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 EXPLANATORY
NARRATIVES
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Marc Garcelon
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ABSTRACT
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Purpose 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 the
social sciences.
Methodology
Explanatory narrative.
Social Theories of History and Histories of Social Theory

Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 31, 179 220
Copyright r 2013 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2013)0000031005
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MARC GARCELON
Findings
A paradigmatic consolidation of generalizing concepts,
modes of social practices, ideal-type concepts, and generic models presents a range of theoretical tools capable of facilitating empirical analysis 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.
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Keywords: Explanatory narrative; models; types; variable analysis
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Sociology approaches the comparative history of human societies by formulating 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 distinguishing 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 contingencies 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 are
here 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 converge 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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The Developmental History of Human Social Practices
beings. Conceptual universals in the social sciences

here called
anthrogeneric 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
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The Anthrogeneric Concepts of Culture and Institutions
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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. 11 12). Indeed,
culture is coevolutionary with human society (Bradford, 2012). Yet culture
and its meanings themselves are not sufficient to map the boundary conditions 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, incarceration, or even death. In contemporary societies, institutions are often formalized in laws, legal regulations, and various codes of conducts such as office
rules, 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 evolutionary 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 anthropologists and sociologists emphasizing that such societies lacked a written language (Goody & Watt, 1987). In oral societies, familiarity with institutional
expectations remains customary, a matter of individuals developing a sensibility through rituals and other patterns of repetition tied to senses of
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identity, belonging, and distinction. Not showing implicit degrees of respect

at 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 informal institutions as, unfortunately, often occurs is misleading.
The invention of writing in itself is not sufficient to move toward formalization of institutions. Indeed, when only a small fragment of persons can
read, and when texts remain handwritten, institutional norms remain overwhelming enforced through customary means. The technological advances
of 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 codification 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 regulation, 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 contractual obligations, stabilizing markets over periods of time. Institutions
are thus the primary patterning element of human social relationships.
A colloquial language stands an archetypical example of an institution.
a
Here we begin by distinguishing the analysis of a linguistic capacity
biological trait of human beings from colloquial language as an institution.7 In this sense, a colloquial language entails development of a biological 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 of
practical 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 underscores a distinctive aspect of colloquial language, namely, colloquial language largely has no disciplinary apparatus, the only institution that
lacks one.8 Indeed, what ensures minimal conformity with linguistic conventions 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 regarding the use of language can trigger penalizing responses by members of a
disciplinary apparatus
whether by certain clan figures in a hunter-gatherer society, staffs of authorities in agrarian kingdoms, or by law enforcement, 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 disciplinary
apparati, such as using profanities in front of children in public in contemporary America. Indeed, the latter is part of the cultural arbitrary in contemporary 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 specialized 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 of
conformity. Indeed, this is why most institutions beyond colloquial language 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 heuristic
device. 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 patterns, such as this worldly religion or bureaucracy, a point developed
below.
A field maps how institutions segment and differentiate particular contexts 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 institutional
reality 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 deliberative action, instances of agency in which conscious deliberation, choice,
and the like play significant roles. Following Pierre Bourdieu, habitus designates a capacity for agency considerably broader than reflexive action
a capacity to engage spontaneously in complex sequences without much
deliberation (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 169 175). For instance, when the driver
of a car has routinized traffic regulations to the point that she can spontaneously adjust to traffic lights, signs, other drivers, and so forth without
reflectively deliberating about them most of the time, she is often considered 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 routines. 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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institutions
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they need an ingredient and need to go get it, they then may engage in
some 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 conventional observance of routines to get by and get along (Garcelon, 2010,
pp. 326 335), as in Fig. 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 micro meso macro distinctions.10 Yet
placing institutions on a different level than agency generates all sorts of
artificial problems that disappear when one recognizes first, that institutions entail an embodied aspect; and second, that individuals can play causal 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,
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 roles

at 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 people, for instance (Mouzelis, 1995, p. 20). Once this is recognized, distinctions 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. Complementing 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 to
introduce 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. 31 33), underscoring that
(relational) institutional orders persist due to (embodied) institutional paradigms.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 authorities out of respect for the law that they might otherwise be disinclined to
obey.12 (Due to time constraints, we leave aside here Webers third variant
of legitimacy, charismatic legitimacy, that he argued may operate in noninstitutional 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 huntergatherer 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 behavior, such as adaptation through adoption of routines of expected conventions in families, schools, businesses, and so on, on the other, allows us to
further 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 the

institutional 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 institutional paradigms, the relation between the social context and how people
understand 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 to
social 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.
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Mapping Five Modes of Social Practices
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We can initially map human societies in all their historical and comparative
diversity through the concept of modes of social practice. This conception 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 anthrogeneric universals in the sense of having existed in all known human societies,
and that variation within and between such modes marks their actual history. In this sense, the concept mode more fully captures this possible
variation and historical depth than either the concepts subsystems or
functions. 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 differentiation stands a principal aim of empirical research, for such modes represent 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 kingships.15 Contemporary representative democracies, on the other hand,
embody complex institutional differentiation. In this sense, the five anthrogeneric modes of social practices outlined here represent bridge concepts to
ideal-type concepts and generic models, as discussed below.
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The Mode of Communication

The very fact of language underscores that all human societies entail specific means and modalities of communication. The differentiation of more
complex communicative forms such as writing, and more elaborate technologies of communication such as books, indicates the utility of differentiating the means of communication from how such means combine with
actual practices. Both means and practices develop as emergent properties
of 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 contemporary one goes, the more fragmentary and incomplete evidence becomes,
until we end up making educated guesses compatible with such incomplete 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 that
entails biological aspects, as discussed above
and a specific spoken language, a historical individual (Weber, 1949, pp. 149 152), initially
learned during socialization.16 Thus language as a spoken practice is a specific 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. 83 84, 111 112, 160 171).
Specific languages as historical individuals are in fact instances of institutions, for they are obligatory forms of getting by and getting along in
situations realized through them.17 As noted above, a spoken language in
its 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 practices

in 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 archaeological 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 the
rise 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. 355 406). Table 1 represents the mode of
communication.
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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 belief
entail 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. 207 219). As societies become more
complex, a considerable variety of patterns of more elaborate beliefs displace myth, from religions per se in the ancient period of human civilization, 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 modern

belief closely identified with both the maintenance and contestation of political power develop in ideological forms, a point we return to below in discussing 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 religious authorities abilities to interfere with scientific practices on the basis
of habitual understandings of elite guardianship of the ought. The history
of the modern sciences thus forms a complex skein of practices distinguishing 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 Jurgen Habermas calls the
linguistification of the sacred (1987).18
The degree to which such distinctions give rise to actual institutional differentiation remains an empirical question. But in fact tensions between
what Weber called practical concerns like the gathering of foodstuffs, on
the 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 practices 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 limited
at 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 (Liljestrom, 1986).
The subtype of kinship constitution stands out immediately here,
and with
through which central bonds of family orders are constituted
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, and
ones place in a social order. As children are highly dependent on the care
of familial kin networks for many years, at least some modest hierarchization based on age and social respect for the knowledge of elders are universal. 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 conventional 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 analytic
nature 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 movements of tribal enemies. Indeed, the gaining of autonomy by medical specialists 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 been
subsumed 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 in
the face of the death of an individual person. In this sense, funerary practices aim at shoring up and solidifying social practices in the face of an existential 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 recognition 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 kin
reproduction
entailing diverse culture practices from marriage to variations of education such as rites of passage and modes of funerary practices.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.
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The Mode of Economy

In contrast to such socially reproductive kin practices, the mode of economy designates a range of human practices at the center of social science
since 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, that
it presumed economism, with the economy conceived as determining in
the last instance other aspects of social life. Webers alternative to economism 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 practices, 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 terms
of 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 production 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 trajectory adjustment where agents rely on their habits and expectations in
anticipating the reproduction of extant institutional arrangements, though
sometimes such anticipation proves erroneous in the face of institutional
change (Eyal, Szelenyi, & 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. 12 19), however, the following does not strictly adhere to Bell or any of the thinkers
whose work is adapted here. Rather, the adaption of Bell via Castells develops 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 separated from tools (Ehrenreich, 1989, pp. 78 81).
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 various economies), from the mode of development, how a work process is
organized to produce economic value (Castells, 2000, pp. 13 18).
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 distinct 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 some
development 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 leadership 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, and
operated in earlier capitalist economies dominated by the capitalistworking 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 organizational

forms of the work process, from the alternative institutional arrangements
of capitalism and socialism within their broader shared orientation to economic growth as an end in itself. Indeed, capitalism and socialism as antagonistic 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 political 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.
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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 natural
resourcesin 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. 16 17)
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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 institutions in the modern world, from industrial socialism to informational
capitalism. 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 economic domination, which brings us to mapping out modes of domination
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Table 4.
The Mode of Economy.
Mode of EconomySubsuming
(a) The mode of production
(b) The mode of development
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per se. Objections could be raised to the concept mode of domination simply on the basis of evidence of small-scale, egalitarian kinship societies
from prehistoric times, and similar evidence from more recent huntergatherer 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, kinfamilial constitution, and health comportment in hunter-gatherer societies.
The institutional differentiation of modes of domination begins with the
emergence of archaic states (Sagan, 1985, pp. 225 298; Weber, 1978,
pp. 226 234) 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. 31 38). Webers concept of legitimacy combines domination and authority to signal acceptance of domination as legitimate by
enough individuals in a society to make some degree of deference to authoritative figures in society obligatory in order to get by and get along.
What happens in cases where domination absent legitimacy occurs?
stateWhen political power is reduced to the mere exercise of coercion
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 societies 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 interpretation altogether, a move that has failed repeatedly to provide a generalizable model adequate to empirical cases such as suicide bombings but
which persists in various forms of economism noted above (Garcelon,
2010, p. 347).
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Sometimes, of course, such stereotyping of motivation works in the

sense 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 such
ideational 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, yet
central, 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 differentiated the two in terms of internal and external aspects of legitimacy,
an unfortunate use of terms that confuses what he actually meant (1978,
pp. 31 33), 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 various fields we clarify how sociology may distinguish the empirical consequences of degrees of legitimacy embodied by varying people at various
times toward particular institutional authorities. Weber did this be differentiating 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 of
cynicism in modern democracies in a sociological light. Certainly, this is
often difficult to carry out in terms of empirical research due to the problem 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 particular 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. 10 14).
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 assess
degrees of affectation and habituation to adequately track the social nuances involved. Foucault called this the microphysics of power (1979), indicating the degree to which patterns of authority are broadly routinized as
habit with minor variations from individual to individual. Indeed, a complex 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 representation of political power in the more conventional sense is the stuff of
history. For instance, the powerful effects of ritualized hatred and communal 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 domination, 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 customary or elaborated through doctrines and other such codes
that can be
differentiated from other patterns of ideation in a social order. Often ritualized 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 of
solidaristic 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 confront 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 contain and constrain it, to incline it in such and such a direction. One can say literally that
they are forces. (Durkheim, 1973, p. 41)
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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 institutional 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 differentiation before the social sciences were even possible. Of course, history
presents a wide diversity of modes of domination and legitimacy, which we
can not go into here beyond noting the elaborate institutional differentiation 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 capable of achieving institutional coherence for some span of time. But domination 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 history, 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. 228 231). This pattern served as the basis of the archaic state in
all known cases, which entailed displacing pre-state patterns of organization 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 pattern Goody and Watt
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(1987) called oligoliteracy. Thus the shift from a kinship to a patriarchal

pattern 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 designate all formal organizations as bureaucracies, a problematic designation
with certain organizational forms such as fascistic or Marxist-Leninist
party states (Garcelon, 2005, pp. 27 35).
The mode of destruction (Foucault, 1970) stands the final aspect of the
mode of domination. To be realized in practice, legitimacy and organization 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 through
relations 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 legitimate 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 modern 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 reproduction, 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 instances
of 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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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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modes tended to be slight in hunter-gatherer societies, about which our

knowledge remains only fragmentary at best take, for instance, the differentiation of sacred and profane times, or the ritualistic ordering of ceremonies, 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 history. As we apply anthrogeneric concepts to specific circumstances, and
then 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 empirical 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 patterns
empirically. 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 observations 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 AngloAmerican sociology in recent decades, a tendency to conceptualize agency
simply as action per se (and individuals as actors), and a tendency to
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time
period
categories
of ideal types
antiquity
pre-history
societies &
economies
hunterOikos
gatherer
societies
(clans,
tribes, etc.)
antiquity
through early
modernity
agrarian
societies
modernity
more capitalistic societies
more socialistic societies
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
patriarchal feudal
representative democracies
states
plebiscitarian authority
patrimonial
hi
ng
varieties of dictatorships
Pu
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extended
authorities bureaucracies
households and staffs
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dominant
organizational form
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------charismatic charismatic charismatic charismatic
up
non-routine, non-state &

founding forms of
authority
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------traditional traditional traditional traditional and legal-rational
routine forms of
authority
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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 Standestaat 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.
identify causes in social life external to agency. As a consequence, both an

overburdened concept (action), and a chronic tendency to assign causes to
structural factors, implicitly frame much Anglo-American sociology.26
But the tendency to concentrate on structural causal factors is also widespread 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 sociology. A similar tendency to locate causality at the structural level in
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Bourdieus work work that aimed at displacing subjective objective binaries 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 regarding 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. 8 14). The indirect identification of distinct types of motivation
follows from the fact that some intentional actions clearly involving deliberation 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 building only 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, valuein light of
rational, traditional, and affective action (1978, pp. 24 26)
the discussion of agency and habitus above. First, we recognize that affective action is reflexive action motivated by the emotional influence of love,
affection, dislike, repugnance, hatred, and the like, as in Webers original
conception. 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 roles
steering social action, and thus practical concerns such as economic, political, 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 orthodoxies 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 valuerational 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 simultaneously
identifying 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 contemporary 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, performative
action 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 fields
as 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 and

McAdams 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 dramaturgical 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 considerable 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 formulation of models and causal hypotheses. Though the development of models
contributes 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 involving
the 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 action

sequences. 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 generality. Abbotts suggestion provides a way to cut through this by subordinating 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 influential 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 an
explanatory 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 illumination of causal regularities across sets of cases, and defines her aim in
States and Social Revolution as understanding and explaining the generalizable 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 two
sets 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 largely 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 unfavorable geopolitical situation and revolts of peasants from below (Skocpol,
1979, pp. 284 293).
Skocpols identification of some similar initial conditions across three
cases, however, nowhere clarifies or justifies her claim that the illumination of causal regularities across sets of cases constitutes the ultimate
objective of comparative historical analysis. Indeed, the linkages between
the explanatory suppositions of States and Social Revolutions and its substantive conclusions are barely sketched, almost cryptic, and have generated 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 substantive 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 differences among her three cases, and between these cases and the controlling 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 himself 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 to
identify 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 identified above is simply to exclude a vast number of potential candidates
from causal analysis at all, including much of human history for which statistics are not available, as well as some contemporary societies with
authoritarian 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 of

issues that impede paradigm formation in the social sciences.
Clarifying the role of generic models in mediating the open-ended, working relation between social analytics and explanatory narratives points a
way forward. A generic model is provisional, insofar as it presents a preliminary 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, these
assumptions are recognized as such by the sociologist and taken as heuristic
devices to be modified as evidence is gathered and considered from different angles.
A key conceptual resource for construing generic models are what
Weber called ideal types, heuristic generalizations that represent major patterns of development and differentiation in human history through concepts 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 particular
explanatory narratives. Unfortunately, Weber also called ideal types
what on the lower right of Fig. 3 are listed 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. 100 103), for a genetic ideal type is simply a socialscientific simplification of an actual state of affairs characterizing social
relations taken to be causally significant factors in a particular case.
variables
analysis
generic models
and ideal types
explanatory
narratives
social
analytics
generic models
and ideal types
historical models
Fig. 3.
Generic Models and Working Boundaries Between Social Analytics and

Explanatory Narratives.
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To refer to this as an ideal type, however, contradicts the fact that it is

striving to capture historically unique dynamics. Moreover, such dynamics
are too complex to be rendered in a concept, and instead take the form of a
model of dynamics institutionally stabilized in historically irreducible ways.
Compare, for instance, the ideal type of capitalism with the historical
model of British capitalism in the late 1970s, or the ideal type of socialism
with the Soviet order in 1953. Indeed, generic models and ideal-type concepts enable the formulation of historical models alongside specific causal
explanations by social scientists. Of course, such historical models can in
turn serve as the basis of generic models and ideal types so long as some of
their causal assumptions are scaled back and the model is stripped down
to either the provisional role of generic models or ideal types (or both).
Pu
Examples of Implicit Explanatory Narratives
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two from early social science,

A brief overview of four different works
and two from more contemporary American sociology
illustrate an
implicit tendency toward explanatory narrative in many instances of otherwise diverse instances of causal analysis in the social sciences. The first
two
Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Webers The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism are both widely familiar to
sociologists today.
Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire presents a complex analysis of the events
surrounding the rise to power in France of Louis Bonaparte, retrospectively seen by many as improvising an early variant of what would become
European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, between 1848 and 1851.36 Marx
frames this as the working out of the class struggle between capitalists and
proletarians at a very general level (the last instance), but the analysis
itself centered on what Marx himself designated as conflicts between
the financial aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the
petty bourgeoisie, the army, the Mobile Guard (i.e., the organized lumpenproletariat), the intellectual celebrities, the priests, and the rural population on one side, and on the other, the Paris proletariat itself (Marx,
1974[1852], p. 154). Marx at various points stresses that Bonaparte has
set himself up as the head of the lumpenproletariat the scum, the leavings,
the refuse the only class which can provide him with an unconditional
basis (p. 197). The analysis further emphasizes that Bonaparte secured the
complete independence of the French state from the class rule of the
bourgeoisie, and stresses Bonapartes ties to small peasants as his broader
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political base (p. 238). Thus, Marx tracks how Bonaparte relied on support
from small peasants to mobilize the army and the lumpenproletarian
Mobile Guard against Parisian workers, and used the threat of the workers Parisian rising to compel the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and middle
class to support him (p. 245). The analysis at no point systematically shows
exactly how this close and complex reading of the course of events in Paris
from February 24, 1848 through December 2, 1851 exemplifies the logic of
the class struggle between capitalists and proletarians, leading to protracted
interpretations of what Marx intended here. In fact, linkages between a
number of Marxs close historical analyses of particular courses of events
often highly detailed and subtle
and the developmental dynamics of
the class struggle as laid out in his theoretical analyses of capitalism,
remain subjects of debate down to the present.
Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism does not pose
an interpretive puzzle of how to fit an explanatory narrative into a broader
theoretical framework the way Marxs writings do, in large part because
Weber argued along lines anticipating the overview of explanatory narrative developed above. Indeed, Weber argued that social science could only
pose developmental histories of historically irreducible causal chains of
events (Roth, 1987). The faults of Webers analysis lie elsewhere, such as
his assumption of a rigid binary between Western and non-Western societies in framing the analysis (Weber, 1958, pp. 13 17). Interestingly enough,
The Protestant Ethic relied on an initial statistical mapping of the problem
situation that inspired his work something often overlooked by commentators (Blau, 1998)
in part because this statistical analysis is presented
almost exclusively in the footnotes (Weber, 1958, pp. 188 189). This last
point is key, for it illustrates how statistical analysis can be incorporated by
explanatory narrative as outlined above.
In the bulk of The Protestant Ethic, Weber developed a doctrinal analysis of a chain of influential Protestant leaders, starting with Martin Luther
and ending up with Calvinism and its closely linked English variant,
Puritanism. The analysis causally accounts for only one side of the causal
chain (Weber, 1958, p. 27) in order to link doctrinal views among key
figures involved in various early Protestant tendencies
from Luther to
John Calvin and his successors to the emergence of early modern capitalism in parts of Europe and the American colonies. Though The Protestant
Ethic has since generated an enormous secondary literature, many of the
controversies in this literature center either on questions of empirical accuracy in Webers analysis, or degrees of causal weighting given to various
factors mentioned briefly in Webers Authors Introduction, originally a
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separate piece written in 1920 and later combined with the substantive text
in English editions (Weber, 1958, p. 12b). Only in recent decades has
the importance of Webers view of history as a network of[historically
irreducible] developmental paths (Ringer, 1997, p. 91) commanded more
widespread attention. The convergence between Ringers analysis of historical paths of development in Weber, and the paleontologist Stephen Jay
Goulds analysis of the irreducibility of historical sequences in biological
evolution, is telling in this regard.37
Comparing Marxs Eighteenth Brumaire and Webers The Protestant
Ethic brings out an important nuance regarding explanatory narratives:
though the sequences explained in such accounts remain historically irreducible, the explanatory narratives themselves do not necessarily take the
form of strict narratives in the presentational sense. Such presentations
may certainly take this form as The Eighteenth Brumaire illustrates but
they may also take a more analytical form less strictly tied to the historical
sequences they explain, as in the case of The Protestant Ethic.
A much more recent example of implicit explanatory narrative Charles
Derbers Corporation Nation illustrates this point by tracking the rise to a
commanding position of a relative handful of publicly traded corporations
during and after the Glided Age in American society. By 1996, such
corporations combined saleswere larger than the combined gross
national product of all but the nine largest nations (Derber, p. 3). Derbers
analysis emphasizes the complex historical path leading to an outcome
where the 200 largest corporations (p. 3) which Derber at one point calls
superbaronies (p. 91)
control roughly half the American economy,
though representing only a tiny percentage of all American businesses as
legal entities (p. 91).
Of course, the consolidation of large corporate dominance in the U.S.
economy after 1945 and especially after 1980 has been widely noted in
academic literature, though remains practically absent from public discussion of such matters in the mass media. Derbers emphasis on the historically irreducible trajectory of the rise and development of the American
corporate economy is what renders his analysis an example of explanatory
narrative. A range of key, historically unique factors emphasized by Derber
stand-out here, such as the complex relations between changes in legal codes
and practices in the organization of the American economy (pp. 165 168);
the only partial roll-back of large corporate influence during the New Deal
(pp. 96 100); the deepening intertwining of large corporate and government
administration after the Second World War (pp. 150 152); the resurgence
of large corporate dominance, particularly following the election of Ronald
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Reagan as U.S. president in 1980 (pp. 161 163, 202 206); and the close
relations of these factors to shifting cultural understandings of American
society among citizens over time (pp. 56 66, 101 102, 118 148). Along
the way, Derber emphasizes a number of historical factors shaping these
outcomes, from shifting perspectives among policy makers at various points
in time, to the consequences of particular legal decisions for the subsequent
development of American corporate influence. As the United States played
a dominant role in the globalization process (pp. 272 290)
particularly
after Reagans election the analysis serves as a potential bridge to other
regional mappings of how the expansion of transnational corporate power
played out in particular regional circumstances.
Derbers analysis can be criticized from a number of perspectives, such
as his tendency to blur the line between social-scientific analysis and a
more activist orientation
a shift that is particularly clear beginning on
page 167, though he does return to an analytical perspective from time to
time after this point. But Corporation Nation develops an explanatory
narrative at a very large scale, abstracted from particular developmental
skeins except for usages of the latter to illustrate points. This underscores
what makes an explanatory narrative an explanatory narrative: its emphasis on historical irreducibility in assessing causal factors, not the degree of
narrative exposition per se.
A final and very clear example of explanatory narrative comes from
Jeffrey Alexanders analysis of the U.S. presidential campaign in 2008.
First, Alexander emphasizes throughout that causality in a presidential
election is best articulated in terms of historically irreducible, complex
skeins of intertwining events. In doing so, Alexander considers factors such
as position in social hierarchies, educational advancement, and so on, as
demographic factors, and emphasizes the importance of events and interactions in mediating the impact of such factors on voter behavior.38 In his
analysis, he models the outcome of the 2008 presidential race on the performative impact that both Obama and McCain made on various audiences
largely indirectly through the mass media as well as how the dynamic of
particular events, such as Obamas trip abroad in late July 2008, or the different response of McCain and Obama to the financial crisis that broke out
in mid-September 2008, causally shifted the dynamics of the presidential
campaign at various points. In short, Alexander develops a close explanatory narrative of the 2008 presidential race on the basis of a detailed analysis of the candidates respective political performances that uses generic
models of democratic institutions, historical models of recent American
political institutions, and the media, together with detailed analyses of
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political speeches, advertising, and the like, as analytic steps to the explanatory outcome.
CONCLUSION
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The above examples drawn from quite different sociological approaches

clarify a key point developed here, that social theory must develop closely
with empirical analysis in ways that enable disciplinary development and,
eventually, the formation of a social-scientific paradigm. The aim here has
been ecumenical, though some approaches that insist on highly limited
models of human agency that all behavior is self-interested, for instance,
or that the agency of persons is merely an empty place determined from
the outside
are ruled out. The social sciences, however, lack the accomplishments of physics and biology when it comes to demonstrable effects in
the world, accomplishments that both consolidated these disciplines around
paradigms and gave them a wider legitimacy in the social world. The case of
the social sciences indeed raises an interesting question, for absent such
potential for wider legitimacy, will it nevertheless still be possible to make
progress on paradigm formation in such sciences? Ironically, the institutional
divisions between the social sciences, combined with the inertia of career
paths, works against this. For this reason, sociology needs to take the issue
of paradigm consolidation as a disciplinary task and pursue it with an
ecumenical ethos.
NOTES
1. This distinction builds upon Nicos Mouzelis distinction between theory as

a set of tools that simply facilitate the construction of specific causal hypotheses, and theory as a set of interrelated substantive statements [that] can be
tentatively proved or disproved by empirical investigation (Mouzelis, 1995, p. 1).
2. Grammatical language is assumed here as bracketing human culture per se
from proto-culture in animal societies; for the latter, see Bonner (1980).
3. The concept of species-being comes from the early Marx, who emphasized
humans as a species-being were conscious and thus capable of a cooperative labor
process (Marx 1964 [1932], pp. 31 39, 106 119). Certainly, culture and institutions
make a labor process possible at all, distinguishing Homo sapiens from other social
species.
4. For an overview of the many aspects of this pre-civilization period of
human history, see Gamble (1994).
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5. For the complex history involved with the dynamics of the diffusion of
reading and social change during the French Enlightenment only a temporal and
geographic fraction of a more than 300-yearlong process see Darnton (1987).
6. See Durkheim (1997 [1893]). In one of his last major published works, The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim (1995 [1893]) used the concept of
institution explicitly to underscore the centrality of what he earlier termed social
integration, moral regulation, and solidarity.
7. The distinction between biological linguistic capacity and the historical development of a spoken language can be traced back to the origins of modern linguistics; see Saussure (1983) for the key text.
8. The term disciplinary apparatus has been adapted from Foucault (1979).
9. This tripartite distinction converges to some extent with Anthony Giddens
distinction between discursive consciousness and practical consciousness,
though the latter term is clumsy given that Giddens himself regards habitual agency
as largely spontaneous and pre-conscious (Giddens, 1984, pp. 5 14).
10. See Fligstein and McAdam (2011) for a recent example of this, though this
tendency goes back decades in American sociology.
11. See Garcelon (2010, pp. 327 334); Bradford (2012, pp. 134 135) is the only
other sociological analysis I have seen that emphasizes a convergent position.
Bourdieu emphasized distinctions between structuring structures (i.e., embodied
patterns) and structured structures (i.e., relational patterns), though inconsistently
applied this to institutions (see below).
12. For the difference between the perspective of legality as a normative orientation, and legality as an empirical sociological phenomenon as well as the complex
relation between the two see Weber (1978, pp. 311 319).
13. Weber sometimes referred to legitimate orders, and in Economy and
Society differentiated conventional from legal legitimate orders (Weber, 1978,
pp. 30 38). Here we use the concept of institutional order instead of legitimate
order for purposes of terminological consistency.
14. Talcott Parsons mapping of social subsystems in terms of his A-G-I-L
scheme (Parsons, 1977), and Norbert Elias designation of four universal functions in terms of economic, control of violence, knowledge acquisition/transmission, and civilizing functions (Elias, 1998), both serve as starting points for
the following; however, both of these approaches lack the range and clarity of
modes of social practices as described below. Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdams
related, more recent proposition of strategic action fields (2011) is discussed
below.
15. An exchange with Robert N. Bellah led me to emphasize this here.
16. Webers definition of a historical individual is flawed by the erroneous
assumption that such individuals appear only at the socio-cultural level of analysis
(Weber, 1949, pp. 160 171), an assumption rooted in his failure to adequately
recognize the role of theoretical presuppositions in framing analytical objects in the
natural sciences (Runciman, 1972, pp. 37 42). Indeed, the study of historical irreducibility figures in many empirical sciences; see, for instance, Kellert (1993) for
physics and Gould (1996) for evolutionary biology.
17. Bourdieu at points muddies the waters by not recognizing that spoken
language itself is an institution; for example, he artificially separates language
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from institutions in the following quote: [T]o ground in language the principle
and mechanisms of the efficacy of language, is to forget that authority comes to
language from the outside for it is nothing other than the delegated power of
the institution (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 147). Yet intelligible language
is the most basic human institution with both embodied and relational aspects;
indeed, there is nothing in institutions outside language and forms of symbolism
presupposing language. See also Bradford (2012), though this analysis at
points uses philosophical discourse in ways that somewhat obscures some of its
points.
18. This paragraph draws considerably on the discussion in Bellah (1973).
19. For a close historical study of the rise of modern medicine and transformations of conventional understanding of health that accompanied it in America, see
Starr (1984).
20. For the this worldly origin of magical practices, see Weber (1978,
pp. 399 400).
21. For the diversity of human funerary practices, see Bonsu and Belk (2003),
Cullen (2006), and Griffiths (2003).
22. James Lovelock, a chemist and ecologist, introduced the term tightly
coupled to map the coevolutionary relations between organisms and their environment (2001).
23. See the Authors Introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (Weber, 1958 [1904]), as well as his essay The Social Psychology of the
World Religions (Weber, 1946, pp. 267 301).
24. Stark (1992) introduced the concept of path-dependency to mark irreducibly
historical processes in human affairs. The problem is that path-dependency appears
in physics, biology, and the social sciences; to capture what is distinctive about the
latter, we need the additional concept of trajectory adjustment.
25. Webers Economy and Society (1978) outlines a diverse array of such modes
of domination.
26. For a pronounced recent example of this, see Fligstein and McAdam (2011).
Of course, there are important exceptions to this tendency in Anglo-American
sociology, such as in the work of Jeffrey Alexander (2006, 2010).
27. The problem of motivation is too often bracketed by either stereotyping
motivations in unrealistic ways, such as in economism, or evading or denying the
causal significance of motivation in human agency, a tactic that led Foucault to
paint himself into a conceptual corner, so to speak, in Discipline and Punish.
28. A lengthy exchange with Robert N. Bellah led to this formulation. The above
refines a discussion in Garcelon (2010, pp. 332 333).
29. [W]e define strategic action as the attempt by actors to create and maintain
stable social worlds by securing the cooperation of others (Fligstein & McAdam
2011, p. 7).
30. Goldstone and Useem (2012, pp. 38 41). For the longue duree, see Braudel
and Matthews (1982, pp. 25 54).
31. There are many models of personality that deserve careful comparative consideration, reconstruction, and synthesis here; the two most important early thinkers concerning personality were Sigmund Freud (1989) and George Herbert Mead
(1934).
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32. The concept of explanatory narrative derives from Andrew Abbotts narrative positivism (1992, 2004); Stephen Jay Goulds delineation of the explanatory
objectives of historical sciences (1989, 1995); William H. Sewells conception of
eventful sociology (1996); and Margaret Somers notion of causal narrativity
(1996).
33. Quotes from Skocpol (1979, p. 39) and (p. 6), respectively.
34. For critical treatments of Skocpol relevant to explanatory narrative, see
Abbott (1991) and Sewell (1996). Skocpol (1994) contains an anticipatory rebuttal
of Sewell, based on an earlier draft of his piece. Somers (1996) is also of interest, as
she discusses her own development from a Skocpolian position to a position close
to explanatory narrative as defined here. The Sewell Skocpol exchange is particularly instructive, as it reveals a certain degree of mutual misunderstanding rooted
substantially, in my view, in the elusiveness of Skocpols original methodological
statements.
35. See Skocpol (1979, pp. 36 37) for the key paragraphs. As A. J. Ayer pointed
out in an introduction to Mills The Logic of the Moral Sciences, Book VI of Mills
System of Logic, Mill does not think that his famous inductive methods are
applicable to the social sciences There is the overall difficulty that the subject
matter is such as to afford us little or no opportunity for making artificial experiments. We have to rely on the spontaneous instances with which history naturally
provides us, and they do not supply the conditions which are requisite for
[the Method of Difference or the Method of Agreement] to be fruitful. The Method
of Difference, preferred by Mill to all others obliges us to find an instance of a phenomenon and one of its absence which are the same in every respect except one,
which occurs only in the presence of the phenomenon; and plainly this is a condition that is not historically satisfied The same axe falls upon the Method of
Agreement, where it is required that two instances of a phenomenon have nothing
relevant in common except the circumstance which is our candidate for its cause.
To take Mills own example, let us suppose that we discover a set of prosperous
nations which, within the limits of our enquiry, agree only in practicing commercial
protection. We cannot infer that this common practice is the cause of their prosperity. The reason why we cannot is that we have not proved either that protectionism
would in any case be sufficient on its own, or that various combinations of the
divergent factors would not yield prosperity even in the absence of protectionism
(Ayer, 1988, p. 12).
36. See, for instance, Robert C. Tuckers brief introductory note to the edited
version of The Eighteenth Brumaire on p. 594 of the 1978 edition of The MarxEngles Reader.
37. Compare Ringers discussion of Webers approach to causal analysis
(Ringer, 1997, pp. 77 80) with Stephen Jay Goulds account of the irreducibility of
historical explanation in evolutionary biology (Gould, 1989, pp. 282 285) to see
the degrees of convergence around historical irreducibility at work here. As mentioned above, Weber erroneously restricted historical explanations to human
affairs.
38. If position in the social hierarchy actually determined party identification
and vote, how could there ever be any alteration in the struggle for power?
(Alexander, 2010, p. 8).
217
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The Developmental History of Human Social Practices: From Social Analytics To Explanatory Narratives

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Purpose The diversity of social forms both regionally and historically

Social Theories of History and Histories of Social Theory

Keywords: Explanatory narrative; models; types; variable analysis

THE ANALYTIC OF HUMAN SOCIETY

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

beings. Conceptual universals in the social sciences

The Anthrogeneric Concepts of Culture and Institutions

Culture in the social sciences entails meaning, more specifically, linguistic

identity, belonging, and distinction. Not showing implicit degrees of respect

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

Additional Anthrogeneric Concepts

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

the core of habitus

Fig. 1. Institutional Paradigms and Orders. This figure is a slight modification of

individuals such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao played causally significant roles

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

and thus entails a hierarchization to some degree of institutions and the

Mapping Five Modes of Social Practices

The Mode of Communication

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

colloquial language in a region are quickly marginalized in social practices

The Mode of Belief

The Mode of Communication.

Mode of Communication Subsuming

hierarchies of fields in the contemporary United States. Patterns of modern

The Mode of Belief.

The Mode of Belief Subsuming

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

The Mode of Economy

The Mode of Kin Reproduction.

Mode of Kin Reproduction Subsuming

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

us distinguish shifts underway in the technological and organizational

Each mode of development is defined by the element that is fundamental in fostering

We thereby analytically decouple ways of organizing production as a

The Mode of Economy.

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

Sometimes, of course, such stereotyping of motivation works in the

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

Such legitimacy enables institutions to persist over time, as embodied

(1987) called oligoliteracy. Thus the shift from a kinship to a patriarchal

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

The Mode of Domination.

modes tended to be slight in hunter-gatherer societies, about which our

Agency and Reflexive Action

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------charismatic charismatic charismatic charismatic

non-routine, non-state &

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------traditional traditional traditional traditional and legal-rational

Fig. 2. Temporal Ordering of Some Basic Ideal Types of Societies, States,

identify causes in social life external to agency. As a consequence, both an

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

is bound up with absence of a sense of historicity in Fligstein and

We now return to the proposition outlined at the beginning of this analysis,

beyond the simple-minded analysis of stage processes and rational action

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

counts as a case, something that underscores the range and variety of

Generic Models and Working Boundaries Between Social Analytics and

The Developmental History of Human Social Practices

To refer to this as an ideal type, however, contradicts the fact that it is

Examples of Implicit Explanatory Narratives