Theoretical Sociology

The Future of a Disciplinary Foundation

Seth Abrutyn, Kevin McCaffree

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000331509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since Durkheim's influential work a century ago, sociological theory has been among the most integrative and useful tools for social scientists across many disciplines. Sociological theory has nevertheless, due to its usefulness, expanded so very broadly that some wonder whether the concept of "general theory, " or even the attempt to link middle-range theories, is still of any use. This book, a collection of top theorists reflecting on the present and future of the craft, addresses this most important question.Taking their lead from Jonathan Turner's important recent work, and drawing on their own broad experience, Seth Abrutyn and Kevin McCaffree have organized the chapters in this book from the general, integrative and review-focused bookend chapters to more specific chapters on innovations in theory construction at the micro, meso and macro levels. Moreover, the book's microsociological content on interpersonal violence, solidarity, identity and emotion coheres with chapters in mesosociological dynamics on class, education and networks, which in turn integrate with the chapters on inequality, justice, morality and cultural evolution found in the section on macrosociology. The distinguished contributors share a distinct commitment to the development, innovation and relevance of general sociological theory. This volume is an invaluable sourcebook for advanced students and social science faculty interested in understanding how sociological theory's past and present are informing its future.

Part I

Theoretical Sociology

Chapter 1

Sociological Theory Must Continue to Become More Interdisciplinary

Kevin McCaffree

The nature of interdisciplinary inquiry in sociology is often left undiscussed, as though it were intuitive how one might go about logically and sensibly integrating diverse fields of inquiry. I will argue here that a genuinely interdisciplinary sociology requires that we continue to reconceptualize our discipline’s fundamental concepts (i.e., power, norms, culture, socialization) in order to make them more amenable to investigation across disciplines at multiple levels of analysis. Advocating an interdisciplinary sociology means advocating a continual re-thinking of our subject matter, and I hope to show here that an interdisciplinary sociology would be as revolutionary as it would be sensible and generative.

This chapter has three parts. In the first part, I will offer and defend a new definition of sociology that captures the interdisciplinary scope of the field. I will then situate the work of Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski as a paradigmatic example of what interdisciplinary theoretical sociology looks like. In the third part, I will suggest some potential areas of collaboration where interdisciplinary sociologists can interface with scholars in psychology, biology and anthropology.

What Is Sociology?

A plausible (if incomplete) definition of society is a collection of individuals that interact and cooperate with others irrespective of familiarity. As Moffett (2019) points out, it is an incredible feat just to walk into a new Starbucks: you may not know anyone in the shop, you may never return again, and yet you enter, smile politely at the cashier, exchange resources for coffee and leave without incident. This capacity to pro-socially (or at least not anti-socially) coordinate behavior in pursuit of resources (be it coffee or a college degree and everything in between) with people you’ve never met before and may never meet again purely because you feel comfortable in your society and comfortable around its members is astonishingly rare in the animal kingdom. We humans do not know everyone around us, though we do know our friends, our family members, our colleagues and so on. Everyone else is known to us only as members of our society, that is, anonymous others who share an aggregate identity of societal membership and modes of communication (in the human case, shared language and symbols) and who are available to be interacted with when necessary.

Though it may sound surprising, no branch of science currently studies this phenomenon; that is, no branch of science currently studies societies as such. Sociology has been conducted as though it were the exclusive study of human societies, but, as it turns out, humans are not the only animals that live in societies. Pinyon jays, naked mole rats, ants, honeybees and sperm whales, among others, all live in societies. Certainly, many other animals might be listed that are social (i.e., like dogs or cats who hunt and sleep and relax in the co-presence of familiar, known others), but animals living in “anonymous societies” composed of individuals cooperatively interacting with unfamiliar, unknown others, such as ants, bees and humans, are comparably far less common (on the concept of “anonymous societies,” see also Turner and Machalek, 2018).

Institutions are also not unique to humans. Animals that live in especially large numbers face similar, intensifying logistical complexities regarding waste disposal, housing, transportation and distribution, resource extraction and division of labor, trade and defense/warfare, among other things. Consider, for example, transportation in colonies of marauder ants—this species has developed a highway norm in order to manage the flow of massive numbers of bodies. On such highways, incoming traffic files down the center of the “road,” whereas outbound traffic sticks to the sides (unlike, of course, in humans, where incoming/outgoing traffic aligns to the left or right of the street depending on the country). Or, consider the economic markets of red imported fire ants, within which, as entomologist Mark Moffett explains,

the flow of commodities is regulated according to what is available and what’s needed, a supply-and demand market strategy. The workers monitor the nutritional cravings of other adult ants as well as the brood, and change their activities as the situation requires. In a nest laden with food, scouts and their recruits hawk merchandise by regurgitating samples to “buyers” in the nest chambers, who in turn roam through the nest to distribute meals to whoever wants them. If these middlemen find their customers sated on meat … , they peruse the marketplace for other commodities until they find, possibly, a seller offering something sugary. When a market becomes glutted and sellers can no longer peddle their wares, both buys and sellers engage in other jobs, or take a nap.

(Moffett, 2019, pp. 61–62)

For more examples we might consider the full-time waste disposal squads to be found among leaf-cutter ants, or we might consider the intricate and organized housing infrastructure of a honeybee hive. When an animal lives amongst other conspecifics in large, anonymous societies, certain problems related to social coordination continually arise, and solutions must be found if the society is to continue growing. Selection pressures arising from the need to develop solutions, albeit to varying levels of adequacy, to coordination problems are as pressing for ants as they are for people.

How, then, can we sociologists expect to fully conceptualize and assess “societies” or “institutions” until we have some grasp on their broad manifestations in the natural world? What, then, is a society? What, then, is an institution? Both are good questions, and both remain largely unanswered in the context of cross-species analysis (though some great work in sociology has been done on these topics; see especially, work by Machalek, 1999; Machalek and Martin, 2004; Turner and Machalek, 2018, pp. 389–394). Societies are not (necessarily) human. Societies, broadly speaking, are things some animals create and maintain to coordinate behavior and improve the chances of survival. Institutions, broadly speaking, are those coordinated, localized patterns of behavior that facilitate particular forms of social integration and resource extraction/allocation. These are basic definitions, but something like these definitions are required starting points if our goal is to study societies in general instead of arbitrarily focusing on human societies. Indeed, a focus solely on human societies may obscure truths about societies in general (including truths about human societies) that would be revealed in a more thorough interdisciplinary analysis. In finding the common definitional denominator of societies and institutions across species, sociology can ground itself in the natural world before speculating about specifically human concerns, such as, for example, “how does the human institution of religion differ from the human institution of medicine, and at what point in human history do these institutions become distinct from one another?”

Human societies are, to be sure, unique in many ways. While other animals define societal boundaries via scent and other biological markers, humans tend to define societal (and subcultural) boundaries with a rich suite of symbols: things like flags, clothes, passports, languages and preferred foods. Humans also differ from, for example, ants and honeybees, with regard to their extensive social learning, relatively high individual intelligence, extensive parental care, complex hierarchies and emotionality, to name just a few differences. Still, as Crespi (2014, pp. 12) notes, “these differences are not relevant to the existence of convergent similarities,” and he goes on to add, “Most generally, the socioecological ‘niche’ inhabited by social insects and humans centers on cooperative and collective behavior, generalist high-quality diets, food-sharing, especially valuable and long-lasting ‘basic necessary resources,’ [such as nests or housing structures] and divisions of labor.”

As I said previously, no branch of science currently studies societies and institutions, as such, wherever they are found, in nature. Of course, zoologists and evolutionary biologists study species of animals, whether solitary, social or societal. And perhaps a case can be made that those calling themselves “sociobiologists” study societies and institutions across species (albeit as a phenotypic expression of genes). Yet I submit that there is no special concern among any established, institutionalized research community that focuses on the dynamics and mechanisms associated with the interspecies formation of groups and institutions (and the regularities and divergences between species).

And, on the other hand, there are working sociologists who for the most part ignore—with indifference—the existence of societies and institutions outside of the human forms these phenomena take (Takács, 2018). My argument here is that it is sociology’s job to study the natural phenomenon of society, wherever it is found, even if, being humans ourselves, we may be ultimately motivated by the goal of discerning truths (or, often, advocating for political causes) about our own human societies. It would be presumptuous and foolhardy to simply assume that the study of nonhuman societies and institutions can add nothing whatever to our understanding of our own societies.

“Human Nature”: The Turner and Maryanski School of Sociological Theory

Even if we conceptualize the study of sociology as the study of societies and institutions generally, we may nevertheless find within ourselves a particular interest in human society. We are humans ourselves, after all. And, yet, if we decide to focus our analytical attention on human societies and institutions, we are still in thoroughly interdisciplinary territory. Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski have offered perhaps the most consistently interdisciplinary theoretical approach to the study of human society and human nature (Maryanski, 1986; Maryanski and Turner, 1992; Maryanski, 1994, 1995; Turner and Maryanski, 2008, 2012, 2015; Turner, 2018; Turner and Machalek, 2018). Let me say a bit about what makes their approach genuinely interdisciplinary. And let me say here that the idea of a fixed, albeit broad, human nature is something I will be addressing further on in this chapter. But, for now, let’s look at how Turner and Maryanski have analyzed the concept of “human nature.”

Among other things, what makes the Turner and Maryanski school of social theory interdisciplinary is its focus on cladistic analysis (which Maryanski adopted from biology and used in her doctoral dissertation—see Maryanski, 1986). Cladistic analysis is a method of discerning the likely characteristics of humans’ last common ancestor with the great apes by noting which traits these great apes share with one another. The logic is that, since great apes and humans share a very high proportion of their genes (from 97–99 percent depending upon the species of great ape), they are descendants of common ancestors. Humans share 97% of their genes with orangutans, indicating that they shared an ancestor some 13–16 million years ago; humans share 98% of their genes with gorillas, suggesting that humans and gorillas shared a common ancestor 8–9 million years ago; and humans share 99% of their genes with chimpanzees, making it likely that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor 5–6 million years ago. Moreover, even though the genes of great apes are spread across an extra chromosome pair compared to humans, chimpanzees are genetically more closely related to humans than the other two great apes, and furthermore, gorillas are more closely related to humans genetically than they are to chimpanzees. Thus, with this kind of close genetic relations, it is very likely that whatever behavioral and organizational propensities present-day gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees have in common were also present in the last common ancestor to great apes and hence were present in their last common ancestors with the ancestors of humans. As Maryanski notes, this strategy for discerning core elements of human nature is analogous to the process used in historical linguistics to reconstruct texts and languages. Indeed, any set of extant texts (or languages) suspected of having a common origin can be studied by isolating those aspects shared in common amongst the present texts, with the assumption being that those shared aspects were present in the root text and hence were derived from this ancestral text.

From an interdisciplinary standpoint, Maryanski and Turner focus on genetic relatedness, and so their particular interdisciplinary focus is at the intersection of primatology, neurology and sociology. The core claims of this perspective are that,

Humans share 99% of their genes with chimpanzees, 98% with gorillas, and 96–97% with orangutans… . This genetic closeness means that a great deal about humans and their nature can be learned from studying the neuroanatomy of the brain, the morphology of the body, the behavioral phenotypes, and the organizational phenotypes of great apes… . And so, as we stare the great apes in the eye, we can see back in time to what our ancestors were like; and if we study the behaviors and organizational patterns of great apes, we can get a sense for the behavioral and organizational propensities of humans’ distant ancestors and, hence, humans today.

(Turner and Machalek, 2018, pp. 293–294)

Maryanski and Turner find that the last common ancestor of great apes was likely individualistic, socially mobile and autonomous. Great apes today tend not to partition themselves into close-knit groups but rather roam a large community, interacting here and there with others in their community, fostering and maintaining weak-tie relationships. These findings led Maryanski and Turner to write their groundbreaking book, The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society (1992). In it, they argue that the supposed “pathologies” of modern society (everything from individualism to impersonality to anomie) are actually quite compatible with human nature as discerned by cladistic analysis. Sure, modernity may seem atomized and anomic when juxtaposed with our romantic assumptions about village life, but we must keep in mind that modernity may be atomized and anomic, in part, because human beings now have the economic and political freedoms to live in a way that expresses an independent, mobile, socially autonomous human nature. The tight-knit village life characteristic of horticultural or agrarian societies, in their account, constituted a suffocating “social cage” that limited human freedom, creativity and social mobility.

This wouldn’t mean that extreme social isolation is a good thing—it simply means that human nature might be more compatible with individualism and social mobility than prior theorists have assumed. The larger point is that sociology will benefit from a concept of human nature (or widely shared predispositions, if one does not like the phrase “human nature”) and that our discernment of this nature (whether you agree with Maryanski’s particular cladistic analytic strategy or not) will necessitate a thoroughly interdisciplinary analysis.

Then again, while the last common ancestor of great apes may have been a weak-tie, low sociality creature, it is undeniable that human beings are a morally concerned species with strong identifications to in-group...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Centripetal Force of Theory, Theorists, Theorizing
• Part I Theoretical Sociology
• Part II Foundational Areas of Inquiry
• Part III The Social Processes of Knowledge Production
• Part IV Reflections