July 20, 2003

Shake'n'Bake Social Theory

Posted by Kieran

Real innovation in social theory is hard but brute-force approaches can yield results. Henry’s comments on Public Choice Theory reminded me of a simple way to innovate theory that you’re welcome to apply in various contexts as you please.

Take a few basic kinds of institutions, structures or practices that can be identified across many different social contexts. There are markets, say, and there is politics. There is ritual. There is culture. There are hierarchies. There are networks. And so on. (Not all of these are the same sort of thing; that doesn’t matter at the moment.) Identify the basic features of each. Now, pick one, take its defining features and see if you can find them at work in one the others.

For example, you can say Politics is really Markets. This is Public Choice Theory, waiting to be elaborated. Because the market form is such a dominant feature of contemporary societies and of talk about them, applying the “x is really a market” trick to any given x is by now quite a common trick. It can tell you a lot about what you’re studying, and it can even provoke that “Of course!” experience that Fredrich Blowhard had. It’s important to see, though, that you can do exactly the same thing in reverse, or with other combinations of concept and institution, and to similar effect.

Markets are really Politics. Out of many, Neil Fligstein’s work is a good example.

Markets are really Culture. Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money takes the world of apparently cold-blooded economic exchange and shows how the ritual creation of social ties between people is fundamental to the nature of money. Alternatively, for a comparative approach read Frank Dobbin’s Forging Industrial Policy to see how 19th-century economic policy about Railroads took as its model different conceptions of the polity in each of France, Britain and the United States.

Politics is really Ritual. Meyer and Rowan’s “Institutional organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony” makes this case.

Markets are really Hierarchies. Sounds like a tough one, but Art Stinchcombe has a go in “Contracts as Hierarchical Documents.”

Markets are really Networks. Harrison White. I should say, “Production markets are really self-reproducing interfaces created by the mutual monitoring of firms trying to find a sustainable niche in a production system.”

And so on. The “x is really y” approach to explanatory theory can be very productive, especially if you can come up with a comparison that hasn’t been done before. There are other tricks to try when looking for a good explanation to some empirical problem — or when looking for a good problem in search of an explanation. Howie Becker’s book Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It has a bunch of useful heuristics.

Posted on July 20, 2003 08:35 AM UTC
Comments

Are you being sarcastic? All social “theory” or social science is just reasoning by analogy? That is incredibly disheartening if true, since people inevitably stretch metaphors too far. It would explain some of the more insane theories to gain popular credence.

Posted by Steve · July 20, 2003 02:21 PM

Are you being sarcastic? All social “theory” or social science is just reasoning by analogy?

No and no. It’s just a useful way into a problem and you see where it goes. The role of analogy and metaphor in theory of all sorts (hard science included) is very powerful, and you can say that without suggesting that’s all there is to it.

Posted by Kieran Healy · July 21, 2003 12:08 AM

Sounds fair enough to me. All norms, structures and institutions of social interaction are similar to one extent or another. Good social scholarship picks up these similarities (and dissimilarities)and examines them in new and interesting ways.

Fresh perspecitives on old structures are how we develop our understanding of the social world.

Posted by Alegna · July 21, 2003 03:20 AM

>>All social “theory” or social science is just reasoning by analogy?

I have an unpublished paper proving that all reasoning by analogy is really a form of social science :)

Posted by dsquared · July 21, 2003 07:09 AM

I’ve posted a followup at my blog (here), but Trackback seems to be on the blink again.

Posted by John Quiggin · July 23, 2003 11:29 AM
Followups

→ Public choice = Marxism.
Excerpt: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber posted some critical remarks on public choice theory, and Kieran Healy chimed in with a piece on "Shake'n'Bake social theory" of the general form "A is really B". For example, public choice theory can be...Read more at John Quiggin
→ Public Choice.
Excerpt: Glenn Reynolds treats us to a dyspeptic attack on interest groups in politics:If one looks at special interest groups as parasites on the body politic -- as, I think, we probably should -- then electoral politics has the effect of...Read more at Matthew Yglesias

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.