Theory for the Working Sociologist

Fabio Rojas

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780231543699
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Theory for the Working Sociologist makes social theory easy to understand by revealing sociology's hidden playbook. Fabio Rojas argues that sociologists use four different theoretical "moves" when they try to explain the social world: how groups defend their status, how people strategically pursue their goals, how values and institutions support each other, and how people create their social reality. Rojas uses famous sociological studies to illustrate these four types of theory and show how students and researchers may apply them to their interests. The guiding light of the book is the concept of the "social mechanism," which clearly and succinctly links causes and effects in social life.

Drawing on dozens of empirical studies that define modern sociology and focusing on the nuts and bolts of social explanation, Rojas reveals how areas of study within the field of sociology that at first glance seem dissimilar are, in fact, linked by shared theoretical underpinnings. In doing so, he elucidates classical and contemporary theory, and connects both to essential sociological findings made throughout the history of the field. Aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, journalists, and interested general readers who want a more formal way to understand social life, Theory for the Working Sociologist presents the underlying themes of sociological thought using contemporary research and plain language.

1

WHAT COUNTS AS SOCIAL THEORY FOR THIS BOOK?

SHOW me a thousand Americans, and I’ll show you a thousand “educational outcomes.” Of these Americans, 871 completed high school, and 299 of these high school graduates earned a college degree.¹ Faced with these facts, most people would ask a rather obvious question: Why do some people complete college, but others struggle, often unsuccessfully, to earn a high school diploma? Many things might explain why a person completes college. A person with low intelligence will have a tough time completing school. Perhaps it’s a matter of motivation. Some people just find it difficult to sit through algebra lectures.

Psychological factors such as cognitive ability and ambition matter a great deal, but sociologists have a special interest in social context. They want to know how a person’s social environment affects his or her future. If a person has enough intelligence to perform schoolwork, how does his or her social environment enable or undermine the ability to succeed in school? Sociologists offer a number of answers. For example, it is thought that some parents, especially those who are already well educated or wealthy, help their children by reading to them. The intuition is that educated and wealthy parents are more likely or more able than poor parents to give their children the academic skills needed to succeed in school.² Other sociologists have argued that wealthier parents endow their children with “cultural capital”—the social resources, such as knowledge or personal style, that help achieve economic success. Children with high cultural capital, for example, might have more knowledge of French or art. These parents teach kids how to eat with the right fork, so to speak.³

Step back and ask what these two explanations have in common and what makes them sociological as opposed to psychological (e.g., high IQ leads to school success). The transmission of academic skills and cultural capital are tied to wealth and privilege. Privileged young people share a family environment that reflects “social class.” The more general principle is straightforward. Well-off people enjoy high status within society, and they do their best to ensure that their children continue to enjoy the benefits of high status. These efforts may be conscious, via private schools, or they may be more indirect, such as encouraging children to speak the right way at public school. Social class isn’t the only way that sociologists explain educational outcomes such as college completion, but it serves as a classic example of sociological argument: a certain group of people (the wealthy) mobilizes its resources (money, skills) to ensure a future outcome (children who continue to be wealthy).

Let’s consider another example—poverty policy. It is very common for governments to provide financial support to low-income individuals. Observers normally view financial support for the poor to be a clear benefit, a political victory for the poor. However, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argue in Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (1971), a highly cited book on poverty policy, that public-welfare programs have placated the poor and reinforced their position. These outcomes often occurred unintentionally. Rules for receipt of cash benefits often required that recipients do things that would make it difficult for them to climb out of poverty, such as not allowing women to receive benefits if they reside with able-bodied men. Piven and Cloward’s bolder claim is that policy makers used public welfare as a tool to build a new majority for the Democratic Party in the 1950s and 1960s. The argument, roughly speaking, is that blacks who migrated from the South to the North’s industrial centers became a key voting block. They were brought into the Democratic Party with a series of poverty-relief programs, administered by workers closely associated with that party.

Piven and Cloward’s controversial thesis is often seen as a fascinating example of class analysis. Poor people have an interest in programs that give them material benefits. They may also have an interest in challenging the state and demanding more wide-scale reform. Wealthier people have opposing interests. Expanded social benefits and political reforms might be financed by increased taxes on their income and the massive redistribution of their wealth. In Piven and Cloward’s view, mobilizing a few resources to produce modest benefits for the poor might be enough to forestall a broader political challenge that might have extensive political and economic consequences. My summary of the argument highlights the fact that it relies on a logic similar to that of the earlier argument about education—namely, that people of a certain social class use their resources to pursue their goals. In the case of American welfare policy, Piven and Cloward argue that political and economic elites have a shared interest in preventing political challenges and that poverty policy is one of the tools they use to achieve that goal.

The point of this book is to show how sociologists create wide-ranging explanations of social life. Theories of capitalism and class are one such example. Sociologists use class analysis to explain things as wildly divergent as school outcomes, global politics, popular culture, and family structure. In fact, explanations that rely on social class and economic forces have such a long history in sociology that they are instantly recognizable and have their own names. Explanations that rely on the benefits of wealth and property ownership are often called “Marxist,” after German revolutionary Karl Marx, who argued that economic forces heavily influence most aspects of social life. Marxist theories, which rely on economic conditions and social class divisions, are one example of a broader class of explanations that explain inequality in terms of intergroup conflict, the deployment of superior resources, and the interplay of race, gender, and social class. This book also discusses three other broader types of sociological explanations: those that focus on forward-looking thinking and strategic action; those that look at how social values lead to social structure; and those that look at how people collectively assign meaning and interpret the world. Before getting to these examples, let’s look at what the term theory means in this book.

THEORY, THEORY, THEORY

These two examples, school outcomes and poverty policy, show that sociology, like any other discipline, has a need for theory. But what exactly is theory? In this book, I define theory as an idea or collection of ideas that provides some coherence or commonality among explanations within a given domain of thought. It is the root of the plant, so to speak. Thus, physical theory refers to the ideas that give physics some underlying structure, in the same way that a social theory allows people to develop overlapping and consistent explanations of topics as diverse as schooling and voting.

Academic fields do not always have well-developed theories. In fact, they vary a great deal in their ability to produce theories that are widely accepted by practitioners as a logical foundation for their research. For example, physics and biology have extremely successful underlying theories that most practitioners seem to accept. In physics, we have the ideas of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell that describe the everyday physical world of motion and energy, while Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr offered laws that describe extremely large and small objects. In biology, nearly all biologists accept some form of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Physics and biology are unusual. In contrast, most fields of inquiry have not developed theories that are universally accepted. It is more typical for a number of approaches to compete for attention in an area of study. For example, much contemporary philosophy is “analytical philosophy,” which views philosophy as a very linguistically precise discussion of narrowly defined concepts and topics.⁴ That is, a philosopher should take an idea, such as “color,” and then rigorously examine its definition and what it entails. The underlying theory of analytic philosophy relies on formal logic and a theory of language that can be used to justify and develop other philosophical arguments. Analytic philosophy may be dominant, but it has competitors. Perhaps the most famous is “continental philosophy,” which stems from writers such as Immanuel Kant and G. F. W. Hegel, who were willing to consider broad questions and answer them in a language that is quite different from that used in analytic philosophy.⁵

It has been argued that theory is too difficult, misleading, or fruitless for some fields. Unifying theories are bound to fail. Scholars and scientists should instead stick to “what works.” For example, in 1982 literary scholars Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels published an article titled “Against Theory.” Their goal was to explain that any attempt to “govern” literary interpretations rested on the fallacy that the meaning of text was easily linked to its author’s intention. The validity of this argument is not important in the present context. What matters is that Knapp and Benn Michaels’s article continues to have great appeal in literary analysis because it speaks to the belief that general theories of poetry and fiction aren’t particularly useful. It’s just too hard to come up with an all-encompassing scheme for literary interpretation that will be helpful when confronted with the full range of novels, poetry, and drama that literary critics try to read. Also, by the time Knapp and Benn Michaels’s article was published, many literary scholars were tired of theories that seemed removed from texts, such as postmodernism, and of rigid theories that offered very narrow rules for how one should interpret a novel, such as the New Criticism of the 1950s. The result of the skepticism was a retreat into literary pragmatism, where judging texts is often historical and contingent rather than rule based.

The social sciences tend to live in between theory skepticism and the relative theoretical unity of physics and biology. Most of the social sciences have a few major schools of thought. Economics has the “neoclassical” framework, which is a conceptually simple, if mathematically sophisticated, theory of how people make optimal choices.⁶ People have options, assign some subjective value to each option, and choose the option with the best value, weighted by the probability that the option will happen (i.e., less value is assigned to things that rarely happen, such as winning the lottery). In addition, choices are constrained by budgets and other factors. There are also competing theories, such as behavioral economics, which focuses on cognitive limits to decision making, and Austrian economics, which rejects neoclassical concepts such as market equilibrium (e.g., prices will settle and reflect supply and demand) and suggests a more dynamic and historical approach to markets.⁷

Sociology is a bit more diverse than economics, where a large majority of economists employ some version of neoclassical theory. Sociology contains multiple schools of thought, such as Marxism and institutionalism, and no school of thought has come to dominate the field, even though many attempts have been made to establish an all-encompassing theory of society. These different theories touch on the types of things that sociologists like to study, such as conflict and social interaction.

WHAT COUNTS AS SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY?

The long discussion of what counts as sociological theory goes back decades and touches on the many ways that sociologists use the term theory. In fact, one scholar has identified at least eight different ways that the word theory is used in modern sociology.⁸ In this section, I explain what I mean by theory in the context of this book. First, sociological theory should be a language for studying what people do when they come together in groups. Thus, any sociological theory should provide a terminology for describing groups and how people relate to each other. The importance of theory as a language can’t be overstated. Intellectual communities can’t thrive if they don’t have a shared vocabulary. There will be little progress when people can’t talk to each other and can’t work with each other. Research projects would proceed with little reference to others. Thus, the application of a sociological theory entails a translation of ideas and observation into a lingua franca. The Marxist, to continue with an earlier example, would try to understand a community as divided into social classes based on people’s position within the economy. How do the upper classes maintain their position? How do they assert their influence? The language of Marxism makes social explanation possible in that tradition.

Second, sociological theory must lead to detailed and logically coherent accounts that move from cause to effect. Contemporary sociologists call the chains linking cause and effect “mechanisms.”⁹ Mechanisms, which in an earlier era were called “social processes,” provide a description of the social world at a level of detail that is persuasive and open to logical criticism and possibly empirical testing. Sociological theories should provide guidance in the construction of these detailed accounts of social life. In that sense, theory is generative.

In this book, I employ Neil Gross’s definition of the term social mechanism: “A social mechanism is a more or less general sequence or set of social events or processes analyzed at a lower level of complexity or aggregation by which—in certain circumstances—some cause X tends to bring about some effect in the realm of human social relations.”¹⁰ In other words, when a sociologist describes this chain of events from cause to effect, he is describing a chain where each link is simpler than the overall process. He is also describing a chain of events that when “added up” is larger or more complex than the sum of its parts. Gross deftly notes that the definition is agnostic with respect to some philosophical issues that plague social theory. For example, there is a longstanding debate in the social sciences about whether explanations of group behavior must be logically reducible to individual action. In some traditions, such as strategic-action sociology, all actions are made by individuals. In other traditions, such as Durkheimian sociology, groups act collectively in ways that are logically distinct from what individuals do. One can produce social mechanisms from both types of sociological theory. This book sidesteps that question. A mechanism is about any chain of events, not just about those that describe individual or group processes.

Without theories and mechanisms, sociology would be overrun by vague concepts that fail to produce satisfactory causal accounts. For example, people who read classical texts such as The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism ([1905] 1958) often come away with the erroneous view that Max Weber believed that “Protestantism causes capitalism.” A closer reading of Weber’s text reveals, however, that he never made any such claim. Weber made a claim about Calvinists in early-modern Europe. By the time Calvinism appeared in Europe, people had developed new attitudes toward work that were coupled with religion. This specific combination of religious belief and cultural change provided an unusually fertile environment for creating capitalist institutions. Weber would have rejected any sort of attempt at formulating a broad historical law and instead argued that social change, such as the emergence of modern capitalism, is the result of very specific historical processes. At the same time, he was not completely antitheoretical. He did not believe that the historical analysis of one time period is not relevant to other time periods. He obtained broader theoretical lessons from history by relying on explanations of motivation, identity, and action that examine how specific identities interact with specific legal and political environments. This approach is not unlike that used by the medical researcher, who recognizes that drugs don’t work the same way in every person. There are broader theories of chemistry, but the way drugs affect a specific patient depends on his or her genetic makeup, body chemistry, and social environment.

This summary of Weber’s text highlights the need for sociologists to pay attention to mechanisms and theory. The problem with the statement “Protestantism caused capitalism” is not only that it is an inaccurate summary of Weber’s argument but also that it is vague as stated.¹¹ How does a set of beliefs about Jesus actually lead to a corporation? What needs to be done is to show how a belief system (religion) encourages people to act in ways that create new belief systems (capitalism). In other words, it doesn’t make sense to say that a religion caused an economic institution. But it does make sense to say that people who belong to a certain religion behave in ways that make it easier to start firms and accumulate wealth, which then leads to new economic institutions.

Third, sociological theory should be able to cross empirical domains. It should be exportable from one context to another. Sociological theory should be ambitious in its claims and not focus exclusively on particular phenomena. Much in the same way that Newton’s laws should be applicable to moving cars as well as to billiard balls, sociological theories should illuminate many things. The sociologist who tries to explain homelessness should come up with an insight that might illuminate less-severe forms of poverty as well as income inequality in general.

NOT QUITE MIDDLE-RANGE THEORY

Readers familiar with the history of sociology may think that I advocate middle-range theory. Promoted by Robert Merton in the mid–twentieth century, “middle-range theory” is the name given to social...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. What Counts as Social Theory for This Book?
• 2. Power and Inequality
• 3. Strategic Action
• 4. Values and Social Structures
• 5. Social Construction
• 6. Combining Different Theories
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index