Explaining Social Processes

Charles Tilly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259886
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Built upon decades of experience at the frontiers of history and social science, Charles Tilly's newest book offers innovative methods and approaches that are applicable in a wide range of disciplines: politics, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, and more. The book covers approaches to analysis ranging from interpersonal exchanges to world-historical changes-economic, political, and social. He shows how a thoroughgoing relational account of social processes, coupled with the careful identification of causal mechanisms, illuminates variation and change in the ways people live at the small scale and the large.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

METHOD AND EXPLANATION

Back in the Dark Ages more than half a century ago, I was a graduate student at Harvard in the composite field called Social Relations. In those distant days, Method meant statistical analysis, and Explanation meant one of three things: 1) location of a phenomenon within some large social structure (at the limit of a society or civilization), 2) discovery of strong correlations between two variables, or (if you were lucky) 3) identification of necessary and sufficient conditions for some important phenomenon. I still retain a vivid image of how the empirical wizard Samuel Stouffer taught us youngsters method and explanation. Imagine a dingy basement room containing a counter-sorter: a machine with an input tray for Hollerith cards (aka IBM cards) at one end, and a dozen trays among which the cards would sort when the operator pushed a button. Stouffer stood before the counter-sorter with a pack of cards in his hand, ash dangling precariously from the eternal cigarette between his lips, and muttered to us, “OK, now let’s try breaking on religion.”

Here was the idea: By means of holes punched in designated columns, each card encoded the responses of a single individual to a national survey on civil liberties. If the punches in the column for religion caused the cards to sort very unevenly on another column recording attitudes toward civil liberties, the uneven distribution told us that we were on our way to discovering that a respondent’s religion caused, at least in part, his or her attitudes toward civil liberties. Of course we would have to run the cards through the machine again to control for such possibly confounding variables as gender, class, and region. Still, a David Hume, exhumed, might have smiled as we followed a simple method in a search for constant conjunction, and called it explanation. Later I learned to follow the same logic on a wired tabulator (I even learned to wire it) and then on a mainframe computer (I even learned to program it, if not very expertly), but the logic long remained the same.

Yet, while still a graduate student I also encountered historical analysis and realized that the search for constant conjunction and correlation had two serious defects: it ignored transformative processes and it promoted premature simplification. My own research concerned responses to the Revolution of 1789–1794 in rural France (Tilly 1964). Once I entered French archives and left textbook schemes behind, I had no choice but to analyze transformative processes and to keep a grip on complexity at least until I could see what features of those processes required explanation.

Explaining variable rural responses to the Revolution, it turned out, required close attention to dynamic processes: extraction, mobilization, repression, and polarization. The conventional simplification—traditional peasants versus modernizing urbanites—completely obscured the changing alignments that occurred between 1789 and 1794. It fostered a premature search for the presumably unchanging fundamental motives of the major parties in the rural revolution (Tilly 1961, 1963). I never forgot the lesson.

Although by no means an intellectual autobiography, this book displays the lifelong impact of that early encounter with complex historical processes. In reviewing my own work as a background for producing the book, I was surprised to discover that about a quarter of the roughly 700 scholarly items I have ever published deal primarily with method and explanation. That happened, I now see, because my peculiar situation at the edge of history and social science meant that people on one side or the other of the boundary kept asking me to interpret the mysterious ways of researchers across the boundary from them (see, e.g., Landes and Tilly 1971, Tilly 1981, 1985, 1997a).

History matters to social science because history matters to social processes: when and where a social process unfolds affects how it unfolds. All social processes incorporate locally available cultural materials such as language, social categories, and locally shared beliefs. Processes therefore vary as a function of historically determined local cultural accumulations. Even if urbanization has universal properties, for example, how cities grow and gain importance in any particular setting depends significantly on earlier urban experience in the same setting. Again, once a process (e.g., immigration) has occurred and acquired a name, both the name and one or more representations of the process become available as signals, models, or threats for later actors. National authorities, for instance, often try to stave off what they see as the evil consequences of previous migration waves by restricting the current wave (Zolberg 2006). In these and other ways, what has happened in the past shapes what happens now.

This collection of papers presents tentative conclusions from a lifetime effort to develop methods and explanations suitable for complex social processes and to place them in appropriate historical perspectives. Suitable methods and explanations need not be complex themselves, but they must somehow capture the ebb and flow of dynamic social interactions. As chapter 3 (“Observations of Social Processes and their Formal Representations”) explains in detail, methods and explanations usually work better if they involve formal representation of the elements within the processes under study—not just convincing narratives, but explicit matching of concepts and observations with the portions of the processes that require explanation. Many of the book’s chapters undertake just that sort of matching.

The book inevitably draws disproportionately on the social processes I have studied most closely: revolution, contentious politics, state formation, migration, urbanization, generation of inequality, democratization, capitalist transformation, and population change. As a result, it has more to say about the large scale than the small scale, more about collective than individual experience, more about Europe and America than elsewhere, more about the last few hundred years of human history than before. Nevertheless, I am confident that its general approaches to method and explanation apply well outside its empirical range.

As for methods, I have occasionally done sample surveys, intensive interviews, streetcorner observations, and analyses of statistics collected by public agencies. But the bulk of my systematic empirical work has consisted of constructing uniform event catalogs from published or archival sources, then analyzing connections, sequences, and settings over substantial numbers of events. (This book’s chapter 4—“Event Catalogs as Theories”—lays out the logic of such a method.) Construction of event catalogs involves high-risk adventure; catalogs absorb a great deal of preliminary effort, and only when the catalog becomes extensive does an analyst know whether it reveals any patterns worth the investment of energy it entails. Still it offers important compensations: the collection of data event by event absorbs an investigator in the richness of the phenomenon under investigation from the start. When the inquiry goes well, furthermore, it provides indications of cause and effect that even participants in the events could hardly grasp.

In what follows, however, you will not plod through a manual for construction of event catalogs. Nor will you learn much about specific techniques for collection, measurement, or analysis of evidence concerning social processes. Instead, the book deals much more generally with the acquisition of reliable knowledge concerning social processes. The acquisition of reliable knowledge requires choices in three fundamental areas: epistemology, ontology, and logics of explanation. Let us look at each of them in turn.

Epistemology

Smart analysts avoid two opposite extremes: naïve inductivism and radical subjectivism. At one extreme, debris of meaningless observations, however glittering. At the other, no means of observing the world, much less of comparing objects in it. At either extreme, no reliable systematic knowledge and therefore no possible social science. At the inductive extreme, we face the call for nothing but the facts. Yet, as a generation of philosophers has established, the situation of discovery always shapes what observers and analysts recognize as facts, not to mention the significance of one fact or another.

At the subjective extreme, no one can acquire reliable knowledge of anything but her own consciousness—regardless of whether real phenomena actually exist outside the range of her senses. Before sinking into the subjectivist swamp, however, sentient humans always have the option of forming hypotheses about what lies outside them, then checking those hypotheses by such means as kicking walls to see if it hurts or insulting other people to see whether they kick back.

In an age of postmodern skepticism any such assertion readily gives rise to the riposte “But it’s all a social construction.” Race, class, gender, religion, and similar categories, goes the argument, are all illusions resulting from mutual persuasion (Jung 2006). At the subjectivist extreme, the position again denies the possibility of reliable knowledge on one of two grounds: 1) the already familiar claim that no one can leap the boundaries of individual awareness or 2) the less familiar, but ultimately more threatening, claim that all knowledge resides within particular cultures and languages and is therefore at best comparable within an epistemic community. If either position holds, a transcultural social science becomes impossible.

To the extreme positions, this book replies, “Let’s see whether we can identify and verify unexpected regularities that cross the boundaries of individuals and cultures.” To the more general argument of social construction, it responds instead, “Yes, it’s social construction all the way down. Social interaction generates what people experience as race, class, gender, or religion. The relevant conventions vary across periods, places, and population. So let’s see how social construction works, then build systematic knowledge of social construction into superior analyses of social processes” (Tilly 2005a).

Fortunately, many intermediate epistemological positions exist. In an argument that should appeal to social scientists, philosopher Louise Antony has argued for truth as relative correspondence between a social environment and the competing theories adopted by different groups of analysts:

So let it be supposed that scientists’ commitment to their theories is accounted for, in causal/historical terms, by a variety of factors, including non-rational, or even irrational factors like loyalty to colleagues or desire for fame and fortune. And let it be supposed, furthermore, that some biasing factors are ubiquitous and ineliminable. If [Thomas] Kuhn and [John Stuart] Mill are right, the hope that theories that result from these unholy mixes of motivations will approximate truth, lies in the constitution of the social environment. Objectivity, in other words, is not secured by the scrupulousness of individual scientists, but rather by the effects of competition among the ideas of contending groups of theorists. (Antony 2006: 69)

No social scientist can declare flatly, “I saw it, so what I say is true.” But it is perfectly feasible to say that a theory conforms more closely to what we can jointly observe of the social environment than the next best available approximation. In such a view, relative truth is possible, but always remains subject to revision as a better approximation comes along. That position informs the essays in this volume. “Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis” (chapter 10) deals most fully with epistemological problems.

Ontology

In this volume’s essays, ontology occupies a far larger place than epistemology. The greater emphasis on ontology results from my concern that social analysts frequently arrive at false conclusions by assuming the existence of fundamental entities such as social systems without doing the work required to establish the presence of those entities. (The critique of the great historical sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt’s work on civilizations and societies in chapter 5, “Iron City Blues,” takes Eisenstadt to task for just such assumptions.)

Within social science, major ontological choices concern the sorts of social entities whose coherent existence analysts can reasonably assume. Major alternatives include methodological individualism, phenomenological individualism, holism, and relational realism. Methodological individualism insists on decision-making human individuals as the basic or unique social reality. It not only focuses on persons, one at a time, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Concepts and Observations
• Part III. Explanations and Comparisons
• Part IV: Historical Social Analysis
• Part V. Conclusion
• Index
• About the Author