Isaac Ariail Reed

Justifying Sociological Knowledge : From Realism to Interpretation

In the context of calls for “postpositivist” sociology, realism has emerged as a powerful and compelling epistemology for social science. In transferring and transforming scientific realism—a philosophy of natural science—into a justificatory discourse for social science, realism splits into two parts: a strict, highly naturalistic realism and a reflexive, more mediated, and critical realism. Both forms of realism, however, suffer from conceptual ambiguities, omissions, and elisions that make them an inappropriate epistemology for social science. Examination of these problems in detail reveals how a different perspective—centered on the interpretation of meaning—could provide a better justification for social inquiry, and in particular a better understanding of sociological theory and the construction of sociological explanations.

Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era*

In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study. The nature of, and relationship between, these contexts is imagined in philosophy; managed, rewarded, and sanctioned in graduate seminars, journal reviews, and tenure cases; and practiced in research. Positivism proposed to produce objective knowledge by suppressing the nonlogical and nonobservational aspects of the contexts. Attacks on positivism disputed the effectiveness and rationality of this strategy. Thus “postpositivism” can be understood as a series of attempts to reconstitute the relation between the contexts as the basis for accurate social knowledge. Two of the most important of these attempts—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—are considered, and a synthesis, which draws from the insights of cultural sociology, is proposed.

Power Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions

This article draws on the conceptual link between power and causality to develop an account of the relational, discursive, and performative dimensions of power. Each proposed dimension of power is grounded in a different understanding of social causes: relational-realist, discursive-hermeneutic, and performative-pragmatic. For the purposes of empirical analysis, this dimensional schema crosscuts the classic sources of power typology developed by Michael Mann and others, thus rendering the conceptual apparatus for pursuing sociological research on power more complex and explanatorily effective. The schema is illustrated by an example from comparative-historical sociology: explaining the storming of the Bastille and its effects. A series of research questions for investigating the relative autonomy of performative power is proposed. Finally, the current schema is situated vis-à-vis classic sociological theories of power, including the arguments of Steven Lukes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others.This article draws on the conceptual link between power and causality to develop an account of the relational, discursive, and performative dimensions of power. Each proposed dimension of power is grounded in a different understanding of social causes: relational-realist, discursive-hermeneutic, and performative-pragmatic. For the purposes of empirical analysis, this dimensional schema crosscuts the classic sources of power typology developed by Michael Mann and others, thus rendering the conceptual apparatus for pursuing sociological research on power more complex and explanatorily effective. The schema is illustrated by an example from comparative-historical sociology: explaining the storming of the Bastille and its effects. A series of research questions for investigating the relative autonomy of performative power is proposed. Finally, the current schema is situated vis-a-vis classic sociological theories of power, including the arguments of Steven Lukes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, among ot...

Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft:

Sociological explanations of the Salem witch trials, and of witch-hunts in the West more generally, have focused on economic transition, political instability, and the functional aspects of witchcraft belief. A more interpretive approach to the explanation of Salem is proposed: an analysis of the intersection of the gendered symbolization of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts and the larger tensions within Puritan culture at the close of the 17th century. A broad theoretical implication of this interpretive shift is also proposed: that a cultural-sociological approach to witch-hunting as symbolic action can bring together feminist theorizations of witch-hunting as an exercise in patriarchal power with the social history of the broad, structural causes of witchhunting in pre-modern Europe and New England.

Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology

Sociologists have long been interested in understanding the emergence of new social kinds. We argue that sociologists’ formation stories have been mischaracterized as noncausal, descriptive, or interpretive. Traditional “forcing-cause” accounts describe regularized relations between fixed entities with specific properties. The three dominant approaches to causality—variable causality, treatments and manipulations, and mechanisms—all refer to forcing causes. But formation stories do not fit the forcing-causes framework because accounts of formation violate the assumptions that ground forcing-cause accounts and instead emphasize eventfulness, assemblage, and self-representation. Yet these accounts are, we argue, fundamentally causal. In particular, formation stories provide the historical, empirical boundaries for the functioning of forcing-cause accounts. We catalog the breadth of formation stories in sociology and use examples from diverse literatures to highlight how thinking of formation stories as causal accounts can improve our understanding of the relationship of history and culture to causal analysis.

Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography

We propose three interlinked ways that theory helps researchers build causal claims from ethnographic research. First, theory guides the casing and re-casing of a topic of study. Second, theoretical work helps craft a clear causal question via the construction of a contrast space of the topic of investigation. Third, the researcher uses theory to identify social mechanisms that condense causal accounts. We show how each step can accommodate the everyday meanings typically central to ethnographic research’s contributions. This tripartite role for theory thus preserves ethnography’s traditionally recognized strength in interpretive validity, while realizing ethnography’s potential for offering causal, and partly generalizable, accounts that can engage the wider sociological discipline. The discussion brings ethnographic research into conversation with recent debates on the role of mechanisms, comparative and counterfactual thinking in causal accounts. We illustrate and defend our argument for theory in ethnography with an extensive analysis of a contemporary ethnographic monograph along with briefer attention to parallel uses of theory in two other ethnographic studies.

Chains of Power and Their Representation

Power is the ability to send and bind someone else to act on one’s behalf, a relation that depends upon habits of interpretation. For persons attempting to complete projects, power involves communicating with, recruiting, and controlling subordinates and confronting those who are not in such a relationship of recruitment. This leads to a basic theoretical vocabulary about power players and their projects—a model of rector, actor, and other. As multiple relations of sending and binding become mutually implicated, chains of power—understood as simultaneously social and symbolic—emerge. The vocabulary presented for analyzing power is developed with reference to a series of instances, including the exploitation of labor and police violence. Finally, the paper analyzes a case study of an imperial encounter on the American frontier and examines therein a shift in how political power was represented, with implications for the sociology of transitions to modernity.

Ratio via Machina Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology

Recently, sociologists have expended much effort in attempts to define social mechanisms. We intervene in these debates by proposing that sociologists in fact have a choice to make between three standards of what constitutes a good mechanistic explanation: substantial, formal, and metaphorical mechanistic explanation. All three standards are active in the field, and we suggest that a more complete theory of mechanistic explanation in sociology must parse these three approaches to draw out the implicit evaluative criteria appropriate to each. Doing so will reveal quite different preferences for explanatory scope and nuance hidden under the ubiquitous term “social mechanism.” Finally, moving beyond extensive debates about realism and antirealism, we argue prescriptively against “mechanistic fundamentalism” for sociology and advocate for a more pluralistic understanding of social causality.

Ethnography, theory, and sociology as a human science: An interlocution

Ethnography has compelled sociology to recognize and articulate the implications of the fact that it is a human science. This response to readers of Interpretation and Social Knowledge is presented as an exercise in ‘working epistemics’: a reflection on knowledge production that connects the philosophy of social science to extant problems in specific subfields and methodological approaches in sociology, themselves connected to the work of making empirically driven truth claims in sociology. In so doing, it addresses the investigator’s reflexivity about his or her knowledge production, causality and contrastive explanation, social power and the theory of fields, and finally the relationship between hermeneutic sociology and the sociological lexicon bequeathed by a ‘theory of action’.

Poder: dimensões relacional, discursiva e performática

Este artigo se debruca sobre o par analitico poder-causalidade com o objetivo de tecer um comentario sobre as dimensoes relacional, discursiva e performatica de poder. Cada uma dessas dimensoes de poder esta enraizada em um diferente entendimento de causalidade social: realista-relacional, disucursiva-hermeneutica, e performatica-pragmatica. Para os fins de uma analise empirica, sera proposto um cruzamento entre esse modelo dimensional e a classica tipologia das fontes de poder desenvolvida por Michael Mann e outros, para que dessa forma a pesquisa sociologica sobre poder se arme com um aparato conceitual mais solido e ganhe mais complexidade e efetividade em suas explicacoes. O exemplo que melhor ilustra o modelo que aqui sera debatido e uma imagem retirada da sociologia historico-comparativa: a Queda da Bastilha e suas causas e consequencias. Uma serie de questoes de pesquisa sera levantada no texto com o objetivo de investigar a autonomia relativa do poder performativo. Por ultimo, sera esbocada uma aproximacao entre o modelo aqui analisado e as teorias sociologicas de poder, incluindo os argumentos de Steven Lukes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, entre outros.