Analytical Sociology

Actions and Networks

Gianluca Manzo

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781119940388
• eBook ISBN: 9781118762738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Demonstrates the power of the theoretical framework of analytical sociology in
explaining a large array of social phenomena

Analytical Sociology: Actions and Networks presents the most advanced theoretical discussion of analytical sociology, along with a unique set of examples on mechanism-
based sociology. Leading scholars apply the theoretical principles of analytical sociology
to understand how puzzling social and historical phenomena including crime, lynching,
witch-hunts, tax behaviours, Web-based social movement and communication,
restaurant reputation, job search and careers, social network homophily and instability, cooperation and trust are brought about by complex, multi-layered social mechanisms.  The analyses presented in this book rely on a wide range of methods which include qualitative observations, advanced statistical techniques, complex network tools, refined simulation methods and creative experimental protocols.
This book ultimately demonstrates that sociology, like any other science, is at its best
when it dissects the mechanisms at work by means of rigorous model building and testing.        

Analytical Sociology:

• Provides the most complete and up-to-date theoretical treatment of analytical sociology.
• Looks at a wide range of complex social phenomena within a single and unitary theoretical framework.
• Explores a variety of advanced methods to build and test theoretical models.
• Examines how both computational modelling and experiments can be used
to study the complex relation between norms, networks and social actions.
• Brings together research from leading global experts in the field in order to
present a unique set of examples on mechanism-based sociology.

Advanced graduate students and researchers working in sociology, methodology of social sciences, statistics, social networks analysis and computer simulation will benefit from this book.

 

Editor's Introduction to Chapter 1

The computer is even more revolutionary as an idea, than it is as a practical device that alters society – and we all know how much it has changed our lives. Why do I say this? Well, the computer changes epistemology, it changes the meaning of “to understand”. To me, you understand something only if you can program it. (You, not someone else!) Otherwise you don't really understand it, you only think you understand it.

(Gregory Chaitin 2006 [2005] Meta Math! The Quest for Omega, Vintage Books, p. xiii)

As the book's subtitle suggests, Hedström's Dissecting the Social had the fundamental goal of clarifying the theoretical and methodological principles underlying the research program of analytical sociology. Despite Hedström's admirable effort, many observers' reactions to analytical sociology over the last 10 years suggest that the intellectual project behind analytical sociology is still often misunderstood. Although the interest in analytical sociology is growing rapidly, criticisms are also recurrent. In this chapter I start with the idea that the current internal heterogeneity of analytical sociology and the complexity of its theoretical and methodological proposals help explain both its success and the criticisms that it receives. I then take these criticisms seriously and let them guide me in an attempt to remedy the most recurrent misunderstandings of analytical sociology's principles. To this end, I shall defend a specific understanding of analytical sociology as a set of principles defining a research program in the sense of Lakatos. The essay discusses each of these principles in detail, as well as their interdependence. It argues that the interdependence among the principles is the fundamental feature of analytical sociology's distinctiveness within contemporary sociology. The argument is that this interdependence arises from a specific understanding of the concept of mechanism. According to this understanding, a mechanism-based explanation amounts to a reverse engineering operation: an observation is explained only when it can be recreated. Once this is posited, it follows that some methods are more appropriate than others for designing models of mechanisms (i.e., “generative models”) and studying their high-level consequences. The chapter explains the basic generic elements composing generative models and why the technical foundations of agent-based computational modeling put this method at the core of analytical sociology. The chapter clarifies that accomplishment of this research program depends on a clear division of labor among quantitative and qualitative scholars, formal modelers, and experimentalists. When all these elements are brought together, analytical sociology clearly stands apart as an empirically oriented, experimentally and computationally based, macro-sociology with clearly explicated and empirically grounded dynamic micro- and network-level foundations. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Analytical Sociology: Actions and Networks should be read as a suite of variations on a common theme, this theme being the kind of analytical sociology discussed in this chapter. The book's aim is to accumulate elements that may foster the further development of this kind of analytical sociology. Analytical Sociology: Actions and Networks is not intended to be about the past or the present of analytical sociology: it points to (one of) its possible future(s).

1
Data, Generative Models, and Mechanisms: More on the Principles of Analytical Sociology

Gianluca Manzo

GEMASS, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and University of Paris–Sorbonne, France

1.1 Introduction

The contemporary meaning of the term “analytical sociology” started to circulate informally through European academic space in the mid-1990s (see Manzo, 2010: 138). Still absent from the seminal collection of essays by Hedström and Swedberg (1998a) on social mechanisms, the expression “analytical sociology” officially entered the sociological vocabulary with Hedström's Dissecting the Social (Hedström, 2005) to denote the sociological perspective that seeks systematically to formulate and empirically test micro-founded, mechanism-based explanations of complex macro-level patterns and dynamics.

Despite the considerable efforts at theoretical clarification made by Hedström (2005), and despite the conceptual richness of the essays subsequently collected by Hedström and Bearman (2009a) and by Demeulenaere (2011a), doubts have been raised concerning the need for analytical sociology and its originality. Qualitative-oriented symbolic interactionists (see Sawyer, 2007; 2011), pragmatists (see Abbott, 2007a; Gross, 2009), cultural sociologists (Lizardo, 2012; Santoro, 2012), rational-choice theorists (Opp, 2007; 2013a), as well as philosophers of social sciences like Bunge (2007) or Little (2012a), have all criticized analytical sociology's understanding of mechanism-based thinking as based on narrow and unoriginal theoretical foundations.

This is an interesting puzzle for (historically oriented) sociologists of knowledge. Indeed, when one considers the arguments brought against analytical sociology (see, in particular, Lizardo, 2012), it seems as if some authoritative scholars have artfully constructed an unoriginal sociological approach with an uncanny ability to mobilize a large stock of institutional and cognitive resources and to attract a considerable amount of attention, including that of scholars who feel it necessary to attack this new intellectual construct and denounce its emptiness, thereby opening the eyes of its blind followers.

At first glance, this puzzle can be resolved by positing that both the construction of analytical sociology and the critical reactions against it simply result from a struggle for academic identity in which false problems and transitory novelties arise because actors intentionally emphasize minor points while ignoring the fundamental ones. I prefer to take seriously, and believe in the intellectual honesty of, both the advocates and critics of analytical sociology. It well may be that the diversity and complexity of the cognitive content of analytical sociology explain both the attention received by the approach and the objections brought against it.

First, there are diverse understandings as to the purpose of analytical sociology. Some maintain that the task of analytical sociology is to clarify what a good sociological explanation is in general, thus endorsing a strong normative stance which ultimately decrees what is scientific and what is not (see Demeulenaere, 2011b: 1). This position (with reason) irritates some observers (see Little, 2012a, and, partly, Gross, 2013). Others reject this imperialistic attitude and claim that analytical sociology “only provides a ‘syntax’ for explanation: that is to say, a set of rules on how hypotheses about mechanisms underlying the regularities of social life can be theoretically designed and empirically tested” (see Manzo, 2010: 162; see also Hedström and Ylikoski, this volume) without implying that those who do not conform with this “syntax” are ipso facto mistaken. Even more liberally, others claim that analytical sociology is only one of the possible ways to conduct “good” sociology, thus implying that the quest for mechanism-based explanations is not necessarily to be considered the priority (see Bearman, 2012).

Analytical sociology is also diverse with respect to some fundamental theoretical and methodological choices. Not all advocates of analytical sociology make the same assessment of the role that rational choice theory should play in model building (see Hedström and Ylikoski, this volume; Manzo, 2013b). From a methodological point of view, some of them distrust quantification and formalization (see Boudon, 2012; Elster, 2007; 2009a), whereas others consider the formal modeling of a mechanism to be a crucial research step (see Hedström and Bearman, 2009b; Hedström, 2005: Ch. 6; Manzo, 2012a).

This diversity has an advantage. Different scholars with different theoretical and methodological orientations can become interested and involved in analytical sociology. This is the success part of the story. The advantage comes with a cost, however. The heterogeneity of analytical sociology dilutes and obscures the perception of its originality. This facilitates the task of skeptical observers.

The complexity of the cognitive content of analytical sociology is likely to generate a similar twofold effect on its reception. From its very beginning, in fact, this intellectual movement has relied on a multi-dimensional combination of conceptual, epistemological, ontological, and methodological elements (see Manzo, 2010). As the topics covered by Hedström's Dissecting the Social show, analytical sociology requires us to reflect at the same time on the principles of scientific explanation, the meaning of methodological individualism, the content of the theory of action, the role of social networks, the problem of the micro–macro transition, and the advantages and shortcomings of statistical methods and formal modeling for the empirical testing of sociological theories.

These are difficult questions that bear upon some of the most fundamental aspects of social inquiry. They have long occupied philosophers of social sciences and social scientists. It is therefore not surprising that a large number of scholars have become interested in analytical sociology. This approach is seen by many as a new intellectual space in which old questions can be again addressed and hopefully developed further. At the same time, given the fundamental importance of these questions, the answers proposed by analytical sociology are likely to provoke controversies. This explains the (strong) critical reactions against the approach: in particular against some of its crucial assertions on methodological individualism and rational-choice theory (see Little, 2012a; Opp, 2013a).

The complexity of the analytical sociology research program also helps explain the criticism that it lacks originality. For assessment of analytical sociology's novelty requires the effort to consider the entire set of questions addressed and the coherence of the entire set of replies provided. What matters is the overall picture. Many of the theoretical and methodological proposals of analytical sociology have deep roots in sociology, and several areas of contemporary sociology also focus on some of them. However, the originality of analytical sociology stems from its integration of these elements into a unitary ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley Series Incomputational and Quantitative Social Science
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• About the Editor
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Editor's Introduction to Chapter 1
• Chapter 1: Data, Generative Models, and Mechanisms: More on the Principles of Analytical Sociology
• Part I: Actions
• Part II: Networks
• Index
• End User License Agreement