Abstract

This symposium adds to the heated conversation currently underway regarding the nature and purposes of comparative historical sociology. Charles Tilly contends that the dominant mode of this enterprise, big-case comparisons, is bankrupt, and that it ought to be replaced by a new "relational realism." Jeff Goodwin sets forth a spirited -- although quite relational -- defense of big-case comparisons, while Mustafa Emirbayer spells out in detail just what a relational realism might look like. We hope that these contributions will not end, but renew, the debate.

Macrosociology, Past And Future

Charles Tilly
New School for Social Research
July 1995

A Case for Big Case Comparison

Jeff Goodwin
New York University

The first great comparative-historical analysts, Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx, arrived at many of their insights by examining ~nd often comparing such big cases as "France," "England," "Germany," and "America." Yet we now live in a world in which the borders between such entities seem increasingly permeable and even irrelevant. Millions of people, enormous materi&l resources, and a variety of cultural artifacts spill over these borders every day. Simultaneously, transnational institutions such as multinational corporations, the World Bank, GATT, and the European Union appear increasingly important. And the widespread proliferation of ethnonationalist movements and contentious "identity politics" further confounds the notion that we inhabit a world of homogeneous "nation-states."

The assumption that "societies" or "countries" are naturally bounded and integrated systems is clearly no longer compelling (and should never have been so). The implausibility of this assumption also undermines the idea that a comparative perspective will reveal the timeless and invariant laws that "cover" all such cases. And yet many sociologists continue to adhere to these notions, which underpin a great many so-called "cross-national," quantitative studies in particular. Fortunately, many other sociologists -- from world-systems theorists to network analysts -- have redirected their attention from categorically defined actors (individual or collective) toward the ties and transactions of actors reconceptualized in relational and interactionist terms.

But does it follow from all this that the comparative study of what Charles Tilly calls "state-defined societies" is now passe'? Are generalizations or statements of any kind about such big cases as "France" or "America" simply literary tropes? Not necessarily. Here's a case for our continued need to compare big cases:

First of all, a relational perspective by no means implies that we should abandon the study of big "state-defined societies." This would follow, certainly, if the only consequential social networks were either small or transnational. Yet many of the important processes that interest contemporary sociologists centrally concern the undeniably big networks that connect various state institutions and the people they govern. Understood in this sense, "state-defined societies are the most appropriate cases for studying such processes as democratization, welfare-state development, warmaking, the formation of public spheres, the institutionalization of ideologies, and virtually all types of political (including revolutionary) mass mobilizations.

Of course, state-society relations have always been embedded within even larger, transnational networks, including the state system; and embedded within state-society relations are important smaller networks, including class-based and ethnic communities, both of which sometimes overflow into other state-governed societies. Astute analysts of big cases, however, have always attended to the ways in which both these larger and smaller sets of relations may powerfully shape and constrain state-society relations; I have in mind such scholars as Otto Hintze, Karl Polanyi, Stein Rokkan, Immanuel Wallerstein, Theda Skocpol, Robert Wuthnow, and, of course, Charles Tilly. If I were to criticize this group of scholars, in fact, it would hardly be for comparin~ ~ig cases of social relations, but for a tendency to neglect some important a1nalytic dimensions of these relations (see Mustafa Emirbayer's contribution to this symposium).

Furthermore, neither the growing importance of transnational exchanges and institutions (i.e., "globalization") nor the proliferationof ethnic and other "subnational" identities implies the disintegration of tlie state system or, perforce, of big state-society networks. In many ways, these developments are strengthening the state system. The fact, for example, that certain states are increasingly coordinating their activities through transnational organizations hardly means that such states thereby forfeit all their power and autonomy; indeed, these organizations sometimes provide states with much-needed resources and legitimacy. (Witness the scramble to join the EU and NATO.) And while states may be increasingly concerned with attracting external sources of capital, that hardly renders them less powerful or less relevant as far as their citizens, "guestworkers," or "illegal aliens" are concerned.

Nor does the recent proliferation of "subnational" identities and movements imply the sudden irrelevance of states or of state-society networks. The very emergence of such identities and movements is very intimately linked to the structure and character of state-society relations, especially "political opportunity structures." Most of these movements, moreover, seek their own states or a share of state power; they are challenging existing states, in other words, not the state system itself. Thus, the collapse of the former U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia no more foreshadows the demise of the state system than the bankruptcy of a large corporation foreshadows the collapse of capitalism.

Finally, a comparative approach is absolutely essential for refining our understanding of all those processes that are centrally linked to big state-society networks. Such comparisons, to be sure, will not yield invariant laws, but that has never been the main purpose of a comparative perspective. On the contrary, such comparisons are necessary precisely in order to historicize and contextualize our understanding of the causal mechanisms through which social networks work. Comparisons are also helpful simply for weeding out overgeneralized and just plain bad ideas about social processes -- including the illusion that only small or transnational social networks matter.

Symbols, Positions, And Objects

Mustafa Emirbayer
New School for Social Research

Charles Tilly speaks of a new relational perspective in~istorical inquiry, but he doesn't spell out precisely what sort of analyt~cal strategy this perspective might entail. Inspired by much the same goal as Tilly, Jeff Goodwin and I, along with other colleagues and students in the New York area, have been striving over the past few years to develop a relational theory of historical process. Our arguments rest upon a simple fourfold distinction. We argue, following upon some of Jeffrey Alexander's recent work in Action and its Environments, and before him Parsons (and Sorokin), that action takes place within a plurality of environments" or structural contexts simultaneously --which we designate as the cultural, societal, and social-psychological contexts of action. (We differ from Parsons in not prioritizing these contexts in any sort of hierarchy, "cybernetic" or otherwise, and certainly in not regarding them as "action systems" per se.) The ways in which actors act are guided and channelled at one and the same time by all three of these transpersonal, structural contexts, which intersect and overlap with one another and yet are mutually autonomous: they encompass relatively enduring patterns or matrices of relationships, each of which operates according to its own independent logic.

Our contention is that these elements can be reconceptualized in relational terms, that we can speak of all three using the same relational language. We proceed, in fact, from the notion that it is ties and transactions, not entities such as "the individual" or "society", that truly constitute the legitimate unit of sociological analysis. This idea was given classic exposition by the early American pragmatists, as well as by Ernst Cassirer in a neglected book entitled Substance and Function, and has since informed the work of many thinkers from Kurt Lewin ("field theory"), to Norbert Elias ("figurational sociology"), to network analysts in the present day.

What we term the cultural environment of action encompasses those symbolic configurations or formations that constrain and enable action by structuring actors' normative commitments and their understandings of the world and of their own possibilities within it. Margaret Somers makes the useful point that the symbolic structures it encompasses can be seen as "conceptual networks," as structured webs, matrices, or configurations of relations among concepts; these formations are relatively autonomous from societal and social psychological configurations (see also William Sewell, Jr., on "idioms"). Important here is that a rich plurality of such cultural structures is to be found in most actual fields of action. A cultural context or environment contains multiple cultural or symbolic structures, just as a societal environment contains multiple, intersecting circles of interaction, in the Simmelian sense.

The societal environment, for its part, encompasses all those network patterns of social ties that comprise an institutional or interpersonal setting of action. It includes political, economic, as well as civil and associational (including "public") networks of interaction. This is more the familiar terrain of network analysis: the terrain, that is, of Laumann and Knoke on the organizational state, or of Ronald Burt, Mark Granovetter, or Harrison White on the economy, or (more metaphorically), of Robert Putnam 'on civil society and Peggy Somers on the public sphere. To be sure, each concrete realm has also a symbolic reference or complement: this, after all, is one of the key insights from White's book, Identity and Control. In our framework, ~owever, we still do separate the societal context analytically from that of culture, so as to avoid the pitfalls of what Margaret Archer terms "central conflation," the interweaving of conceptual and societal networks so tightly together that, in her words, their "constituent components cannot be examined separately" (Archer 1988, p. 77). Conceptual networks and societal structures might well constrain and enable action in different, even incompatible ways. Empirically, of course, these structures usually "fit" together intimately, but analytically they must be kept distinct.

Finally, we speak of a social-psychological environment of action, which encompasses all those psychical structures that constrain and enable action by channelling flows and investments of emotional energy. It includes long-lasting, durable interpersonal structures of attachment and emotional solidarity. Here the "nodes," so to speak, in the networks are not symbols (as in the cultural environment), or positions (as in the societal), but rather "objects," as that term is understood by "object relations" theorists in particular: that is to say, actual persons, aspects of persons, or fantasized substitutes for persons. (As Freud argues in his monograph on Group Psychology, in place of the "father" one might just as well find a leader, the nation, or some sort of abstract Idea, ideal, or set of principles.) Herein lies another difference from Parsons, Sorokin, and Alexander: we conceptualize this third "environment of action" as fundamentally transpersonal in nature, rather than as an environment of individual personality or psychology. Empirically, we see potential applications for it in a wide range of fields of study, from nationalism and racism to social movements and organizations. Often, students of these phenomena focus upon the patterns of societal interaction (and the societal interests) underlying them, or else upon their discursive aspects, while ignoring their sometimes powerful emotional and psychical (often less than fully conscious) bases.

Important as well to our framework is the notion that action also possesses -- at least in certain empirical instances -- a moment of intentionality as well, which guarantees, in fact, that action will never be completely determined or structured. Hence a fourth element in our theory of historical process: namely, human agency. Agency, too, is intrinsically relational, although its grounding resides not primarily in transpersonal interactions, but rather in the autonomous semiotic, dialogical processes -- themselves also relational -- that are internal to the self as a distinct analytical structure (Wiley 1994, pp. 15, 47, 210, 228). We understand by agency the engagement by actors of their different environments, an engagement that both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. Ann Mische and I (1995) have proposed the idea of a "chordal triad of agency" consisting of three principal tones or components, any one of which might be accentuated within a given field of empirical action. The first of these tones, which we term the iterational moment of agency, refers to the selective reactivation of past patterns of thought and action, as routinely incorporated in practical activity, thereby giving stability and order to social universes and helping to sustain identities, interactions, and institutions over time. The second dimension, the projective, encompasses the imagillative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in re~tion to the actors' hopes, fears, and desires for the future. And finally, the practical-evaluative element entails the capacity of actors to make practical and \'ormative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action, in respdnse to the emerging demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations. Disaygregating agency in this way allows us to relativize -~ and thereby to go beyond -- the "practical actor" model of actjon (action as largely habitual, repetitive, and taken-for-granted) that informs much of sociology today, from Bourdieu 's writings to structuration theory to network analysis. In our approach, the iterational moment of agency (the reactivation of past patterns of interaction) is but one of several alternative possible agentic orientations. By emphasizing variation and change in the temporal constitution of agency, we open up the possibility of conceiving of actors' relations to their environments (or at least to some of their environments, some of the time) as also potentially entailing a creative, future- and present-oriented, solving of problems.

All of this, of course, is but a set of analytical distinctions, which have to be developed further through extensive empirical investigation. We need at least to link together (more systematically than we've done) the various analytical categories I've mentioned: to inquire into the empirical "fits" or connections among the three types of structural configurations, for example, and to ask what specific configurations conduce to which of the three moments of human agency I've delineated. (When, for example, is agency genuinely projective and transformative -- and of which environments?) Perhaps the key payoff at this stage will have been simply to lay out a wide array of theoretical possibilities that prevents the foreclosure of otherwise promising research options, a framework that opens up new questions and prevents the conflation of old ones. This framework is thoroughly relational in its every aspect; it combines the ambitions of general theorists of historical process, past and present, with the "relational realism" of empirical researchers interested in exploding the limitations of substantialist thinking and pointing us in the direction of a new historical and comparative macrosociology.

References

Archer, Margaret. 1988. Culture and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische. 1995. "What is Agency?" CSSC Working Paper #206.

Wiley, Norbert. 1994. The Semiotic Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.