Contemporary Sociological Theory. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ First, theorists must account for how actors behave and second they must identify how the interdependent behavior of actors in the system combines to produce system behavior. This leads to a three-step “boat” argument consisting of situating actors in context, explaining individual action, and aggregating those actions back to the system level. Rational-actor models were, for Coleman, the most mathematically tractable solution to the first challenge of accounting for actor behavior, allowing one to profitably focus on the more complicated interdependence and systems parts.

      Coming full circle to early exchange theorists and work on social networks, Coleman’s later work on social capital (1988) identifies networks of trust as an essential element in modern society. In this now classic treatment, Coleman describes how the relations actors have with others provide them with a generalized capacity for action – in much the same way as economic capital allows investors to build factories and start companies. While defining exactly what counts as “social capital” has sparked something of a minor industry in sociology, all agree that factors that contribute to informal interactions and social resources provide advantages. For example, knowing many people (and, importantly, the right people) increases your odds of knowing someone who can help you find a job, which provides a clear example of how social capital can generate economic capital. Social capital also provides a collective route to solving social dilemmas, as people can mobilize their social networks to overcome problems. Theorists have argued that social capital is key to understanding political participation and the ability of communities to cooperate for common good (Putnam, 2000). That relationships can provide an unspecified future resource changes the incentive structure implicit in much of the early work on social exchange, making decisions about who to exchange with and how power is distributed complex.

      Harrison White: Structure from (Relational) Action

      A common avenue out of the structure–action duality rests on social networks. The root of this idea is that in most social situations, action is not independent, but rather “embedded” with the actions of others (Granovetter 1985; see Part III of this volume). That is, people’s actions are in response to the prior actions of others and are mutually interdependent. Through social relations ranging from trivial fleeting interactions to deeply meaningful patterns of kin, social networks provide a way to simultaneously situate meaningful interaction within an extant, realized structure of prior action. Arguably, one of the theoretically richest accounts of this perspective has been made by Harrison White (b. 1930).

      Harrison White entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of 15 years and went on to receive a PhD in theoretical physics 5 years later. He leveraged a Ford Foundation fellowship at Princeton University to earn his PhD in sociology with a dissertation based on management conflict (White 1961). His early work on the structural implications of kinship patterns (White 1963) formalized earlier ideas from structural anthropology and laid the foundation for his later work on abstracting structural patterns from observed networks. Kinship systems provide a clear example of how primary relations (marriage and descent) can extend to other known roles (for example, your mother’s mother is your “grandmother” and your mother’s mother’s daughter’s daughter is your cousin). The various concatenations of the two primary relations can be used to describe the full kinship system. Moreover, rules about who is allowed to marry provide a constraint that shapes social action in ways that reinforce the system. White recognized that one can extend this argument to other kinds of relations and discover roles in systems by empirically tracing the most common patterns of extended network ties. Known as “blockmodeling,” this approach founded a long tradition of research building on earlier role theories. The ultimate, abstract extension of these ideas takes White beyond actors to “identities” and from the specific analyses of particular networks to the general strategies actors use to gain control (White, 1992; 2004).

      White’s second major contribution to social theory is a direct attack on classical economic market models. In a series of papers culminating in his book Markets from Networks (2004), White demonstrates that the basic competition model for commodities that is the foundation for most work on markets is really just a special case of the many possible ways markets can be organized. Instead of focusing on the supply and demand for commodities, White focuses on observable relations among product producers and how they negotiate a trade-off between the quality of goods produced and the prices for those goods in comparison to similar other firms. In White’s model, firms choose a position along a quality–price array to offer goods. For example, Walmart seeks to offer low-quality goods at the lowest prices, while Target offers slightly higher-quality goods at slightly higher prices. As you move up the quality–price curve, you would find retailers, such as Macy’s, deliberately eschewing low prices in an effort to signal high quality. This insight has deep implications for market failures, prices, and control.

      The piece reprinted in the following text existed as a mimeographed copy in circulation among White’s students (and students of students of students) that we first published in our third edition. While we are typically used to thinking of categories, such as “race” and “sex,” as essential fixed characteristics of people, White argues for a conception of categories that rests on the correspondence of network ties (Nets) with categories (Cats). A “catnet” is thus the correspondence between these two features of a population. Substantively, the idea reflects notions that we regularly observe – category membership (such as being “male” or “female”) is only relevant to the degree that it shapes our relations with others. Or, to flip it around, features come to have structural meaning when they shape social relations. The reality of a category is only meaningful when enacted in relations.

      Anthony Giddens and the Duality of Structure

      Giddens (b. 1938) grew up in a lower-middle-class suburb of London, and attended Hull University as an undergraduate in sociology. His rising prominence was marked in 1970 by a move to Cambridge and visiting positions in North America. He was the director of the London School of Economics and maintained an active public life beyond the academy. He is the cofounder of Polity Press and helped promote the “third way” in politics aimed at transcending traditional political divisions of left and right. In 2004, he was given a life peerage, and as Lord Giddens he has a direct voice in politics.

      Giddens’s early work involved outlining a theoretical and methodological understanding of the field of sociology based on a critical rereading of the classics. The major works here are Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971) and New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), excerpted in the following text. The second stage in his work was devoted to articulating his own theory of “structuration.” His most well-known books on this are Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984). His most recent work concerns modernity and politics. Giddens has examined the impact of modernity on social and personal life (The Consequences of Modernity [1990], Modernity and Self-Identity [1991], and The Transformation of Intimacy [1992]) and politics (Beyond Left and Right [1994] and The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy [1998]).

      Giddens’s first book, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, re-examined the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber to wrestle the field away from the dominance of Parsonian functionalism. He argues that the main focus of sociology should be “the study of social institutions brought into being by the industrial transformations of the past two or three centuries” (1987) with an emphasis on power, modernity, and institution. He starts to provide a set of conceptual tools for doing this work in New Rules of Sociological Method, contrasting the collective realities of “structures” with the interpretive (or “hermeneutic”) tradition’s core focus on understanding agency and motives of individuals.

      Giddens rejected the idea that society is an autonomous collective reality, but does not entirely accept the hermeneutic tradition either; he particularly disagrees with the emphasis on the individual СКАЧАТЬ