equal opportunity, stressing just distribution of the means of participation, was reduced to the minimal standard of formal equality or absence of legal barriers to participation. Neoliberals contended they were liberating people from dependence and mediocrity cultivated by “socialistic” policies and creating an “opportunity society” that rewards individual enterprise and talent (e.g. Frohnen 2015). Dwelling on the virtues of human capital and social capital, neoliberals treated individuals and communities as financial assets to be managed in a strictly businesslike way. Sacralizing possessive individualism, market fundamentalists deployed libertarian ideas from Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick to celebrate egoism and single‐ minded individual success. “Winner takes all” sensibilities permeated popular culture. Neoliberal individualism was sometimes taken up critically; for example, Wall Street’s (1987) main character, financier Gordon Gekko, personified market fundamentalism’s outsized, unscrupulous ambition. Tea Party followers spun neoliberal austerity as liberating people from social liberal dependency. Famously exhorting personal responsibility to wealthy campaign donors, Republican Mitt Romney declared that 47% of Americans belonged to the government‐dependent “taker class” who luxuriate in public entitlements and demand ever‐larger public support. He held that they pay no taxes, consider themselves “victims,” and burden “makers” – wealth and job creators – with an unfair, unstainable tax burden (Klein 2012). This updated, more expansive version of the nineteenth‐century market‐ liberal concept of the “undeserving poor” is a pillar, albeit usually unspoken, of market fundamentalism. The erosion of social liberalism and its postwar countervailing power system was driven in part by neoliberal globalization’s hypermobile capital, products, and labor and worldwide production and consumption networks forged by transnational corporations (TNCs) that invest capital and move production facilities relatively freely around the globe. Reduced capacity to control global capital and labor flows greatly reduces the nation state’s capacity to regulate their home economies and societies. Critics of neoliberal globalization hold that free trade and open borders result in a

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“race to the bottom” that degrades society socioeconomically and environmentally and reduces security and overall quality of life. They charged that TNC willingness to invest and locate in authoritarian regimes that provide infrastructure, security, and compliant workers decouples capitalism and democracy. Nation states created free‐trade agreements (e.g. NAFTA), global regulatory institutions (e.g. World Trade Organization [WTO]), and multinational quasi‐political entities (e.g. G20) to coordinate transnational cooperation in accord with neoliberal principles. The EU is arguably the most comprehensive attempt to politically regulate transnational socioeconomic space; it has emerged as a very powerful global economic actor. The idea of a single market under a common currency manifested neoliberal tenets of reducing of barriers to capital and labor mobility and trade and eliminating “redundant and constraining” regulations. Progressive arguments underscored the role of European unification in strengthening the extent and pace of cooperation among nations and providing common regulatory standards. However, expanding market mechanisms clashed with centralized control systems and large bureaucracies. Additionally, the active EU central bank (ECB) suffered problems from the absence of an effective unified executive office. Moreover, progressive forces have been disappointed that European unification did not alter hegemonic corporate interests or the class‐based distribution of power. Also, left‐leaning support for the EU has been weakened by its regulatory organs’ anti‐democratic nature, which do not respond to any constituency. Accordingly, EU policy is understood to be determined by political elites and bureaucrats and consequently suffers a “democratic deficit” (Steffek and Nanz 2008, p. 1). Moreover, the Greek financial crisis, Brexit, and emergence of right‐wing populist governments in Hungary, Poland, and Austria critical of EU bureaucracy generate additional serious tensions and manifest a nascent legitimation crisis. Famously Thomas J. Friedman (2000, pp. 105–106, 167) held that globalization grows the economy by shrinking politics – “political choice gets reduced to Pepsi or Coke.” His neoliberal panegyric identified this economization of politics as the “golden straightjacket” and celebrated replacement of political democracy by an electronic “herd” of investors who govern via the principle of “one dollar, one vote.” The herd threatens to “stampede” or move investments to more felicitous locales when political decision interferes with market‐liberal governance and threatens reduced earnings. Friedman’s classic market‐fundamentalist text celebrates hegemonic finance capital and the investor class. Neoliberalism relieves the state from its role of regulator and makes markets the only reservoir of legitimacy. For market fundamentalists, problems unfixable by market mechanisms become irresolvable “wicked problems” that fester and inspire populist broadsides.

Neoliberal Legitimation Crisis: Crony Capitalism and American Decline In English speaking neoliberal heartland nations, market fundamentalism has ruled for about 40 years and genuine political economic alternatives have been absent. American neoliberals privatized public goods and deployed market‐liberal ­standards, practices, and means more widely than ever before in noneconomic domains



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(Quiggin 2010; Rodgers 2011, pp. 41–76). As market‐liberal hegemony grew, however, states had to intervene repeatedly to rescue investors and stabilize the regime’s leading finance sector, which has grown faster and has had higher profit rates than the real economy. Stimulating extraordinary state intervention, the 2008–2009 fiscal crisis threatened a collapse of the US banking system, disrupted global capital flows, and generated a prolonged recession and major job loss. During the financial meltdown and government bailout, some neoliberal economists and policymakers admitted that markets were imperfect and reembraced Keynesianism, but they soon shifted back to neoliberalism after the state stabilized the banking system and corporate profits and stock market started to recover rapidly. Harsh socioeconomic impacts and slow economic recovery for those below the top helped deepen a neoliberal legitimation crisis (Bonanno 2017). The financial crisis and consequent recession had devastating effects on labor markets and the well‐being of middle‐income and lower‐income people. The crisis arose when a financial bubble burst that had been driven by the greatly expanded financial sector, deregulated financial markets, sky‐high financial profits, ­historically low interest rates, high levels of liquidity, perverse incentives and misaligned interests, and most importantly extremely risky, high yielding, financially engineered securities. Late‐1990s financial deregulation, especially rescindment of the Glass–Steagall Act (which separated commercial banks and investment banks), enabled gross imprudence, irresponsibility, and fraud in the finance industry and consequent greatly overvalued mortgage‐based securities flush with subprime loans. The huge banks that engineered the derivatives and profited most from them were “too‐big‐to‐fail” because of their combined investment and commercial functions. Investment bankers knew they would be bailed out because the US state and financial governance institutions had intervened often to rescue bankers and big investors in previous neoliberal era financial crises (Phillips 2002, pp. 104– 107; Morris 2008; Stiglitz 2010). The 1999 Glass–Steagall repeal ensured that the stakes would be much higher in the case of another crisis driven by bankers’ reckless speculation and therefore necessitate a bailout to avoid banking system failure and general economic collapse. Financial instability is a characteristic feature of the neoliberal regime, requiring regular state and transnational governance intervention to avert or cope with disruptions and failure of the global financial system and economy. In the 2008–2009 financial crisis, the US government bailout rescued the banks and investor class, while many businesses failed and lower‐income and middle‐income people suffered job losses, stagnant wages, home foreclosures, and community crises. The normal rules of capitalist business failure were not invoked; the big banks were not restructured, big investors did not lose, and bondholders or new management did not take over the operations. Moreover, gross negligence and fraud were not prosecuted and CEOs and top management kept their jobs and even received “retention” bonuses. This “ersatz capitalism,” Stiglitz says, privatized gains and socialized losses. Finance capitalists contributed enormous amounts of money to the campaigns of politicians from both political parties and had substantial political sway; the big banks were “too‐powerful‐to‐fail” as well as “too‐big‐to‐fail.” As profit accelerated in the financial sector and Wall Street investors recorded unprecedented gains, the rest of society continued to suffer. A flourishing recovery occurred only for the corporate world

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and its investors as the enormous economic gap between the very rich and rest of society grew steadily worse (Stiglitz 2010, p. 43, 49 135, passim). Economic inequality within countries has been accelerating for nearly 40 years throughout the neoliberal era (Piketty 2014; Atkinson 2015; Galbraith 2016; Leicht 2016; Milanovic 2016; Saez and Zucman 2016). The richest 1% have continued to increase their wealth since the financial crisis. In the United States, family incomes of the top 1% making more than $1.4 million a year grew by 7.7% from 2014 to 2015 and increased their income share to 22% (Saez 2016; World Inequality Lab 2017). During the same period, families earning less than $300 000 a year experienced income growth of only 3.9%, which, however, was the best growth rate for them in almost 20 years. This large group of families suffered an income decline of 11.6% from 2007 to 2009 and a very small gain of 1.1% from 2009 to 2013. They recovered only 60% of their 2007–2008 pre‐crisis income (Burkhauser et al. 2016; Dobbs et al. 2016). In 2015, the US average income for the top 0.1% was more than $6 700 000 while the bottom 90% (excluding transfer benefits) was slightly above $34 000 (Inequalityorg 2018). The Occupy mantra about “the 1 percent” rings true and some prominent economists argued persuasively that the United States is becoming a plutocracy reduced to democracy “in form” only (Stiglitz 2011: Milanovic 2016, p. 199). The income gap between the superrich and the poor increased faster in the United States than in Western Europe, which retained more facets of social‐liberal policies (World Inequality Lab 2017). In 1980, income inequality in the United States and Western Europe was about the same, but in 2016 Europe the top 1% controlled 12% of the wealth, while the same income fraction owned 39% in the United States (Federal Reserve Bulletin 2017). In 2017, the top 10% earned 47% of US national income (Word Inequality Lab 2017). The growing income gap has been fueled by the vastly increased incomes of large‐company CEOs and top managers while wages stagnated for the lower classes and middle classes; the pay ratio between these CEOs and average workers increased from 41: 1 to 347: 1 between 1980 and 2016 (Inequalityorg 2018). In 2015, US average CEO pay was $10.8 million, up from $10.3 million in 2014. Their average annual raise of over $468, 000 was 10 times greater than the average income of US workers (Choe 2016). The accelerated stock market expansion made this gap even greater in 2017 (Word Inequality Lab 2017). Other studies illustrate the global reach of income inequality. More than 70% of the households in 25 advanced economies experienced declining earnings from 2005 to 2014. Only 2% of households recorded declining incomes in previous decades; between 1993 and 2005, less than 10 million people had declining income while this number surged to 580 million people in the 2005–2014 period (Dobbs et  al. 2016). Thomas Piketty (2014) demonstrates that income convergence in wealthy nations has given way to accelerating, sharp divergence and warns that if the trend continues, it will result in a new version of the exceptionally hierarchical, caste‐like, “rentier society” of old. By the mid‐2010s, an abundance of research, surveys, and public opinion polls reported that large segments of the population were dissatisfied with their economic conditions, social status, and future perspectives (Gilens and Page 2014; Burkhauser et al. 2016; Hardoon et al. 2016). In the latter half of the 2010s, economic conditions for average Americans improved modestly, but wage growth has been slow and



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workers’ share of corporate income has not recovered. For most Americans, improvement of the economy is still a top priority, along with a complex of related “material” concerns (e.g. health care costs, social security, Medicare, education). The majority also deems growing economic inequality to be a major problem, despite the partisan divide over its seriousness and what to do about it. Polling data suggest that only slightly more than one‐third of Americans think the nation is on the right track – a pattern that led to the electoral victory of Barack Obama as well as Trump (Pew Research Center 2017, 2018a; Economic Policy Institute 2018; Real Clear Politics 2018). The financial crisis and increased economic inequality have been driven by the neoliberal policy regime, especially its positions on taxation, deunionization, deregulation, financialization, and securitization. The regime has been shaped by the fusion of great wealth, concentrated political power, and expert legal and wealth management teams that cloth their activities in platitudes about the virtues of capitalism, free markets, and competition (Harrington 2016). However, this well‐ worn trope, music to investor‐class ears, has had little hold over most lower‐ and middle‐income earners. Deployed with ethnoracial provocation (i.e. restoration of white, Christian hegemony), Trump’s exhortations about making “America Great Again” and “draining the swamp” did not invoke market‐liberal shibboleths but were aimed at public sensibilities that something is terribly wrong with neoliberalism, especially its finance sector. In major campaign appearances, Trump asserted repeatedly and loudly that only his executive strong hand could make things right again; he implied that political power, not the free market, was needed to return America to its virtuous ways and rightful global leadership role. His celebratory signing of a record number of executive orders in the first months of his presidency aimed to emphasize his follow‐through on this promise. By contrast, Trump’s compact with wealthy donors and impression management around his Mar‐a‐Lago compatriots likely stressed the old market‐liberal tropes and more lucrative version of neoliberal business as usual. His tax and antiregulatory policies and Wall Street appointments followed through on these aims assertively. However, his surprising ascendance and contradictory poses as populist and finance capitalist manifest an emergent legitimacy crisis of neoliberalism.

Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Brexit: Authoritarian Capitalism on the Rise? The global recession, tighter job markets, and unemployment heightened insecurity for average people. In Europe, the massive flow of refugees and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, related cultural conflicts, and terrorist acts produced a climate of fear and receptive audience for ethnoracial populists. Right‐wing anti‐ immigrant, tribal politics played on these fears and “woke” ethnoracial identity opposed to the other, outsider, or enemy. In addition to Trump and Brexit, the electoral victories of right‐wing populists such as Andrzej Duda (Poland), Sebastian Kurz (Austria), and Viktor Orbán (Hungary) and emergence of others such as Jair Bolosonaro (Brazil), Nigel Farage (United Kingdom), Marine Le Pen (France), Matteo Salvini (Italy), and Geert Wilders (Netherlands) manifest a powerful authoritarian current. Popular strongman and nationalists, such as Vladimir Putin, Recep

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Erdoğ an, Narenda Modi, and Rodrigo Duterte reflect the same trend. Right‐wing populist leaders and their parties have loosened the normative ban on public expression of racist, anti‐Semitic, and other prejudicial attitudes against minorities and on neo‐Fascist and neo‐Nazi affiliation, propaganda, and threats. In Europe, ethnoracial populist parties can be found in almost every country and have usually increased their share of the vote, inspired center‐right parties to move further rightward, and motivated limits on democratic citizenship rights (Milanovic 2016, pp. 204–213). The American alt‐right charge that progressives support the interests of minorities, immigrants, and threatened species, but fail to protect the jobs, incomes, and security of predominantly white communities and openly disrespect white rural, small‐town, and working‐class people. These “identitarians” also decry the contradiction between progressives’ support for minority identity politics and their condemnation as racist white people’s efforts to build racial solidarity and pride. Tea Party supporters’ frequent, emphatic expressions of racial animosity against President Obama and Republican toleration or active support of it paved the way for Trump’s ethnoracial provocations and for his party’s post‐election populist drift.3 Addressing Marine Le Pen’s Front National, former inner‐circle Trump advisor Steve Bannon asserted that history is on the side of enthnoracial nationalism. “Let them call you racists, xenophobes or whatever else, wear these like a medal,” he declared (Willsher 2018). Le Pen family member and Front National politician, Marion Maréchal‐Le Pen, gave an enthusiastically received keynote to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).4 Event organizers made a modest effort to normalize her appearance by declaring that she also embraces market‐ liberal economic policies. British white nationalist Nigel Farage also was warmly received at this meeting (Elliot 2018). Their presence did not deter President Trump from speaking at CPAC. Republican Matt Lewis lamented that “this new populist nationalist Trumpian vibe, it’s no longer a fringe thing. It’s the mainstream of CPAC” (Tharoor 2018). Other Republican moderates have said the same (e.g. Bardella 2018; Elliot 2018). Right‐wing populists claim to provide the alternative to neoliberal globalization, but lack a vision of the new political economy and governance system to replace it. In leadership positions, they often embrace core facets of neoliberal tax and antiregulatory policies and seek multinational corporate investment. Right‐wing populist regimes vary, depending on their people, history, and culture. They are unified, however, in their disregard for liberal democratic institutions and culture. President Trump’s admiration of leaders such as Putin, Dutarte, and Xi does not trouble his tribal base who feel threatened or ignored and who crave a “strongman” to save them from social liberals, reassert white Christian authority, close borders to outsiders, and ensure national sovereignty. His demagogic attacks on the press, erosion of rule of law, disregard for democratic procedure, nepotism, blatant lying, rejection of science‐based and fact‐based policy, and other corrupt practices have been reported daily in the mainstream press. Prominent conservative pundits (e.g. David Frum, David Brooks, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, and George Will) as well as progressives have questioned his “fitness” for office and warned repeatedly that he is a threat to democracy. While resisted through political actions, curtailed by legal challenges, and partially controlled through institutional means, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies have been manifested on the campaign trail and in office (e.g. Cox et  al. 2017;



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Judis 2016; Kellner 2016; Kivisto 2017; Mayer and Tarrow 2018; Mounk 2018; and Stokes 2016).5 Larry Bartels’ (2018) research found that Trump appealed to Republican voters who already were highly receptive to “culturally conservative” views (e.g. favoring patriotism and English speakers and hostility to Muslims, LGBT people, immigrants, and nonbelievers) and agreed on these ideas much more than the oft‐repeated tropes about “limited government,” which appeal to investor‐ and donor‐class Republicans. Bartels reports that very few Trump supporters have defected because of his “racially charged cultural appeals” and “ethnic nationalism” and that more than 25% of Democrats in his sample held similar “culturally conservative” views. Another study found that white working‐class Trump voters were motivated by fears of being culturally displaced (Cox et al. 2017) and another found that white, male, and Christian Trump voters were inspired more by fears of losing group dominance than economic anxiety (Mutz 2018). Smith and Hanley’s (2018) analysis of items included in the 2016 American National Election Study found that white Trump voters did so, above all, because they “shared his prejudices” and because they wanted a domineering, intolerant leader who would “crush evil” and “get rid of the rotten apples who are ruining everything.” Analyzing a number of these types of studies, Thomas B. Edsall (2018) declared that the Trump election “created an authoritarian moment.” Ethnoracial populism justifies and stirs active expression of authoritarian tendencies and consequently undermines democracy. Right‐wing populists oppose free movement of capital, jobs, and especially people across national borders. They defend privileges of dominant religious, ethnic, or racial groups that compose the “real nation” and that fear competition or displacement by “outsiders” and favor a chauvinistic, muscular, patriarchal culture. Ethnoracial populist leaders and intellectuals often have been influenced by Carl Schmitt’s Weimar era, proto‐fascist political philosophy, revived by the late‐twentieth century French New Right and diffused globally online. Schmitt called for militarized nationalism unified by “concrete clarity” about internal and external ethnoracial “enemies,” which he held animates nationalist solidarity and politics. Schmittean alt‐right populists combine progressive sounding criticism of neoliberal capitalism’s eroded community, fragmented public, possessive individualism, debased culture, and damaged ecology with virulent attacks on liberal democracy, egalitarianism, human rights, multiculturalism, and immigration. They believe that ethnoracial nationalism is the only force powerful enough to bind and motivate a nation to resist market‐liberal neutralization of a nation’s politics, sovereignty, and cultural particularity (Schmitt 1996 [1932]; Antonio 2000; de Benoist and Champetier 2012). Similar to the left, today’s right‐wing Schmitteans vilify Thomas L. Friedman’s celebration of the “Golden Straightjacket” or market‐liberal evaporation of political choice and “Americanization‐globalization” or political economic and cultural rule by the “electronic herd” of investors and U.S.‐style consumerism. By contrast to the left, however, these Schmittean ethnoracial populists want an illiberal, inegalitarian political regime. Weimar era, German statist market‐liberals embraced Schmitt’s views about the need for a strong, unified state and held that an “authoritarian competitive order” and “highly stratified society” was needed to escape the Great Depression. Deeply distrustful of democracy, they harmonized their market‐liberal economic views with

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the Nazis, but after the war altered their views to fit German social liberalism (Ptak 2009, pp 111, 118, 126). Right‐wing libertarians also have distrusted democracy because they fear that voters will opt for redistribution and regulation and undermine economic liberty. Hayek (1972 [1944], pp. 70–71) warned against ­making democracy “a fetish” and claimed that autocratic regimes often permit more  “cultural and spiritual freedom” than “some democracies.” Hayek (1967, pp. 160–161) also said that “democratic government may be totalitarian and that authoritarian government may act on liberal principles.” By allowing democratically elected politicians to expand greatly the regulatory and redistributive state, Hayek believed postwar progressive liberalism was becoming “anti‐liberal” and drifting toward social democracy and even totalitarianism. Advising the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship, Hayek helped build and legitimate an authoritarian market‐liberal regime. Other market‐liberals expressed similar skepticism about democracy and supported the Pinochet regime (Fischer 2009; Mirowski 2009). Reacting to the rise of Thatcherism, Stuart Hall, Nico Poulantzas, Bob Jessop, and others speculated about an authoritarian fusion of populism and neoliberalism, stressing race, class, and perceived failures of postwar social democracy. Later critics held that neoliberal states’ “explicit exclusion and marginalization of subordinate social groups” via “­ nominally democratic institutions governments, and parliaments” demonstrate possibility of an “authoritarian neoliberal state” (Bruff 2014, p. 116). Some recent critics suggest the same about President Trump’s fusion of neoliberalism and illiberal populism (e.g. Kivisto 2017, pp. 73–112). The first Western leader to endorse Trump and admirer of Putin and Erdoğ an, populist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is building what he named an “illiberal democracy.” Orbán’s Fidesze Party holds a parliamentary supermajority, which has allowed him to rewrite the constitution and centralize political power and control over civil society institutions. Second in the 2018 election, the Jobbik Party embraces an even more extreme version of authoritarian ethnoracial populism than Fidesze. Orbán is a Christian nationalist who opposes immigration and multiculturalism and cultivates hostility to the Roma, Islam, and Jews. He built a border fence with Serbia to keep out refugees. Orbán rejects liberal individualist society and intervenes in the economy, but his “workfare” state neoliberal policies are harsh on the poor and homeless. Orbán says he aims to make Hungary competitive in the global economy in the manner of Russia, Turkey, Singapore, and China (Tóth 2014; Tremlett and Messing 2015; Kingsley 2018a, b). Republican Party and Tea Party activists fused nativist racial politics with neoliberalism in response to the Obama presidency and paved the way for Trumpian populism (e.g. Lundskow 2012; Ehrenfreund 2016; Kivisto 2017). Given the weakened liberal democracy, plutocratic trend, and absence of left‐leaning countervailing power, the neoliberal legitimation crisis could devolve into an authoritarian version of the same. The Trump election constituted a resounding repudiation of progressive neoliberalism or the Democratic Party’s alliance of left‐leaning supporters of minority rights and new social movements (e.g. stressing “cosmopolitan,” multicultural inclusion and green politics) with higher‐income professionals from the financial sector, high‐tech industry, academe, and movie industry who share progressive cultural and ecological views, but benefit from and support at least passively ­neoliberal regulatory, trade, and tax policies (Fraser (2017)6.



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Trump has done all he can to reverse the resultant Obama‐era progressive ­ olicies with strong support from his base and his Republican colleagues, often p overturning Obama executive orders with his own. Trump’s critics contend that ethnoracial populism is trending toward authoritarian capitalism or neoliberalism sans liberal democratic institutions and culture or severely damaged, ineffective versions of them.

Conclusion: Democracy or Authoritarianism? “Although the risk is real, I do not see any genuine alternative: If we are to regain control of capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy” (Piketty 2014, p. 573). The democratization Piketty (2014, p. 570) urges has no blueprint and its “concrete institutions” must “reinvented again and again.” The neoliberal regime was created to restore stalled postwar economic growth by returning to market‐ liberal policies. Especially within the core US‐led English‐speaking heartland nations, the neoliberal policy regime has been highly resistant to change, not only blunting political opposition but impoverishing political imagination. Hence, Thatcher’s declaration “there is no alternative” and neoliberal convergence of left and right have been persistent realities. However, neoliberalism is plagued by profound contradictions that cannot be resolved within its framework or even within capitalism per se as we have known it. The ethnoracial populist “alternative” arises in this breach. Two intensifying enormous problems that manifest the limits of the capitalist growth imperative and that could generate catastrophic global crises intensify the nascent authoritarian threat. First, as anticipated by Marx, capitalism’s global expansion combined with accelerated rationalization and automation create an ever‐ expanding reserve army of unemployed and desperate masses of super‐marginalized, casual workers in newly industrialized and poor nations and growing underemployment and shrinking, eroding, and increasingly insecure middle classes and working classes in rich ones. Milanovic contends that this trend will grow worse and, despite growing surveillance and control, likely will generate major political instabilities. He holds that rich nations will continue to move toward highly unequal two class societies of very wealthy people and strata that serve them. His argument converges with Piketty’s dystopian vision of a return to immobile, profoundly unequal, rentier society (Piketty 2014; Milanovic 2016, pp. 214–217). Second, neoliberalism’s massive global expansion of capitalism and its hypertrophied growth imperative have generated profound ecological problems that have worldwide implications. Global capitalism is already colliding with the environmental wall – an absolute barrier to exponential growth promised by market‐liberal ideology and its ruling mythology that humans lack the biophysical constraints to growth that limit all other species. Accelerating anthropogenic global forcings (e.g. energy usage, population growth, resource usage, habitat destruction) threaten to end mild Holocene conditions, which have sustained complex civilizations. Consequent global ecological problems have caused scientists to entertain whether a new Anthropocene Epoch has begun in which human activity drives overall ecological change and threatens ecocatastrophe, including a “sixth great extinction” that some scientists say is already underway. The most dangerous, fast‐moving ecological

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threat, climate change has already had major impacts (e.g. destabilization of Greenland and Western Antarctic Ice sheets, global glacier retreat, rising seas, and dangerous storm surges) with only about 1° C. rise in global atmospheric temperatures. Continued carbon burning will likely result in at least 3 or 4° C. rise and certain catastrophe. Some scientists hold irreversible changes have already begun that will produce economic contraction, major food and water crises, flooded coastal cities, and other serious threats to our civilization and to other creatures and life forms with which we share the planet. Currently, the worst impacts have been suffered in poor parts of the world that lack adaptive capacity and that have contributed little or nearly nil to the problems (Hansen et al. 2013). Climate change and other global ecological damages are inextricably entwined with the current regime’s economic inequality and social injustice. Corporate elites and neoliberal policymakers argue that improved technology, accelerated growth, and increased profits are the ultimate means to solve these and other problems. They claim to understand the gravity of these problems and propose a pseudo‐benign version of neoliberalism in which proper corporate behavior becomes the guarantor of economic and social stability as well as ecological sustainability. Continued movement toward plutocracy and ecological catastrophe, however, favor authoritarian capitalism in order to stem the likely sociopolitical chaos and conflict (e.g. Oreskes and Conway 2014). Yet an authoritarian capitalist regime would still face mounting inequality and rapidly escalating climate change, which will undercut its socioeconomic and biophysical foundations and produce conditions for a garrison state until collapse. Neoliberal economism’s imperialist extension of market‐liberal standards into noneconomic domains weakens democratic institutions, procedure, and culture and opens way for authoritarian capitalism. The emerging progressive opposition to ethnoracial populism and authoritarian capitalism provides hope about escaping the current predicament (Bruff 2014, pp. 116, 127). In the United States, a significant portion of younger people seem acutely aware of the need for resistance and change (Pew Research Center 2018b). Perhaps with their support and hopefully resilient democratic institutions, the immediate American threat of resurgent ethnoracial populism and authoritarianism can be thwarted. However, the profound problems accentuated by neoliberalism call for more fundamental change  –  an alternative culturally inclusive, ecologically responsible, egalitarian political economic vision to neoliberalism and capitalism as we have known them and a counterhegemonic bloc to bring it into being is a must to cope with crises already upon us.

Notes 1 We refer to the democratic “post‐capitalist” left, which reject authoritarian state socialism but, similar to social liberals, cannot simply advocate return to their postwar positions (i.e. democratic socialism or social democracy). 2 Postwar Fordism was based on cooperation between the interventionist state, large firms, and national unions. Unions bargained successfully for better working conditions, wages, and benefits, but accepted the basic capitalist organization of production and authority of ownership and manage. 3 Trump supported “birther” claims that questioned Obama’s nationality.



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4 CPAC is a chiefly Republican organization of conservative activists supported by most of its base, leaders, and donors. 5 Max Weber [1919] 1949: 116) warned that “vanity” or “personal self‐intoxication” is an enormously destructive demagogic force in mass democracy. He said, “There is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu‐like braggart with power.” The charismatic powers of the irresponsible demagogue to disrupt rational legal authority and undermine democracy. The United States has means to limit authoritarian tendencies of the president, especially via resistance the courts, civil service employees, and Congress, which have sometimes checked Trump’s most dangerous tendencies. Conversely, the American presidency has extensive executive powers, which can be abused by an officeholder who does not respect rule of law, has advisors, political support, and courts that construe executive power to be almost limitless, and a compliant Congress that does not carry out its constitutional duty to exert oversight on the executive branch. In the case of President Trump, the struggles over these matters are yet resolved. 6 New Democrats advocate a less austere version of neoliberalism favoring a limited redistribution‐regulation state. However, Fraser (2017, p. 2) contends that their progressive neoliberalism “mixed [the] truncated ideal of emancipation and lethal forms of financialization … [and] equated the term emancipation with the rise of a small elite of talented women, minority and gays in the winner‐takes‐all corporate hierarchy instead of with the latter’s abolition.”

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Index

Page references to Figures are followed by the letter ‘f’, while references to Tables are followed by the letter ‘t’. References to Notes are indicated by the page number followed by ‘n’ and the Note number. activism see also social movements digital technology  388–389 Adorno, Theodore  26 adumbrationists 11 affect control theory  70–72 agnosticism, environmental sociology 285–286 AIDs 160–161 Alexander, Jeffrey  29 Archer, Margaret  36 Aristotle 7 artifacts, big data  430–431 Asian Americans  181–182 assimilation and integration  343–348 Atlanta School  4 authoritarian capitalism  477–495 and democracy  489–490 market to social liberalism  478–480 rise of  485–489 Baudrillard, Jean  32 Beck, Ulrich  33 Bhaskar, Roy  36 big data  419–443

see also data; data mining; digital technology anomalies 430–431 artifacts 430–431 confounding 431 defining 419 digital instrumentation  422 digital trace data  421 digitalized/digital life  421–422 excessive 429–430 future trends different data  434 more data  433–434 more generic models  434 standard platforms  434–435 generalizability and representativeness 428–429 ideal user consumption  431–432 making small  426–427 methodological integration  435–436 natural and field experiments  427–428 opportunities 422–428 origins 419 qualitative approaches to  435 reactivity 431

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. Edited by George Ritzer and Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Index 497 research ethics  432–433 vulnerability 428–432 Blau, Peter  23 Blumer, Herbert  25 Bogardus, Emory  7–8 Bourdeau, Pierre  28 Brennan, Teresa  34 Carnegie, Andrew  16, 17 causation 51–54 causal mechanism  53 contextual effects  53–54 surveys 54 change classical sociological theory  5–9 social movements  159, 307–313 and stability, in deviance  132, 136–137 cities 278–280 see also urbanization citizen journalism  389–390 class, education  206–208 classical sociological theory  3–20 and Comte  13–15 continuity and change in evaluating “the classical” 5–9 defining “the classical”  3–5 French mode of classical theorizing  9–11 lasting classical voices  15–19 Scottish contributions  11–13 Clough, Patricia  34 Coleman, James  24 collaborative consumption  367 Collins, Patricia Hill  29 color, people of see also racial/ethnic issues Asian Americans  181–182 black women, mythologizing  183–184 experiential voices  179 “model minority” myth  181 commodity fetishism  16 Comte, Auguste  13–15 conflict see also war and culture  27–28 interpersonal conflicts and harassment  386–387 consumption 358–375 collaborative 367 culture and society  361–362

food 365–366 historical context  358–359 money, cedit and debt  364–365 objects of  362 places and spaces of  363–364 politics of  366–367 and prosumption  367 sharing economy  367–368 subjects of  363 theoretical perspectives  359–361 context causation 53–54 schools and inequality  212–216 Coulthard, Glen Sean  30 credit 364–365 Crenshaw, Kimberlé  29 criminology 141–155 see also deviance breaking of law  146–147 society’s reaction to law breaking  151–153 cultural 137–138 interdisciplinary explanations  150–151 making of law  142–146 multidisciplinary approaches  148–149 political criminals treated as heroes  134–135 single‐factor reductionism  147 systemic reductionism  147–148 Critical Sexualities Studies (CSS)  156–173 complex global sexualities in the new millennium 162–169 and contested world sexual cultures 167 critical global sexualities  167–169 digital sexualities  164–165 neoliberal global market strategies  165–166 emergence 158–162 global sexualities and contested world sexual cultures  167 HIV/AIDs 160–161 obdurate features  156–158 queer theory  160–161 sexual rights to global intimate citizenship  161–162 social movements and change  159 social scripting and constructivism  158–159

498 Index culturalizing sociology  104–123 and cultural sociology  108–113 culturalizing sociology theory  113–118 history 104–108 culture and conflict  27–28 contested world sexual cultures  167 participatory 381–383 Darwin, C.G.  11 Darwin, Charles  11 data see also digital technology behavioural 422–424 big data see big data data mining see data mining digital trace  421 nowcasting 424 social systems  425–426 data mining  388 de Beauvoir, Simone  27 debt and credit  364–365 as power  452–455 as risk  449–451 as sin  446–448 and social change  455–457 sociology of  444–459 decolonial feminisms  407–408 DeLanda, Manuel  35 Deleuze, Gilles  35 democracy 489–490 developing countries, urbanization  277–278 deviance 124–140 see also criminology change and stability  132, 136–137 contemporary debates  126–128 defining 124–126 Durkheim 128–129 moral entrepreneurship  130 moral panics  131–132 and politics  132–133 criminals treated as heroes  134–135 judging deviants and political trials  133–134 political criminals  134–135 political deviance versus political justice 133

power and morality in regular deviance  135–136 social control  130 digital technology  377–396 being plugged in  391–392 citizen journalism  389–390 data mining  388 features of mediated digital environments 383–387 interpersonal conflicts and harassment 386–387 place and presence  383–384 self‐expression 384 trust and social support  385–386 watching and being watched  384–385 inaccuracy and fake news  387–388 key issues and impacts  387–391 online surveillance  388 participatory culture, growth  381–383 social media and politics  390–391 social organization, movements and activism 388–389 understanding “social”  380–381 understanding technology  378–379 discrimination, medicine and health 262–263 Du Bois, W.E.B.  4, 21 Durkheim, E.  3–4, 12 Durkheim, Emile  12, 15, 18, 24, 128–129 on suicide  10 Edin, Kathryn  62–63 education see also education digital divide/capital  215–216 emerging issues  215–216 formal schooling learning outside  214–215 prior to  212–213 higher education, recent sociological insights 216–217 organization of schools  210–211 policy developments, school choice and organization 208–211 race, class and goods  206–208 recent trends  206–208 and religion  235–237 school choice  209–210 schools and inequality  212–216

Index 499 standards‐based reform era  208–209 summers in between school years  213–214 teacher and principal relationships  210–211 education, sociology of  206–223 ego‐nets 92 Emirbayer, Mustafa  33 Engels, Friedrich  10, 16 environment 283–300 agnosticism 285–286 anthropogenic causes of problems  286–289 constructivism 284–285 social impacts of problems  289–290 solutions 291–293 ethics, research, big data  432–433 ethnographic research  62 existentialism 27 fake news  387–388 families 190–205 changes in daily lives  195–199 future of  199–201 key changes in family patterns  191–195 marriage and childrearing  238–239 new trends  201 and religion  238–239 work‐family intersections  195 Fanon, Frantz  30 feminist theory  398–416 expanding field  413 feelings 410–412 gender, feminist theories  402–405 humanism, feminism following  412–413 intersectionality 405–407 second‐wave feminisms  398–402 and transgender theory  408–410 transnational and decolonial feminisms  407–408 field experiments  427–428 France classical sociological theory  9–11 structuralism 22 Frankfurt School  26 functionalism, contemporary social theory 24 Garfinkel, Harold  25–26, 35 gender factors education 206–208 feminist theory  402–405

generalization 47–51 Giddens, Anthony  29 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins  21 Goffman, Erving  21, 31 Gorski, Philip  36 grand theory  22 Guattari, Felix  35 Halfpenny, P.  23 harassment, and digital technology  386–387 Haraway, Donna  35 health lifestyles 258–259 and medicine  250–266 and religion  234–235 heterosexuality, compulsory  402–405 higher education  216–217 HIV/AIDs 160–161 Homans, George  23 Honneth, Axel  30 Horkheimer, Max  26 humanism, feminism following  412–413 Hutcheson, Francis  11 Huxley, Aldous  7 hypothetico‐deductive method  23 identity and social categories  69–86 affect control theory  70–72 affective commitment  81 empirical tests of the control theories  73–75 expectation states theory as identity theory 78–79 future potential for linkage  81–82 group practices and development of meaning 78–81 group processes  81 identity theory  72–73 immigration, impact on  348–349 meaning and emotion in social interaction 70–73 multiple identities  75–76 social exchange  80–81 social structural influences on meaning 76–77 status value theory  80 trust 81

500 Index immigration 340–357 assimilation and integration  343–348 changes in immigrant receiving societies  351–352 control 349–351 implications on race relations and identity  348–349 inclusion and exclusion mechanisms 349–351 integration of immigrants  346–348 major theoretical paradigms  343–345 origins 342–343 transnationalism 345–346 undocumented 350–351 interdisciplinary explanations, criminology  150–151 intersectionality contemporary social theory  29–30 feminist theory  405–407 interviews 62 Journal of Classical Sociology 3 justice, political  133 Knorr‐Cetina, Karen  35 Latour, Bruno  35 law breaking 146–147 society’s reaction to  151–153 making 142–146 liberalism see also neoliberalism market to social  478–480 Liebow, Elliot  62, 63 life‐course theory  263 Malthus, Thomas  7 Marshall, T.H.  24 Martineau, Harriet  14 Marx, Karl  3, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16 Massumi, Brian  34 Mead, George Herbert  25 measurement see also quantitative research quantification of qualitative data  46 religion, influence on individuals  231–234 social context  46

theory 46 translation 47 medicine and health  250–266 future directions  263–264 health lifestyles  258–259 life‐course theory  263 medicalization 257–258 neighborhood disadvantage  260 Parsons and role of theory  251–253 post‐Parsons era (1952–1969)  253–254 perceived discrimination  262–263 period of maturity (1970–2000)  254–255 postmodernism 256–257 present, the (2000–2020)  255–263 sickness and mortality, socioeconomic status issues  260–261 social capital  259 social networks  262 mega‐cities and global cities  278–280 megalopolis 275 Merton, Robert  25 Mill, John Stuart  14 mixed‐methods research  61–62 “model minority” myth  181 moral entrepreneurship  130 moral panics  131–132 More, Thomas  7 Morton, Timothy  33 multidisciplinary approaches, criminology  148–149 multinucleated metropolitan regime  275, 276 natural experiments  427–428 neoliberalism global market strategies, in CSS  165–166 legitimation crisis  482–485 market fundamentalism  480–482 network analysis  87–103 closeness 99 cohesion 94–97 components 99 ego‐nets 92 exogenous subgroups  100 medicine and health  262 network properties and measures  93–100 paths 98–99 statistical and mixed method approaches 100–101

Index 501 structural holes  97–98 two‐mode networks  92–93 whole networks  91–92 Ogburn, William  58, 59 online surveillance  388 Pareto, Vilfredo  24 Park, Robert  58, 59 Parsons, Talcott  6, 23, 24, 27 and role of theory in medicine and health  251–253 post‐Parsons era (1952–1969)  253–254 participatory culture, growth  381–383 Plato 7 politics of consumption  366–367 political criminals  134–135 political deviance, versus political justice 133 political integration of immigrants 346–348 political trials  133–134 and social media  390–391 Popper, Karl  23 positivism, contemporary social theory  23, 24 postmodernism contemporary social theory  22, 30–32 defeatism 36 medicine and health  256–257 and qualitative research  59 poststructuralism, contemporary social theory  30, 31 prosumption 367 qualitative research  57–65 ethnographic interviewing  62 logic of inference  59–60 and postmodernism  59 and quantitative research  60–61 quantitative research  39.56 causation 51–54 generalization 47–51 goals and strategies  41 history and philosophy  39–41 indexes 45 logic of inference  59–60 measurement 43–47

new directions causation 53–54 generalization 50–51 measurement 45–47 problems causation 51–52 generalization 47–48 measurement 44 and qualitative research  60–61 research goals and strategies  41–43 single questions  44–45 solutions causation 52 generalization 48–50 measurement 44–45 queer theory  160–161 racial/ethnic issues  174–189 see also racism color, people of Asian Americans  181–182 black women, mythologizing  183–184 experiential voices  179 “model minority” myth  181 see also racial/ethnic issues colorblindness 179 contemporary critical race scholarship 179–184 critical analysis of mainstream ethnicity theories 175–179 crticial theoretical approach to race 177–178 education 206–208 hegemonic ideology, challenging  179 immigration, impact on  348–349 “model minority” myth  181 postraciality 179 resistance 184–186 whites ordinary and elite  178–179 white racism, contemporary forms 180–181 racism see also racial/ethnic issues frontstage and backstage  180–181 institutional and systemic  177–178 white, contemporary forms  180–181 realism, contemporary social theory  32–36

502 Index reductionism single‐factor 147 systemic 147–148 religion 224–249 altruism and helping behavior  237 crime and delinquency  237–238 economic outcomes  239 and education  235–237 family, marriage and childrearing  238–239 globalizing 225–229 and health  234–235 influence on individuals  231–239 improving measures and methods  231–234 micro‐led secularization, rethinking  229–230 social movements  230–231 tolerance and prejudice  239 resistance, racial/ethnic issues  184–186 response rates, generalization  50 Saint‐Simon, Henri  9, 10 Sartre, Jean Paul  27 Saussure, Ferdinand de  27 schools see also education choice 209–210 formal schooling learning outside  214–215 prior to  212–213 inequality in context  212–216 organization 210–211 standards‐based reform era  208–209 summers in between school years  213–214 teacher and principal relationships  210–211 Scotland, classical sociological theory  11–13 sexualities, global see also Critical Sexualities Studies (CSS) and contested world sexual cultures  167 critical 167–169 digital 164–165 neoliberal global market  165–166 in new millennium  162–169 sharing economy  367–368 Simmel, Georg  4, 15, 18

Smith, Adam  12–13 Smith, Christian  36 Smith, Dorothy E.  28 social class see class social constructivism environmental sociology  284–285 and social scripting  158–159 social control  130 social media  390–391 social movements  301–318 and change  159 defining 302–304 digital technology  388–389 function 304–307 and religion  230–231 social change, seeking  307–313 strategic practices  307–313 social network analysis see network analysis social scripting, and social constructivism  158–159 social theory, contemporary  21–38 culture and conflict  27–28 functionalism 24 intersectionality theory  29–30 positivism  23, 24 postmodernism  22, 30–32 poststructuralism  30, 31 realism 32–36 sociologie (Comte)  13–15 sociology of consumption see consumption sociology of religion see religion sociology of sport see sport, sociology of sociology of the environment see environment Sorokin, Pitirim  11 Spencer, Herbert  15, 16–17 sport, sociology of  460–476 at 50th year of publication  467–469 integrated future for ongoing work 469–472 origins 461–464 public intellectuals and active scholars  472 in the UK  465–467 in US/North America  464–465 Stack, Carol  63–64 statistical inference, generalization  50 Steinmetz, G.  22 Stones, Rob  36 structuralism  22, 27

Index 503 surveillance, online  388 surveys, causation  54 systematic reviews, generalization  51 Taylor, Charles  29 technology see digital technology Thomas, W. I.  57 transgender theory  408–410 see also Critical Sexualities Studies (CSS); feminist theory; sexualities, global transnationalism 345–346 and feminism  407–408 trials, political  133–134 United States, positivism  22 urbanization 267–282 contemporary trends  278–280 crisis‐driven 276–277 in less‐developed countries  277–278 mega‐cities and global cities  278–280 megalopolis 275 multinucleated metropolitan regime  275, 276

and suburbanization  272–275 theories 268–272 Wallerstein, Immanuel  27–28 war 319–339 see also conflict building of wars  330–332 conquest 328–329 genocide 329–330 if particular to humans  320–321 lived experience  323–324 progress 326–328 rationale for  322–323 universality of  321–322 unseen twenty‐first century global war  332–335 warriors 324–326 Washington, Booker T.  5 Weber, Max  4, 15, 18, 24 whites ordinary and elite  178–179 racism, contemporary forms  180–181 women, black, mythologizing  183–184