Lullaby,+Chorale,+or+Hurdy-Gurdy+Tune?

Straddling the two disciplines, historical sociology is marked by a clash between historians’ approach, looking for causal influences that run through their specialized historical time and place, and sociologists’ approach, looking for structures and processes common across historical settings. Historical sociologists have to make several choices: · Genre. “//Historical social criticism// revisits the past as a means of informing human choices in the present and future…. //Pattern identification// searches for recurrent structures and sequences across time and space…. //Scope extension// applies procedures that sociologists have created in studies of contemporary social life to historical situations…. //Historical process analysis// examines how social interactions impinge on each other in space and time” (pp. 2-3). In most of these genres, history and sociology don’t talk to each other and so “sociologists and historians at large remain woefully ignorant of each other’s sources, methods models, ideas, and discoveries” (p. 4). · Ontology. “…major ontological choices concern the sorts of social entities whose coherent existence analysts can reasonably assume” (p. 5). “//Holism// is the doctrine that social structures have their own self-sustaining logics” that is, major institutions have a causal force all their own. “//Methodological individualism// insists on human individuals as the basic or unique social reality” (p. 5) as in a microeconomics-like calculation. Tilly criticizes the failure to link the micro preference or decision to macro to larger institutional levels. “//[P]henomenological individualism// refers to the doctrine that individual consciousness is the primary or exclusive site of social life” (p. 5); social structures and processes are aggregates of individual responses. “//Relational realism// [is] the doctrine that transactions, interactions, social ties, and conversations constitute the central stuff of social life” (p. 6). In other words, social relations are primary. As I understand it, this is a middle ground between individualism and holism, both of which (back to Tilly now) overtook relational realism in the 20th century. These four ontologies can be mixed and matched (p. 6). · Explanatory logic, the subject of some of the “hottest disagreements” (p. 7). “//Skepticism// considers historical processes to be so complex, impenetrable, or particular as to defy explanation…. //Covering law// accounts consider explanation to consist of subjecting robust empirical generalizations to higher and higher level generalizations, the most general of all standing as laws” (p. 7)—this seems to be in the KKV independent-to-dependent-variable tradition. “//Propensity// accounts consider explanation to consist of reconstructing a given actor’s state at the threshold of action, with that state variously stipulated as motivation, consciousness, need, organization, or momentum” (p. 7). These actors may be individuals or entities. Tilly refers, with tacit criticism, to the possibility of psychological reductionism. Covering law is sometimes depicted as “science” and propensity explanations as “interpretation” (p. 8). “//[S]ystemic// explanations… consist of specifying a place for some event, structure, or process within a larger self-maintaining set of interdependent elements, showing how the event, structure, or process in question serves and/or results from interactions among the larger set of elements” (p. 7). “//Mechanism-based// accounts select salient features of episodes, or significant differences among episodes, and explain them by identifying within those episodes robust mechanisms of relatively general scope” (p. 8). The goals are more modest here—“selective explanation of salient features by means of partial causal analogies” (p. 8). · Mechanisms. Here Tilly slips into defending his preferred approach, mechanism-based accounts. Recurring mechanisms can be mistaken for covering laws, but in the former there is much more room for different starting conditions, interaction of different mechanisms, and thus variability across instances. These are not “law-like empirical generalizations” (p. 8). Tilly next presents his familiar nesting dolls of—from smaller to larger—mechanisms, processes, and episodes. He also classifies mechanisms into environmental (external influences), cognitive, and relational (referring to “connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks”) (p. 9). He proceeds to use mechanisms as a base from which to attack rational choice theory. As we know (but Tilly puts it well), RC theory “centers on situations of choice among relatively well defined alternative actions with more or less known costs and consequences according to previously established schedules of preference” (pp. 9-10). RC focuses on cognitive mechanisms, but there are “upstream” problems of how to explain “how preferences, available resources, choice situations, and knowledge of consequences form or change”; “midstream” concerns about how people make decisions (empirical evidence doesn’t support the RC account except in narrow conditions); and “downstream” problems of how to account for the differences between what people decide to do and what they actually do, as well as the failure to connect individual actions to social consequences. · Practical procedures. He declines here to offer a taxonomy as he has done with the above four choices. Instead, he offers practical advice on “undertaking historical analysis from a social scientific perspective” (p. 11). For instance, first “define the phenomenon you want to describe and explain,” study at least three instances of it, try to characterize the kinds of settings in which the phenomenon has happened, learn what historians say about it and with what evidence, form theories, clarify “how your own analysis of the phenomenon under study will build upon, improve upon, or differ from the best historical work you have found,” clarify where you and the historians fall in the four choices (genre, ontology, explanatory strategies, and mechanisms), and so on into more specific steps of stating the argument and how you will evaluate it. Tilly acknowledges his “personal preference for process analysis, relational realism, mechanism-based explanations, and relational mechanisms” (p. 11). || = = = = = = = = = = = =
 * =Title= || "Lullaby, Chorale, or Hurdy-Gurdy Tune?" ||
 * =Author= || Charles Tilly ||
 * =Date= || Feb. 16, 2011 ||
 * =Summary By= || Suzanne Ghais ||
 * =Summary= || Tilly seeks to improve method in historical sociology by examining its method, ontology, and epistemology. The thesis is that historical sociology “works better when its practitioners know what genres, ontologies, explanatory logics, mechanisms, sources, methods, and arguments they have chosen, why they have adopted them, and what rules those choices entail” (p. 13).
 * =Discussion points= || This article suffers from ambiguity of purpose—to categorize different approaches to historical sociology and argue for clear and explicit choices, to critique rational choice theory, to advance his own methodological approach, and to teach scholars-in-training how to practice historical sociology. (Perhaps that’s why the article was so hard to summarize and my summary so long—sorry!!) However, as we inch towards our own dissertations and make methodological choices, Tilly offers an interesting alternative to the choices that have been emphasized in our methodology courses, from the //x//-causes-//y// “neopositivist” approach to interpretive methods such as ethnography. ||

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