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7/23/2019 The Developmental History of Human Social Practices: From Social Analytics to Explanatory Narratives
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THE DEVELOPMENTAL
HISTORY OF HUMAN SOCIAL
PRACTICES: FROM SOCIAL
ANALYTICS TO EXPLANATORYNARRATIVES
Marc Garcelon
ABSTRACTPurpose The diversity of social forms both regionally and historically
calls for a paradigmatic reassessment of concepts used to map human
societies comparatively. By differentiating social analytics from
explanatory narratives, we can distinguish concept and generic model
development from causal analyses of actual empirical phenomena. In so
doing, we show how five heuristic models of modes of social practices
enable such paradigmatic formation in sociology. This reinforces Max
Webers emphasis on the irreducible historicity of explanations in thesocial sciences.
Methodology Explanatory narrative.
Social Theories of History and Histories of Social Theory
Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 31, 179220
Copyrightr 2013 by Emerald Group Publishing LimitedAll rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2013)0000031005
179
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2013)0000031005http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2013)00000310057/23/2019 The Developmental History of Human Social Practices: From Social Analytics to Explanatory Narratives
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Findings
A paradigmatic consolidation of generalizing concepts,modes of social practices, ideal-type concepts, and generic models pre-
sents a range of theoretical tools capable of facilitating empirical ana-
lysis as flexibly as possible, rather than cramping their range with overly
narrow conceptual strictures.
Research implications To render social theory as flexible for practical
field research as possible.
Originality/value Develops a way of synthesizing diverse theoretical
and methodological approaches in a highly pragmatic fashion.Keywords:Explanatory narrative; models; types; variable analysis
Sociology approaches the comparative history of human societies by for-
mulating concepts, models, and causal hypotheses presupposing scientific
autonomy from both common sense and political expediency. Yet little
disciplinary agreement regarding how to do this how to fashion what
Thomas Kuhn termed a paradigm in the empirical sciences (Kuhn, 1962)
has emerged in sociology, or for that matter in the social sciences writ
large. By separating the development of concepts and models from that of
causal hypotheses, we can move toward resolving this problem by distin-
guishing the analytic of human society from specific causal accounts
social scientists propose.1 Such a distinction allows for a robust yet flexible
process of sociological concept and model formation attuned to the contin-
gencies that field research requires in developing causal hypotheses.
Moreover, distinguishing a social analytic of concept development, from
the formulation of causal hypotheses, in turn helps clarify why what arehere called explanatory narratives should methodologically predominate
over the isolation of independent and dependent variables across cases
what Andrew Abbot calls the variables paradigm (Abbott, 1992).
Indeed, the isolation of independent and dependent variables across cases
will be shown to more accurately serve a useful but auxiliary method to
explanatory narrative. As we will see, these methodological issues also con-
verge with a number of important substantive issues in social theory.
THE ANALYTIC OF HUMAN SOCIETY
As many animals are social from ants and bees to varieties of fish,
birds, and mammals the concept of society per se is not specific to human
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beings. Conceptual universals in the social sciences
here calledanthrogeneric concepts entail distinguishing human societies from those of
other species. Two such anthrogeneric concepts culture and institutions
do this by mapping the boundary conditions of the social sciences per se,
and thus form a logical starting point for mapping the social analytic.2
Indeed, culture and institutions together distinguish Homo sapiens as a
species-being from other living social species today.3
The Anthrogeneric Concepts of Culture and Institutions
Culture in the social sciences entails meaning, more specifically, linguistic
meaning and other forms of representation enabled by language. Indeed,
one cannot separate a human society from its culture except in an analytic
sense, for human sociation is impossible without meanings at least partially
intelligible to others in the society (Griswold, 2008, pp. 1112). Indeed,
culture is coevolutionary with human society (Bradford, 2012). Yet culture
and its meanings themselves are not sufficient to map the boundary condi-tions of human society.
For this, one needs the additional concept of institution. An institution
is an obligatory form of getting by and getting along in an established
social setting (Garcelon, 2010). Violations of institutional norms trigger
responses that involve some significant cost in resources, time or status,
and sometimes provokes marginalization, sanctions, exclusion from the
situation in which given institutions are effective, banishment, incarcera-
tion, or even death. In contemporary societies, institutions are often forma-
lized in laws, legal regulations, and various codes of conducts such as officerules, university handbooks, and the like. Yet for much of human history,
members of society could not read indeed, the historically longest-term
variety of human society was hunter-gatherer society, though we have only
fragmentary knowledge concerning such societies from the rough evolu-
tionary emergence of Homo sapiens about 150,000 years ago, to today,
when the remnants of hunter-gatherer societies are dying out.4
Prior to the invention of writing, societies were organized through highly
ritualized institutions reproduced through ceremonies, festival days, rites,
and the like. Such societies are often designated oral societies by anthropol-ogists and sociologists emphasizing that such societies lacked a written lan-
guage (Goody & Watt, 1987). In oral societies, familiarity with institutional
expectations remains customary, a matter of individuals developing a sensi-
bility through rituals and other patterns of repetition tied to senses of
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identity, belonging, and distinction. Not showing implicit degrees of respectat important rituals rituals marking everything from birth to death and
much of life in between risks degrees of disapproval, shunning, or worse.
Since in some circumstances, institutional violations in oral societies may
result in the offenders death, referencing customary institutions as infor-
mal institutions as, unfortunately, often occurs is misleading.
The invention of writing in itself is not sufficient to move toward forma-
lization of institutions. Indeed, when only a small fragment of persons can
read, and when texts remain handwritten, institutional norms remain over-
whelming enforced through customary means. The technological advancesof the printing press and the diffusion of reading skills in societies made
formalization of institutions possible.5 Indeed, codes of law in the modern
sense are an example of this, and spurred the subsequent development of
handbooks of conduct, procedural norms, and the like. Such formal codifi-
cation entails patterns of institutional steering of behavior in ways that
enable large-scale organization and the processes Max Weber called
bureaucratization to develop (1978, p. 956).
Emile Durkheim conceptualized observable patterns of human behavior
associated with institutions in terms of social integration, moral regula-tion, and solidarity,6 all of which underscore that institutions entail
both cultural intelligibility and expectations of subordination of individual
behavior to norms in the broadest sense. As conformity to institutions
entails some degree of routine and habit normalized psychologically on a
day-to-day basis in human social groups, institutions steer social life to a
substantial degree, giving rise to patterns that may persist for extended
periods. For instance, formal codification legality facilitates commercial
activity by imposing respect for laws governing private property and con-
tractual obligations, stabilizing markets over periods of time. Institutionsare thus the primary patterning element of human social relationships.
A colloquial language stands an archetypical example of an institution.
Here we begin by distinguishing the analysis of a linguistic capacity a
biological trait of human beings from colloquial language as an institu-
tion.7 In this sense, a colloquial language entails development of a biologi-
cal capacity in a specific human social context. This context in turn
provides the framework for learning to understand and speak, and learning
to understand and speak simultaneously entails learning social conventions
so that one can express oneself in a meaningful way to others. The skill ofpractical language use we call competence in a specific spoken language in
fact embodies aspects of an archetypal institution, insofar as observance
of minimal linguistic norms is the precursor for a human to be able to
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function at all beyond the competence of a toddler. This in turn under-scores a distinctive aspect of colloquial language, namely, colloquial lan-
guage largely has no disciplinary apparatus, the only institution that
lacks one.8 Indeed, what ensures minimal conformity with linguistic con-
ventions is the fact that intelligibility per se requires such conformity to
achieve intelligibility with interlocutors in any linguistic interaction at all.
Of course, the use of language is involved in all other institutions, and the
more elaborate it becomes, the more ritualized, formalized, or specialized it
becomes. Thus in certain situations beyond instances of everyday practical
communication and banter, not following institutional obligations regard-ing the use of language can trigger penalizing responses by members of a
disciplinary apparatus whether by certain clan figures in a hunter-gath-
erer society, staffs of authorities in agrarian kingdoms, or by law enforce-
ment, legal organizations, courts, and other managerial bodies charged
with enforcing institutional norms in highly bureaucratized contemporary
societies such as the United States today.
There are certain circumstances, however, where even use of colloquial
language in a context not explicitly limited by ritual, formal, or specialized
concerns regarding language use may provoke action by such disciplinaryapparati, such as using profanities in front of children in public in contem-
porary America. Indeed, the latter is part of the cultural arbitrary in con-
temporary American society, the historically irreducible aspects of cultures
in a given society at a given time (Bourdieu, 1991). For the most part,
though, distinctions between colloquial and more ritual, formal, or specia-
lized usages of language intertwine in complex ways with distinctions
among hierarchies within institutional orders in human social relations.
All of this raises an important point: institutions are obligatory in the
sense of mutual expectations, but empirically elicit probabilistic degrees ofconformity. Indeed, this is why most institutions beyond colloquial lan-
guage entail disciplinary apparatuses. Thus they need to be assessed in
terms of probabilistic criteria, as anticipated by Webers conception of
legitimacy and legitimate order (Ringer, 1997). When the probability of
observance falls below historically variable thresholds, then, institutions
may disintegrate (Garcelon, 2006).
Additional Anthrogeneric Concepts
Of course, many additional anthrogeneric concepts play key roles in the
social sciences. We will briefly review a few key additional such concepts,
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but bear in mind that this review is partial and offered only as a heuristicdevice. Among the most basic anthrogenerics stand the concepts of field,
agency, habitus (reflexive) action, institutional paradigm, institutional
order, interests (strategic and symbolic), personality, and many others.
Bear in mind that such anthrogeneric concepts are distinct from what
Weber called ideal-type concepts of historically distinct developmental pat-
terns, such as this worldly religion or bureaucracy, a point developed
below.
A field maps how institutions segment and differentiate particular con-
texts for particular patterns of interaction and behavior, and by extension,generate an order that either persists for a period of time with minor,
incidental changes, or, in much rarer circumstances, deeper changes or even
outright disintegration of the field (Bourdieu, 1981).A field is considerably
more than an institution. The latter give coherence and shape to fields and
steer routine behavior and interaction in their contexts. But a field per se is
always more than its institutional architecture. For instance, there are
many particular activities that individuals may engage in at a doctors
office such as reading a magazine or interacting with another patient in a
waiting room
that are not obligatory. Yet medicine as an institutionalreality shapes the most basic behavior in a doctors office, as patients
would not even come to a doctor without some institutional certification of
the practitioner.
Agency refers to the causal significance of human behavior in various
situations. Moreover, agency per se should be distinguished from its
subtypes, habitus and reflexive action.9 Reflexive action here means delib-
erative action, instances of agency in which conscious deliberation, choice,
and the like play significant roles. Following Pierre Bourdieu, habitus des-
ignates a capacity for agency considerably broader than reflexive action
a capacity to engage spontaneously in complex sequences without much
deliberation (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 169175). For instance, when the driver
of a car has routinized traffic regulations to the point that she can sponta-
neously adjust to traffic lights, signs, other drivers, and so forth without
reflectively deliberating about them most of the time, she is often consid-
ered a good driver by others.
We will return to agency, habitus, and reflexive action shortly. At this
point,note that habitus entails both institutional and noninstitutional rou-
tines. Take a cook at home preparing a meal for her or himself alone
this individual may prepare the meal largely on the basis of routines that
require little in the way of deliberative reflection, and yet there is little that
is institutional about this. On the other hand, if the same person realizes
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they need an ingredient and need to go get it, they then may engage insome institutionalized routines, such as adjusting to traffic regulations
when driving a car, standing in line at a check-out counter in a grocery
store, and so on.
We can distinguish institutional from noninstitutional routines in terms
of a broader habitus, on the one hand, and those aspects of habitus bound
up with institutions, on the other. This latter subset of an individual
habitus we call an institutional paradigm, a disposition toward conven-
tional observance of routines to get by and get along (Garcelon, 2010,
pp. 326
335), as inFig. 1.This offers a corrective to a chronic but erroneous tendency among
many Western sociologists to assume that institutions somehow exist on a
different level than agency, with level usually referencing micro
macro distinctions, or sometimes micromesomacro distinctions.10 Yet
placing institutions on a different level than agency generates all sorts of
artificial problems that disappear when one recognizes first, that institu-
tions entail an embodied aspect; and second, that individuals can play cau-
sal roles at different levels. Of course, this latter also entails recognizing
that distinctions between the micro as the realm of agency, and the macro(or meso) as the realm of institutions, make little sense certainly,
institutions
institutional paradigms institutional orders
embodied
as habits, dispositions,
beliefs, and adjustments
observable as patterns
of behavior which give
apparent order to patterns
of social relations
the core of habitus the core of
institutional fields
Fig. 1. Institutional Paradigms and Orders. This figure is a slight modification of
Fig. 1 in Garcelon (2010, p. 333).
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individuals such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao played causally significant rolesat a macro level, and institutional norms sometimes exist only at the micro
scale of very small groups such as religious cults with only a few dozen peo-
ple, for instance (Mouzelis, 1995, p. 20). Once this is recognized, distinc-
tions between levels micro, meso, macro serve simply to differentiate
the scale of a social space.
At this point, then, we have mapped out culture, institution, field,
agency, habitus, reflexive action, and institutional paradigm. Complement-
ing the latter, an institutional order refers to those aspects of an institution
that manifest as routine patterns in social groups. This in turn allows us tointroduce Webers concept of legitimacy, for legitimacy is the felt sensibility
of the rightness or justness of a tribal leadership of some sort, or the
state as an institutional order (Weber, 1978, pp. 3133), underscoring that
(relational) institutional orders persist due to (embodied) institutional para-
digms.11 In the pre-modern world, Weber argued states relied on traditional
forms of legitimacy among their subjects, traditional authority; whereas in
the modern period, he noted the emergence of a new form of legitimacy
among subjects, legal-rational authority, that entailed obedience to authori-
ties outof respect for the law that they might otherwise be disinclined toobey.12 (Due to time constraints, we leave aside here Webers third variant
of legitimacy, charismatic legitimacy, that he argued may operate in non-
institutional circumstances and which plays an often crucial role in social
change.) Legitimacy is, in essence, an aspect of an individuals institutional
paradigm, namely, that aspect entailing acceptance of a tribal order or
states leadership. These latter in turn constitute what Bourdieu (1990)
called the field of fields, insofar as the state or a pre-state hunter-
gatherer leadership sets the boundaries for perception of legitimate
behavior on the part of agents in a given society at a given point in time.Differentiating institutional orders from institutional paradigms within
broader institutions per se allows considerable conceptual refinement that
maximizes the flexibility of these concepts for empirical research. Indeed,
such research can simply study agency and institutions without worrying
about how to reconcile their assumed theoretical levels. Moreover,
further differentiating institutional paradigms in terms of a sensibility of
legitimacy, on the one hand, and other varieties of routinization of beha-
vior, such as adaptation through adoption of routines of expected conven-
tions in families, schools, businesses, and so on, on the other, allows us tofurther differentiate various types of institutions. This refines the relation
between a state and other institutional orders, for a state operates across
other institutions and to an extent legitimizes them by extension as well,
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and thus entails a hierarchization to some degree of institutions and theinstitutional paradigms that people develop to adapt to them. In short,
institutional orders per se are broader than the institutional order of a
hunter-gatherer leadership or state, and thus we should expect varying
degrees of differentiation between the degree of legitimacy people develop
toward a hunter-gatherer leadership or state, and the broader institutional
paradigms people develop in relation to various institutional orders and
the fields they enable in various societies.13
As people interact in institutional orders relying on their embodied insti-
tutional paradigms, the relation between the social context and how peopleunderstand and convey meaning about it are steered by what Bourdieu
called the doxa of a social world, the everyday conventions that bound
conversation and more elaborate forms of expression to some degree
(Bourdieu, 1991). In a more differentiated society, individuals take a doxa
for granted as they express the meanings of various experiences to one
another in social interaction.
Of course, there are many other anthrogeneric concepts that we do not
have time to discuss here. We will, however, revisit the anthrogeneric
concepts of agency, habitus, and reflexive action shortly, but first we turn tosocial analytics that help us comparatively situate societies in regard to one
another. In this way, we will have a minimum range of concepts to place
analysis of agency, habitus, and reflexive action in historical context.
Mapping Five Modes of Social Practices
We can initially map human societies in all their historical and comparative
diversity through the concept of modes of social practice. This concep-tion generalizes from Marxs concept of the mode of production without
assuming any lines of causal determinacy. Rather, five such modes are
offered here heuristically to organize the comparative study of historical
variants of social relations, institutions, and patterns of culture and agency
particular to them. The concept mode signals that all five are anthroge-
neric universals in the sense of having existed in all known human societies,
and that variation within and between such modes marks their actual his-
tory. In this sense, the concept mode more fully captures this possible
variation and historical depth than either the concepts subsystems orfunctions. At the same time, mode allows more range than either of
these concepts in mapping the complexity and diversity of human social
forms, as we shall see.14
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Mapping modes of social practices onto degrees of institutional differen-tiation stands a principal aim of empirical research, for such modes repre-
sent preliminary concepts heuristic devices for the organization of
empirical explanations. Indeed, degrees of institutional differentiation
within modes of social practices vary for contingent, historically irreducible
reasons. For instance, degrees of institutional fusion of modes of social
practices often predominated in premodern history, such as divine king-
ships.15 Contemporary representative democracies, on the other hand,
embody complex institutional differentiation. In this sense, the five anthro-
generic modes of social practices outlined here represent bridge concepts toideal-type concepts and generic models, as discussed below.
The Mode of Communication
The very fact of language underscores that all human societies entail speci-
fic means and modalities of communication. The differentiation of more
complex communicative forms such as writing, and more elaborate technol-
ogies of communication such as books, indicates the utility of differentiat-
ing the means of communication from how such means combine with
actual practices. Both means and practices develop as emergent propertiesof language appearing at various points in the historical record. This
immediately raises a cautionary note applicable throughout the following
elaboration of modes of social practices: the farther back from the contem-
porary one goes, the more fragmentary and incomplete evidence becomes,
until we end up making educated guesses compatible with such incom-
plete evidence.
The mode of communication always subsumes a mode of language.
Language as an actual mode of communication realizes itself both through
a universal language capacity among all Homo sapiens
a capacity thatentails biological aspects, as discussed above and a specific spoken lan-
guage, a historical individual (Weber, 1949, pp. 149152), initially
learned during socialization.16 Thus language as a spoken practice is a spe-
cific historical mode of language a unique complex of features we give a
proper name, such as Russian as spoken in the Soviet Union in the 1960s
(Weber, 1949, pp. 8384, 111112, 160171).
Specific languages as historical individuals are in fact instances of insti-
tutions,for they are obligatory forms of getting by and getting along in
situations realized through them.
17
As noted above, a spoken language inits most basic colloquial forms entails no disciplinary apparatus, for the
obligatory nature of a spoken language coheres largely spontaneously
those who cannot speak at a practically minimal level of a dominant
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colloquial language in a region are quickly marginalized in social practicesin that region.
Modes of language enable the elaboration of modes of mediation in
human history, such as the invention of writing and the spread of literacy.
Again, early Homo sapiens used artifacts in a representational way in their
burial practices, implicitly differentiating everyday linguistic practices
from the symbols used in such burials, something we know from archaeolo-
gical evidence. Such modes of mediation have developed in diverse ways
since Neolithic times, as the development of painting, writing, and then
books and other forms of media attest. Obviously, mass literacy and therise of first the mass media, and then the multimedia system of recent years,
represent the extent to which such differentiation has gone in the modern
period (Castells, 2000, pp. 355406). Table 1 represents the mode of
communication.
The Mode of Belief
Beliefs help constitute human society by ordering relations between a social
order and its wider environment through beliefs about both community
and the wider world in which it is situated. Specifically, modes of beliefentail ways social groups presuppose some projected order of the world
represented through languages and symbols, but taking more complex
forms than language itself, from mythic ideations to the passing on from
one generation to the next of forms of practical know how, what
Michael Polanyi dubbed tacit knowledge (2009). Claude Levi-Strauss
identified an archaic form of the more complex ideations that language
enables as mythemes (1967, pp. 207219). As societies become more
complex, a considerable variety of patterns of more elaborate beliefs dis-
place myth, from religions per se in the ancient period of human civiliza-tion, to ideologies in more modern times (Levi-Strauss, 1967, p. 205). Such
post-mythical patterns of belief often gain a sacred status through revered
texts such as the Bible or Bhagavad Gita, or a quasi-sacred status through
foundational texts such as the American Constitution. Indeed, reference to
the American Constitution often takes the form of cant across complex
Table 1. The Mode of Communication.
Mode of Communication Subsuming
(a) The mode of language
(b) The mode of mediation
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hierarchies of fields in the contemporary United States. Patterns of modernbelief closely identified with both the maintenance and contestation of poli-
tical power develop in ideological forms, a point we return to below in dis-
cussing modes of domination.
More modern patterns of belief develop tensions between practical
knowledge and abstract ideations as differences between the is and the
ought. Take for instance the emergence of the modern sciences, which
required extensive institutional changes to legitimize the practices of those
engaged in them, including the piecemeal restriction of political and reli-
gious authorities abilities to interfere with scientific practices on the basisof habitual understandings of elite guardianship of the ought. The history
of the modern sciences thus forms a complex skein of practices distinguish-
ing the is from the ought. Indeed, the whole differentiation of the is
from the ought presupposes the differentiation of cognitive from moral,
legal, magical, and spiritual practices, what Ju rgen Habermas calls the
linguistification of the sacred (1987).18
The degree to which such distinctions give rise to actual institutional dif-
ferentiation remains an empirical question. But in fact tensions between
what Weber called practical concerns like the gathering of foodstuffs, onthe one hand, and ritualized practices such as group ceremonies, on the
other, can be identified even in tacit distinctions between burial artifacts
and simple hunting tools from Neolithic times. We can thus recognize tacit
practical differentiation of modes of cognition from modes of ideation
within modes of belief throughout history, building on Bellahs distinction
between cognitive and symbolic understanding (Bellah, 1973) (Table 2).
The Mode of Kin Reproduction
The mode of kin reproduction stands a third universal mode of social prac-tices entailing four subtypes of such practices. All known human societies
in history placed kinship and the family order in the center of human social
life, something which continues today. Certainly, the understanding of
what family means has varied considerably in human history, with more
extended kin networks predominant in family life in premodern societies,
Table 2. The Mode of Belief.
The Mode of Belief Subsuming
(i) The mode of cognition
(ii) The mode of ideation
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and the emergence of the nuclear family
parents and children
limitedat first to late medieval and early modern Britain and some of its colonies
before spreading much more widely outside the Anglo-American world
from the nineteenth century forward (Liljestro m, 1986).
The subtype of kinship constitution stands out immediately here,
through which central bonds of family orders are constituted and with
them the most basic organization of social life. Here we find birthing and
marital practices, as well as aspects that govern the possibility (or its lack)
of constituting kin ties across societies. Next, the sub-mode of socialization
describes practices signaling in-group boundaries, social hierarchies, andones place in a social order. As children are highly dependent on the care
of familialkin networks for many years, at least some modest hierarchiza-
tion based on age and social respect for the knowledge of elders are univer-
sal. From here, we can identify other such socializing practices, from rites
of passage from one social status to another in hunting and gathering
groups, to compulsory schooling in more contemporary societies. Elias
(1969, 1982)described these as parts of the civilizing process.
The mode of health comportment embodies a third variant of such kin
reproductive practices. These are everyday practices of health edification,maintenance, and interventions ranging from dietary injunctions such as
Orthodox Judaisms forbiddance of shell fish, to expected patterns of dress
in various circumstances at various times. Such understandings presuppose
a conventional, not strictly medical, understanding of health that varies
widely across history. Indeed, what counts as healthy follows conven-
tional understandings.19
Modes of health comportment are often mediated through other social
practices, such as modes of belief. Indeed, considerable overlap between
early magical and health-intervention practices underscores the analyticnature of the distinctions drawn here medicine man, for instance,
appeared as a common variant of a magician in hunter-gatherer societies.
Yet distinctions between the practice of magic, religions, and other spiritual
belief systems, on the one hand, and specific modes of health comportment,
on the other, can at least be analytically drawn in early human societies,
though often only becoming clear as societies become more complex. For
instance, we can tacitly distinguish the practices shamans divined regarding
taboos of eating, from the practices of seeking knowledge of the move-
ments of tribal enemies. Indeed, the gaining of autonomy by medical spe-cialists from magical and religious practices is a most modern institutional
fact. In the oral cultures of most kinship societies, for instance, modes of
health comportment remained closely linked to ritual practices of belief,
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one of the reasons that the entire range of health practices has often beensubsumed under analyses of magic and religion in premodern societies.20
Here, by contrast, magical, religious, and other spiritual practices combine
aspects of modes of belief, health comportment, and domination.
The unique human practices of funerary rites compose a fourth subtype
of the mode of kin reproduction, namely, the mode of funerary practices.
Critically, funerary practices are practices of kin reproduction insofar as
they affirm social and natural perceptions of order and continuity in the
face of the existential reality of death.21 In this sense, funerary practices
entail key rites and rituals that maintain a semblance of continuing on inthe face of the death of an individual person. In this sense, funerary prac-
tices aim at shoring up and solidifying social practices in the face of an exis-
tential trauma that all people sooner or later face.
In doing so, funerary practices generally entail the at least ceremonial
setting apart of various practices associated with them. The social recog-
nition of death in funerary practices underscores the liminal state of death
as a symbolically weighted rite of passage from a living social status to
a symbol of the continuity of the past in the present (Turner,
1969). Historical evidence shows a tight coupling between modes of kinreproduction entailing diverse culture practices from marriage to varia-
tionsof education such as rites of passage and modes of funerary prac-
tices.22 The latter entail everything from patterns of ritual grievance for
those seen as mortally injured, to funerary rituals themselves. Table 3
represents the mode of kin reproduction.
The Mode of Economy
In contrast to such socially reproductive kin practices, the mode of econ-
omy designates a range of human practices at the center of social sciencesince the origins of political economy in the second half of the eighteenth
century. Marxs critique of classical political economy framed the economy
as a base determining a superstructure entailing a wide range of other
Table 3. The Mode of Kin Reproduction.
Mode of Kin Reproduction Subsuming
(a) Mode of kinship constitution (including marital and birthing practices)(b) Mode of socialization (including education)
(c) Mode of health comportment
(d) Mode of funerary practices
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practices, from politics to culture. The problem with this is, of course, thatit presumed economism, with the economy conceived as determining in
the last instance other aspects of social life. Webers alternative to econo-
mism located causal relations in the historically irreducible confluence of
historically unique social relations at specific times, a central aspect of
explanatory narratives explained below.23
In this sense, economic practices, like communicative, belief, or kin prac-
tices, can be conceptualized as both constraining and enabling patterns of
social relations over time, and yet not determining them in an a priori
fashion. Economic practices can instead be modeled comparatively in termsof conceptual generalizations, and then these generalizations can be used as
a tool kit (Swidler, 1986) from which to devise specific accounts of causal
patterns along specific paths. In light of this, we can both acknowledge the
origins of the mode of economy in Marxs concept of the mode of produc-
tion while differentiating the former from the latter.
First, we reject economic determinism in favor of a Weberian model of
historical contingency. This can be developed in terms of a model of trajec-
tory adjustment where agents rely on their habits and expectations in
anticipating the reproduction of extant institutional arrangements, thoughsometimes such anticipation proves erroneous in the face of institutional
change (Eyal, Szele nyi, & Townsley 1998; Garcelon, 2006).24 We can then
fashion a noneconomistic conception of the mode of economy reconstructed
along lines mapped out by Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells in ways that
clarify how to conceptualize economic relations in relation to other social
practices.
One cautionary note regarding the following discussion. Bells analysis
can certainly be criticized in various ways (Postone, 1999, pp. 1219), how-
ever, the following does not strictly adhere to Bell
or any of the thinkerswhose work is adapted here. Rather, the adaption of Bell via Castells devel-
ops one of his more useful conceptual innovations for a proposal that is
synthetic, not exegetic, in character.
In any case, the mode of economy allows us to recognize a broader range
of work processes and class distinctions that can develop under a particular
institutional ensemble like capitalism than Marx conceptualized. Take for
instance the distinction between laborers working for an hourly wage, and
professionals working for a salary (Castells, 2000). Professionals turn out to
be central to the computer sectors of the contemporary capitalist economy,for instance, yet they cannot be understood in terms of the capitalist-worker
distinction that Marx mapped as determinant of capitalist society as a whole
precisely because professionals cannot be separated from their key means
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of production, their specialized expertise, in the way workers can be sepa-rated from tools (Ehrenreich, 1989, pp. 7881).
What we see instead is the differentiation of three major classes in leading
capitalist economies since the Second World War, capitalists, workers, and
professionals. In short, the work process can develop in ways that Marx
did not anticipate and still be organized on a capitalist basis. Modifying
Bells earlier differentiation of axial principals in human societies
(Bell, 1999), Castells proposed distinguishing the mode of production (how
social relations are organized to stabilize distinctive power relations in var-
ious economies), from the mode of development, how a work process isorganized to produce economic value (Castells, 2000, pp. 1318).
Economic value in turn functions pragmatically as some metric or ensemble
of metrics some implicit, some explicit that relates the utility of things
and services to measures of worth and effort.
In this way, the productive capacity of a labor process appears as a dis-
tinct question from the institutional basis of power relations which both
enables and constrains it. The productive capacity of labor processes can
now be mapped as the ratio of the value of each unit of output to the value
of each unit of input (Castells, 2000, p. 16), though this presupposes somedevelopment of both conceptual and measuring standards to do so. Yet at
least precursors of such standards have always been practically used, though
in rougher and simpler forms going back to hunter-gatherer societies. The
quantification and standardization of such measures under capitalism made
their function as measures explicit as economic ends in themselves, but we
can retrospectively see crude variations of these throughout history, often
implicit in political arrangements. Indeed, economic tribute extracted from
the peasantry turned over to patrons, labor days, and so forth marked
all premodern states (Wolf, 1981).The emergence of economic growth as the avowed goal of political lea-
dership distinguishes the modern world from premodern societies. The rise
of the modern era thus witnessed widespread changes regarding economic
production, changes that entailed what Weber (1958 [1904]) called the
rationalization of measures of economic output, a protracted outcome of
a whole chain of institutional changes that in the end led to the very idea of
making economic growth the Alpha and Omega of social policy.
Such a championing of economic growth marks both capitalist and
socialist variants of political projects to manage a modern economy, andoperated in earlier capitalist economies dominated by the capitalist-
working class distinction, as well as more recent capitalist economies with
three major classes, the capitalists, workers, and professionals. Indeed, the
reorientation of social life to economic growth as an end in itself helps
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us distinguish shifts underway in the technological and organizationalforms of the work process, from the alternative institutional arrangements
of capitalism and socialism within their broader shared orientation to eco-
nomic growth as an end in itself. Indeed, capitalism and socialism as antag-
onistic institutional ensembles subsume similar technological arrangements,
as is strikingly clear when one tracks the Soviet mimicking of Fordist factory
organization in the 1930s (Kuromiya, 1988). We can thus differentiate the
institutional umbrella which stabilized industrial work processes as a politi-
cal form in Fordist and Stalinist factories in the 1930s, from the institutional
arrangements at the shop floor similar in both countries at this time.Modes of development thus map the technological arrangements by
means of which labor works on matter to generate the level and quality
of surplus (Castells, 2000, p. 16). Such technological arrangements have
institutional dimensions, for instance the role of foremen in supervising
assembly lines in factories producing automobiles in Henry Fords Detroit
or Joseph Stalins Soviet Union.
Each mode of development is defined by the element that is fundamental in fostering
productivity in the production process. Thus, in the agrarian mode of development, the
source of increasing surplus results from quantitative increases of labor and naturalresourcesin the production process, as well as from the natural endowment of these
resources. In the industrial mode of development, the main source of productivity lies
in the introduction of new energy sources. (Castells, 2000, pp. 1617)
We thereby analytically decouple ways of organizing production as a
process from ways of arranging power relations between an economy and
a larger society, with the former mapping modes of development and the
latter mapping modes of production. Thus we can see a wider range of
possible patterns of organization between work processes and political insti-
tutions in the modern world, from industrial socialism to informationalcapitalism. At the same time, this shifts causal analysis from an abstract
level of predetermined historical stages, to the comparative modeling
of specific historical trajectories dependent on historically irreducible
circumstances. In sum, human societies at various times in various regions
remain dependent on trajectories of social interaction in contingent
historically irreducible situations. This in turn leads to recognition of how
problematic assumptions of universal developmental stages of human
society indeed are. We can map this contingency as in Table 4.
The Mode of Domination
Of course, patterns of domination in history are more than patterns of eco-
nomic domination, which brings us to mapping out modes of domination
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per se. Objections could be raised to the concept mode of domination sim-
ply on the basis of evidence of small-scale, egalitarian kinship societies
from prehistoric times, and similar evidence from more recent hunter-gatherer societies. But at least one form of domination that of adults
over children is universal, for obvious reasons. Such universal patterns
of domination also extend to those recognized as knowledgeable about key
processes shamans, medicine men, and other varieties of magicians in
early societies as well as to the growing dependence of the frail, whether
through sickness, child bearing, or age, on stronger adults. We again see
here a practical fusion of analytical modes, here of domination, kin-
familial constitution, and health comportment in hunter-gatherer societies.
The institutional differentiation of modes of domination begins with theemergence of archaic states (Sagan, 1985, pp. 225298; Weber, 1978,
pp. 226234) and runs right down to contemporary antagonisms between
and within different states and social orders in the world today.
Indeed, stable domination over relatively protracted periods of time
entails stable patterns of authority, the voluntary acceptance of obedience
(Weber, 1978, pp. 3138). Webers concept of legitimacy combines domina-
tion and authority to signal acceptance of domination as legitimate by
enough individuals in a society to make some degree of deference to author-
itative figures in society obligatory in order to get by and get along.What happens in cases where domination absent legitimacy occurs?
When political power is reduced to the mere exercise of coercion state-
organized terrorism the state as an institution disintegrates and political
power becomes highly unstable and inefficient. Legitimacy as a broadly
expressed loyalty to state authority is thus key to political stability in socie-
ties with states. Such legitimacy can only be mapped probabilistically, and
moreover, the mapping itself presents difficult empirical problems unless
we agree to stereotype patterns of motivation in ways that bypass inter-
pretation altogether, a move that has failed repeatedly to provide a general-izable model adequate to empirical cases such as suicide bombings but
which persists in various forms of economism noted above (Garcelon,
2010,p. 347).
Table 4. The Mode of Economy.Mode of EconomySubsuming
(a) The mode of production
(b) The mode of development
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Sometimes, of course, such stereotyping of motivation works in thesense of generating plausible empirical hypotheses, such as the behavior of
stock holders in a highly capitalistic society such as the contemporary
United States. But when such economic stereotyping of motivation fails to
generate adequate empirical hypotheses of behavior, a more complex array
of methods of interpreting behavior comes into play. No behavior more
starkly embodies such economically irrational agency than loyalty to a
greater social project which requires people to make sacrifices of economic
interests to some greater goal, such as ideational projects of building
socialism, defending the nation, or martyrdom for Allah. And suchideational projects lie at the heart of modes of domination in history,
signaling a need to trace the sub-mode of legitimacy in order to flesh out
how stable domination works.
Durkheim perceptively captured the sentiments stabilizing legitimacy in
the concept of solidarity, the willingness to sacrifice self-interests for a
greater project (1997 [1893]). And indeed legitimacy entails some minimal
degree of solidaristic commitment in order to stabilize authority for either
a hunter-gather leadership or a state. Differentiating strategic interests
from solidaristic sentiments clarifies and sharpens a somewhat obscure, yetcentral, point in Weber. First, we differentiate those who comply with
authority out of simple expedience, from the always shifting though
incrementally so number of people in a society at some time x who
embody some felt sense of the legitimacy of authorities. Weber differen-
tiated the two in terms of internal and external aspects of legitimacy,
an unfortunate use of terms that confuses what he actually meant (1978,
pp. 3133), for both expedience and solidarity are internal in the sense
of being embodied in agents. Webers terminological choice thus obscured
the differentiation of motivations he was driving at.If we conceive of this differentiation in terms of solidaristic sentiment
and expedient compliance both of which are embodied by agents in var-
ious fields we clarify how sociology may distinguish the empirical conse-
quences of degrees of legitimacy embodied by varying people at various
times toward particular institutional authorities. Weber did this be differen-
tiating the normative from the empirical validity of an order (1978,
p. 32). This requires a probabilistic distinction between those motivated
more by solidaristic sentiments, from those motivated more out of
expedience, a problem of empirical analysis that situates perceptions ofcynicism in modern democracies in a sociological light. Certainly, this is
often difficult to carry out in terms of empirical research due to the pro-
blem of how to align evidence in relation to various motivations assumed
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as influencing the behavior and interactions of distinct individuals at parti-cular times. Regardless of this methodological difficulty, however, if the
number of individuals motivated by a solidaristic sense of legitimacy
toward core state institutions becomes too small relative to a society as a
whole, institutional authority may rapidly disintegrate into contending
power centers, a phenomenon often designated a revolutionary situation
in the modern period (Tilly, 1993, pp. 1014).
The differentiation of solidaristic sentiments from the expedient pursuit
of interests, however, is itself inadequate for assessing patterns of agency
in relation to constellations of political power. One must also assessdegrees of affectation and habituation to adequately track the social nuan-
ces involved. Foucault called this the microphysics of power (1979), indi-
cating the degree to which patterns of authority are broadly routinized as
habit with minor variations from individual to individual. Indeed, a com-
plex range of motivations and habits are at work in any population, from
intelligible emotional states like love and hate, to the simple routines of
habit. How such patterns articulate with the embodiment and representa-
tion of political power in the more conventional sense is the stuff of
history. For instance, the powerful effects of ritualized hatred and commu-nal identification in motivating warfare and terrorism stand an obvious
example.
Legitimacy, then, serves as the glue holding institutional authority
together. Indeed, legitimacy is an embodied aspect of institutions of domi-
nation, a solidaristic belief in the authority of established social powers.
In this sense, such belief forms a core aspect of institutional paradigms
central to maintenance of a mode of domination as routine social order.
Legitimacy thus constitutes a special case of belief whether more custom-
ary or elaborated through doctrines and other such codes
that can bedifferentiated from other patterns of ideation in a social order. Often ritua-
lized and developed as mythologies in premodern societies, such ideations
sometimes develop into ideologies and legal doctrines in modern states
(Levi-Strauss, 1967). Legitimacy thus represents a bridge case between
modes of belief and modes of domination in any society, underscoring the
analytic character of the distinctions drawn here and the need to track
actual patterns of institutional differentiation empirically.
In most cases, organized hierarchies figure centrally in institutional
orders. Indeed, the latter depend on the embodiment of at least traces ofsolidaristic sentiment. Thus hierarchical authority presupposes embodiment
of moral facts of solidarity in a sense of conscience and more diffuse and
improvised patterns of habitus.
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Thanks to the authority invested in them, moral rules are genuine forces, which con-front our desires and needs, our appetites of all sorts, when they promise to become
immoderateThey contain in themselves everything necessary to bend the will, to con-
tain and constrain it, to incline it in such and such a direction. One can say literally that
they are forces. (Durkheim, 1973, p. 41)
Such legitimacy enables institutions to persist over time, as embodied
dispositions stabilize legitimate authority, the core of institutional orders as
obligatory patterns of social relations over time.
We have thus reconstructed Weber through concepts introduced by
Durkheim and Bourdieu, giving us a robust theory of what makes institu-tional hierarchy possible in the first place. Indeed, the mode of legitimacy
is central to all known human societies, as pre-state varieties of legitimate
authority play important roles in hunter-gatherer societies, though in such
cases legitimacy remains tightly coupled with clan and tribal customs and
rituals. The fusion of other domains mapped out in the modes of social
practices mapped above, with the core social practices of legitimacy prior
to modern representative democracies, had to undergo significant differen-
tiation before the social sciences were even possible. Of course, history
presents a wide diversity of modes of domination and legitimacy, which wecan not go into here beyond noting the elaborate institutional differentia-
tion that marks the rise of modern constitutional democracies, Soviet-type
societies, and the like.25
Certainly, legitimacy though very diverse in terms of degrees and
types of embodiment stands at the core of any mode of domination cap-
able of achieving institutional coherence for some span of time. But domi-
nation also usually entails distinctive hierarchies of organization and
distinctive means of applying force, conceptualized here as the mode of
organization and the mode of destruction.Kinship patterns stand as the most archaic mode of organization in his-
tory, and continue to be fundamental in all more complex organizational
patterns. Nothing captures this more clearly than the resonance of the
vague phrase family values in recent American politics. Indeed, extended
family groupings kinship were reorganized around clusters of warriors
in a new type of hierarchy in ancient times, patriarchal domination. Weber
described this in terms of the emergence of the patriarch and his staff
(1978, pp. 228231). This pattern served as the basis of the archaic state in
all known cases, which entailed displacing pre-state patterns of organiza-tion such as clans and tribes (Sagan, 1985). The archaic state, in turn,
enabled the invention of writing in some cases, at first limited to scribes,
religious figures, and other patriarchal elites in a patternGoody and Watt
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(1987) called oligoliteracy. Thus the shift from a kinship to a patriarchalpattern of domination enabled in some cases the shift away from a purely
oral pattern of transmitting knowledge and ritual, to a pattern in which a
social elite wielded new modes of mediation bound up with the secrets of
literacy itself. We again see here an instance of tight coupling of various
modes, here the mode of organization and the mode of mediation. Indeed,
for thousands of years, oligoliteracy remained tightly coupled with the
patriarchal mode of organization. Today, we tend to construe organization
per se with formal organizations in the sense of bureaucracies, though this
latter is only a subcategory of organization. Moreover, we also tend to des-ignate all formal organizations as bureaucracies, a problematic designation
with certain organizational forms such as fascistic or Marxist-Leninist
party states (Garcelon, 2005, pp. 2735).
The mode of destruction (Foucault, 1970)stands the final aspect of the
mode of domination. To be realized in practice, legitimacy and organiza-
tion must combine with instrumentalities of domination. We can thus map
the mode of destruction in terms of implements spears, swords, guns,
and the like and how people are ordered in relation to them warrior
bands, militias, armies, and so on. All of these gain coordination throughrelations of destruction, the hierarchical pattern of command and control
that sets such instrumentalities into motion. Again, the differentiation of
such instrumentalities of destruction used by agents in distinct institutional
and noninstitutional contexts marks human history. In prehistory, for
instance, we see a generalized fusion of such instrumentalities with modes
of development, specifically hunting tools. Institutional differentiation of
the mode of destruction followed from the creation of hierarchies of legiti-
mate command with the rise of archaic states. Indeed, the owl of Minerva
flies only at dusk, for only the perspective of full differentiation in the mod-ern world places the mode of destruction in such clear perspective. Indeed,
the recent development of substate terrorism appears a tactic developed
to counter the seamless web of domination engendered by the modern
state. We thus see that the mode of domination entails modes of legitimacy,
organization, and destruction as mapped in Table 5.
The differentiation of modes of communication, belief, kin reproduc-
tion, economy, and domination is the stuff of institutional history. The
above five modes and various sub-modes are analytic distinctions, insofar
as variations of all five are either known or assumed present in all instancesof human society since the coevolutionary differentiation of languages, on
the one hand, and of Homo sapiens from earlier, now extinct human
species, on the other. Certainly, the institutional differentiation of such
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modes tended to be slight in hunter-gatherer societies, about which our
knowledge remains only fragmentary at best
take, for instance, the differ-entiation of sacred and profane times, or the ritualistic ordering of cere-
monies, meals, birth and death events, hunting expeditions, and so on. In
hunter-gatherer societies, such differentiation entails at best a modest
specialization of tasks, and little institutional differentiation in terms of the
formation of distinct fields.
Indeed, there is nothing intrinsic about such patterns of differentiation:
such anthrogeneric modes of social practices remain only heuristic devices
for arranging evidence of actual paths of institutional differentiation in his-
tory. As we apply anthrogeneric concepts to specific circumstances, andthen engage in secondary, comparative-historical generalizations on the
basis of such analyses of specific circumstances, we generate what Weber
called ideal-type concepts. Such ideal types like generic models discussed
below show in practice how the social analytic bridges to the analysis of
specific circumstances, and from here to the formulation of specific empiri-
cal hypotheses, something discussed in more detail below.
For now, Fig. 2 presents a very brief overview of how to historically
organize some basic ideal-type concepts from Webers Economy and
Society, indicating the rich complexity involved in tracking these patternsempirically. The patterns of institutional differentiation mapped by ideal
types remain tightly coupled to patterns of agency and reflexive action in
particular times and places, and thus we turn to a few important observa-
tions about agency and action as a bridge to the following discussion of
explanatory narratives.
Agency and Reflexive Action
Two common traits regarding human agency have predominated in Anglo-
American sociology in recent decades, a tendency to conceptualize agency
simply as action per se (and individuals as actors), and a tendency to
Table 5. The Mode of Domination.Mode of DominationSubsuming
(a) The mode of legitimacy
(b) The mode of organization
(c) The mode of destruction
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identify causes in social life external to agency. As a consequence, both an
overburdened concept (action), and a chronic tendency to assign causesto
structural factors, implicitly frame much Anglo-American sociology.26
But the tendency to concentrate on structural causal factors is also wide-
spread elsewhere, such as in Bourdieus work, despite his recognition of the
potential causal efficacy of reflexive action at times (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992, pp. 120
138).In considerable part, this tendency represents the long effects of an
assumed but problematic dualism of structure and action in Western sociol-
ogy. A similar tendency to locate causality at the structural level in
timeperiod
antiquity antiquitycategories
of ideal typesthrough early modernity
pre-history modernity
societies &
economies
hunter-
gatherer
societies
(clans,
tribes, etc.)
Oikos agrarian
societies
more capitalistic societies
more socialistic societies
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------states patriarchal feudal representative democracies
plebiscitarian authority
patrimonial varieties of dictatorships
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------routine forms of
authority
traditional traditional traditional traditional and legal-rational
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------non-routine, non-state &
founding forms of
authority
charismatic charismatic charismatic charismatic
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------dominant
organizational form
kinship extended authorities bureaucracieshouseholds and staffs
Fig. 2. Temporal Ordering of Some Basic Ideal Types of Societies, States,
Organizations, and Authorities in Webers Economy and Society. Note: Weber did
not track such type concepts in unilinear-evolutionary terms, that is, he noted that
history has sometimes seen what might appear earlier forms reappearing at later
times, though capitalism, socialism, and for the most part, bureaucracies are
modern. Weber also identified many, many intermediate forms not shown here,
such as the Sta ndestaat in some parts of late medieval/early modern Europe. Also,
the chart makes more schematic some of Webers analyses than they are, obscuring,
for instance, his identification of the medieval Catholic Church as the originator of
early bureaucracy in the Western world.
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Bourdieus work
work that aimed at displacing subjective
objective bin-aries with that between the embodied and the relational shows that such
tendencies are reinforced by additional initial assumptions about the object
domain of the social sciences. Indeed, one key to revealing such additional
initial assumptions is a close analysis of the concepts agency and actor. As
we saw above, habitus enables us to frame agency in terms of an array of
dispositions that predominate in much of everyday life, particularly regard-
ing routines. At the same time, Bourdieus tendency to downplay the causal
efficacy of reflexive action underscores that action itself needs to be further
conceptualized.Recent neurology tells us that reflexive action is only about 10 percent
of agentic behavior (Montague & Berns, 2002). This needs to be placed in
context, though, for habitus with its institutional paradigms enables more
complex reflective action by enabling individuals to devote attention to
what they are doing in the sense of reflexively decided courses of behavior.
Thus, though (reflexive) actions may probabilistically only be roughly
10 percent of agentic behavior per se, certainly such actions are often
disproportionately important in reconstructing causal chains in human
history, to paraphrase the Authors Introduction to The Protestant Ethic.Following from this, we also need to differentiate types of reflexive
action in terms of possible types of motivation. As mentioned above, the
problem of motivation is complex as Weber recognized, motivations
can only be interpreted indirectly, taking behavior as evidence (1978,
pp. 814). The indirect identification of distinct types of motivation
follows from the fact that some intentional actions clearly involving delib-
eration are impossible to explain in terms of self-interested motivations, as
the behavior of the 19 individuals who hijacked jets and flew them into
buildings on September 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington, DC,or the firefighters who began ascending the stairs in one of the burning
Twin Towers buildingonly to be killed as the building collapsed on top of
them, demonstrates.27
In any case, we need to modify here Webers fourfold typology of
action with its distinctions between purposive-instrumental, value-
rational, traditional, and affective action (1978, pp. 2426) in light of
the discussion of agency and habitus above. First, we recognize that affec-
tive action is reflexive action motivated by the emotional influence of love,
affection, dislike, repugnance, hatred, and the like, as in Webers originalconception. Next, we rename purposive-instrumental action as strategic
action. This clarifies what such action entails as it assumes practical goals
in a strategic sense for persons considering them. Practical goals in a
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strategic sense means here that strategic interests play predominant rolessteering social action, and thus practical concerns such as economic, politi-
cal, and other such interests predominate in their motivation. Webers
concept of value-rational action, in contrast, is guided by non-immediate,
non-strategic, symbolic motivations, such as philosophical inclinations,
religious beliefs, scientific questioning, artistic proclivities, and the like.
And tensions between strategic and value-rational motivations have figured
centrally at key points in human history. [V]ery frequently the world
images that have been created by ideas have, like switchmen, determined
the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamics of interest(Weber, 1946, p. 280).
This brings us to Webers problematic concept of traditional action,
which tends to collapse conscious adherence to a tradition and its ortho-
doxies with conventional behavior per se. The concepts of habitus and
institutional paradigm enable us to resolve Webers overburdened concept
of traditional action by shifting to both a broader conception of value-
rational action, and bringing in the concept of habitus. Such a broader
range of value-rational action considers conscious, deliberative reflection in
favor of tradition an example of value-rational action, while simultaneouslyidentifying conventionalism with the realm of habitus and institutional
paradigms proper.28
From here, we can identify many additional subtypes and hybrid
motivations for reflexive action. Take what Erving Goffman (1959) called
dramaturgical action, and what Jeffrey Alexander (2010) modifying
Goffman and developing an analysis of political action in the contempor-
ary United States terms performative action. One can certainly question
the range that Goffman assigns to dramaturgical action in his 1959 text,
as Goffman himself does in the last pages. In contrast, performativeaction as Alexander applies it to national presidential campaigns is finely
attuned to its subject matter. Indeed, performative action sits between
strategic and value-rational action along a continuum of types of reflexive
action.
The above indicates the problematic nature of trying to conceptualize all
sociologically relevant action as strategic action as Fligstein and McAdam
do, though the latter define this so broadly that it appears to overlap other
types of action.29 Are value-rational actions always strategic actions, for
instance? A related tendency in Fligstein and McAdam is to frame all fieldsas strategic action fields along lines of incumbents and challengers, a
move that gives short shrift to beliefs and institutions, norms, and the
longue duree of customs and traditions in many social orders.30 All of this
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is bound up with absence of a sense of historicity in Fligstein andMcAdams proposed model of general social theory.
And indeed, the development of an adequate range of ideal types of
action for analyzing the range of human actions in history underscores the
need to reverse what Elias called sociologys retreat into the present
(1998). We turn to the application of one such action subtype dramaturgi-
cal action to actual skeins of social development in the section below on
explanatory narrative in order to illustrate the dynamic relation between
social analytics and explanatory narratives. For now, let us briefly note that
other aspects of human agency enabling types of actions require consider-able conceptual development. Take, for instance, the social-psychological
concepts of personality and a wide suite of related concepts that help define
it, from cognition to consciousness, mind to the unconscious, and so on.
Indeed, personality entails a broad conception of the emergent properties
that make a person a person distinguished by a proper name with a specific
life history that identifies her or him.31
The analytic differentiation of anthrogeneric concepts and modes of
social practices offered above raises questions of how they enable formula-
tion of models and causal hypotheses. Though the development of modelscontributes to the analytic of society, in fact the formulation of these
models can most clearly be understood in relation to the formulation of
specific causal hypotheses regarding events in which human agency and
interaction are taken to be causally significant. This brings us to the topic
of explanatory narratives.
EXPLANATORY NARRATIVES
We now return to the proposition outlined at the beginning of this analysis,
namely, that most explanations in the social sciences should properly be
conceived as explanatory narratives. Explanatory narrative subordinates
the identification of causal factors to the reconstruction of a specific
enchainment of events in a historical process.32 Such explanatory narratives
grapple with the empirical problem of how to factor multiple experiential
perspectives of various agents into a broader narrative sequence focused on
key causal links in the chain of a historically irreducible sequence involvingthe interaction of many people, as well as the unintended consequences of
such interaction. The multiple time-horizon problem [of many agents]
remains the central theoretical barrier to moving formalized narrative
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beyond the simple-minded analysis of stage processes and rational actionsequences. Serious institutional analysis cannot be conducted without
addressing it (Abbott, 1992, p. 441).
In order to do this, explanatory narrative subsumes a distinct model of
causal analysis, what Abbott calls the variables paradigm (1992). In this
currently predominant model of causal analysis in Western sociology,
evidence is arrayed in terms of variables, with some factors identified as
independent and treated as causes, other factors identified as dependent
and treated as effects, and mediating variables often identified as altering
the effects of independent variables on dependent variables. In so doing,historicity is often lost, and the result is instances of analysis that develop
on the assumption of causal generality while rarely achieving such general-
ity. Abbotts suggestion provides a way to cut through this by subordinat-
ing the analysis of variables to explanatory narratives. Thus much of
statistical analysis would gain a means for situating its analysis in terms of
explanatory narratives of skeins of events. Of course, the longue duree
remains, but very long-term explanations in the social sciences have yielded
very little so far, one reason that historians tend to dominate influential
work on time spans of such a long temporal scale. Indeed, the most influen-tial attempt to do this Marxs historical materialism exemplifies this
difficulty. Indeed, Marxs work presents many lacunae when trying to
bridge his broad theory of capitalism, for instance, with his analysis of
particular courses of events, as we will see below.
Certainly, such a framing of the problem situation between theory and
research comes at a cost, specifically, the cost of abandoning cross-case
hypothesis formulation in much of the social sciences. Yet very little has
been accomplished in this regard in any case. Take Theda Skocpols
States and Social Revolutions, an influential analysis that develops anexplanatory strategy for explaining three political revolutions the
French Revolution in the 1790s, the (first) Russian Revolution of the early
twentieth century, and the Chinese Revolution. Skocpol argues that the
ultimate objective of comparative historical analysis is the actual illu-
mination of causal regularities across sets of cases, and defines her aim in
States and Social Revolution as understanding and explaining the general-
izable logic at work in the entire set of revolutions under discussion
the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and the Russian of
Revolution of 1917.
33
She goes on to explain her cases by identifying twosets of institutional conditions sufficient for explaining revolutions
(Skocpol, 1979, p. 339, note 11). The first set of conditions is met by the
classification of a certain type of state three proto-bureaucratic agrarian
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empires
institutionally articulated to a certain type of social order, a lar-gely peasant society dominated by an agrarian landed class. The second
set of conditions is met when the relation between state and dominant
agrarian class fatally constricts the ability of state leaders to successfully
negotiate simultaneous pressures on the state brought on by an unfavor-
able geopolitical situation and revolts of peasants from below (Skocpol,
1979, pp. 284293).
Skocpols identification of some similar initial conditions across three
cases, however, nowhere clarifies or justifies her claim that the illumina-
tion of causal regularities across sets of cases constitutes the ultimateobjective of comparative historical analysis. Indeed, the linkages between
the explanatory suppositions of States and Social Revolutions and its sub-
stantive conclusions are barely sketched, almost cryptic, and have gener-
ated a large body of critical comment, some of it widely off the mark in
part due to the elusiveness of the original text.34
The sum of explicit linkages between explanatory suppositions and sub-
stantive analysis in the book consist of two paragraphs summarizing John
Stuart Mills comparative Method of Agreement and Method of
Difference. Skocpol uses these throughout to identify similarities and dif-ferences among her three cases, and between these cases and the control-
ling cases of England, Germany, and Japan. The difficult problems
Skocpol leaves hanging include the fact that Mill designed the methods of
agreement and difference for the study of nonsocial phenomena, and him-
self argued that they were inapplicable to human social affairs, due to the
complicating factors of human agency and the impossibility of subjecting
historical processes to controlled experiment.35
Over a number of years, Skocpol has hedged concerning her method in
States and Social Revolutions (1984), underscoring how vexed attempts toidentify cross-case causes on the scale of a state has proven to be. Indeed,
strategies have developed since the middle of the twentieth century among
some Western sociologists to rule out study of cases beyond the level of
outcomes for particular individuals, sometimes justified by the notion that
only a sufficient number a sufficient N can be treated statistically
(Lieberson, 1981). In short, such sociologists answer to the problems iden-
tified above is simply to exclude a vast number of potential candidates
from causal analysis at all, including much of human history for which sta-
tistics are not available, as well as some contemporary societies withauthoritarian legacies, such as the Russian Federation, or with active
authoritarian regimes that makes statistical analysis difficult to impossible,
such as China. Moreover, this phenomenon raises the sticky case of what
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counts as a case, something that underscores the range and variety ofissues that impede paradigm formation in the social sciences.
Clarifying the role of generic models in mediating the open-ended, work-
ing relation between social analytics and explanatory narratives points a
way forward. A generic model is provisional, insofar as it presents a preli-
minary framing of a given situation for heuristic purposes, a framing that
allows sociological analysis to proceed. Indeed, together with ideal-type
concepts as discussed above, generic models bridge the boundary between
such analytics and explanatory narratives in the social science, as Fig. 3
shows. To the extent that generic models entail causal assumptions, theseassumptions are recognized as such by the sociologist and taken as heuristic
devices to be modified as evidence is gathered and considered from differ-
ent angles.
A key conceptual resource for construing generic models are what
Weber called ideal types, heuristic generalizations that represent major pat-
terns of development and differentiation in human history through con-
cepts such as feudalism or representative democracy. Along with
generic models, such ideal types form on an open-ended basis in the back
and forth of development of social analytics and formulation of particularexplanatory narratives. Unfortunately, Weber also called ideal types
what on the lower right of Fig. 3 arelisted as historical models of actual
institutions and social relations in given places at given places in given
points in time. Weber here relied on a problematic distinction between
generic and genetic ideal types, a distinction that makes little sense
(Weber, 1949, pp. 100103), for a genetic ideal type is simply a social-
scientific simplification of an actual state of affairs characterizing social
relations taken to be causally significant factors in a particular case.
variables