Category: Trajectories Essays

Damon Mayrl, Colby College

Nicholas Hoover Wilson, Stony Brook University

What do historical sociologists do all day? The answer to this question is surprisingly hard to come by. One reason is that historical sociologists do many different things. As Julia Adams and Ann Orloff argue in their essay in this issue, historical sociology celebrates its methodological, theoretical, and substantive pluralism—a pluralism which is growing with every passing year. There thus is not a simple, straightforward answer to the question. Another reason is that—while historical sociologists have written extensively about logic of inquiry, the relationship between theory and conceptualization, case selection and causality, and specific analytic techniques, much of this work is prescriptive. As a result, the actual practice of historical research has received relatively short shrift. How do historical sociologists actually gather, evaluate, and deploy evidence over the course of a research project—and how do they put that evidence into dialogue with theories when they write up their published findings?

For the past several years, we have been looking into these questions by examining the practice of historical sociology—both by examining how published studies are composed, and by interviewing historical sociologists about their research practices. The first article from this project, “What Do Historical Sociologists Do All Day? Analytic Architectures in Historical Sociology,” was recently published in The American Journal of Sociology. In it, we ask how and why scholars combine theoretical claims and empirical evidence the way they do in their published work. We argue that the answers to these questions are neither self-evident nor idiosyncratic. Rather, scholars use “analytic architectures”—that is, familiar templates for linking theoretical claims and evidence—to guide how they write up and present research. To support this argument, we looked at every book and article that won either the Barrington Moore Book Award or the Charles Tilly Best Article Award from ASA’s Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology between 1995 and 2015. We individually coded in-text citations for what kind of source the authors were citing—theoretical or empirical, and primary or secondary evidence—and how that source was mobilized in the author’s argument—constructively or critically. We coded 15,256 citations in total across 37 books and articles. We then subjected these citations to cluster analysis, a technique that identifies commonalities across different works; and qualitatively examined the clusters that emerged to identify patterns in how theory and evidence are combined in historical sociology.

Using this combination of inductive quantitative and holistic qualitative analysis, we found that “historical sociology” encompasses four distinct analytic architectures that combine theory and evidence in different ways. As Figure 1 shows, these architectures differ in how often they cite primary sources, how heavily they engage with theoretical arguments, and how critical they are of existing work. Each architecture thus reflects choices about what kinds of evidence to present (and in what amounts), how and where (and how extensively) to engage with theoretical explanations, and how to enroll theory and evidence into a coherent presentation of findings and argument. These four architectures are as follows:

1) A first architecture, which we dub “The Theoretical Frontier,” prioritizes engaging with theoretical claims. This architecture gives pride of place both to theoretical criticism and to constructive theorizing, often by explicitly evaluating competing theoretical explanations. In this architecture, evidence (most commonly, existing secondary histories) is used as building blocks brought to bear directly in the service of the evaluation of existing theories.

2) A second architecture, the “Sociologist as Historian,” mirrors the conventions of historians. It emphasizes the use of archival and other primary sources, which are used to nail down an empirically rich and theoretically revealing study. The concentrated presentation of detailed and extensive historical data is thus central, while theoretical citations are typically relegated to a frame in ways that may echo the style of work by historians.

3) A third architecture, the “Macro-Causal Analysis,” constructively combines historical evidence to make claims about large-scale change. This architecture stresses the constructive citation of large amounts of empirical evidence, typically resulting in synthetic comparative accounts or revisitations of classic arguments. In this architecture, unique to books, primary sources fill holes and provide rich detail, but the main power of the analysis rests on an exhaustive foundation of secondary sources.

4) Finally, a “Data-Driven Theorizing” architecture closely couples the building of a theoretical and empirical case. This architecture, unique to articles, is deeply empirical without being archival, and uses its empirical materials to engage in constructive theoretical work. This architecture permits the presentation of case-based inductive theory development, where detailed analysis of a single case is used to construct both an explanation of the case and a more abstract theoretical intervention.

In addition to identifying these architectures, we also took advantage of the twenty-year span of our sample to examine whether awards flowed to certain architectures rather than others at particular points in time. We found suggestive evidence that architectures come in and out of fashion, becoming more or less likely to receive awards at certain moments in time, as can be seen here in Figure 2. Most notably, the architecture that mirrors historians’ conventions became much more prominent among award-winners in the years immediately following the publication of the third-wave landmark Remaking Modernity. This trend in architectural prominence paralleled a secular trend toward the greater use of primary sources, especially among award-winning books. It also appeared to be somewhat, but not perfectly, related to the composition of awards committees. Analytic architectures thus appear to play an important role in mediating prestige, consecration, and transformations in the practice of historical sociology. 

Why does this matter? In the article, we argue that this study of our little corner of sociology has lessons for debates in the sociology of knowledge about how knowledge gets produced, as well as broader disciplinary debates over the value and nature of methodological pluralism. But for historical sociologists specifically, we think there are additional particularly important lessons.

First, “historical sociology” is less of a coherent “thing” than we usually take it to be. We have choices about how we put theory and evidence into dialogue, and structure our arguments. There are in fact multiple recognized “excellent” ways to produce historical sociology, and this productive, peaceful pluralism is something we should celebrate.

 Second, analytic architectures appear to play an important role in making our findings legible to one another. They do this in part by signaling what kind of historical sociologist we are trying to be. The choice of the Historian architecture may signal that we value the methods, standards, and evidence of historians; the choice of the Macro-Causal architecture may signal our hope of positioning ourselves within the tradition of Moore, Skocpol, and Wallerstein. We situate others’ work in part by recognizing their architectures—how they connect theory and evidence—and how that architecture relates to the goals and contributions of other scholars who have written similarly. 

In fact, the existence of analytic architectures likely helps the subdiscipline to cohere. Although techniques and strategies for historical inquiry have multiplied, when it comes to writing, they tend to be presented in a delimited number of architectures, which engage with and link together theory and evidence in ways that make them legible and recognizable as historical sociology. While we are a diverse bunch, it is not the case that “anything goes” in historical sociology. Instead, our methodological pluralism is tamed within a formal structure that allows for diversity and innovation within recognizable bounds.

Anthony S. Chen, Northwestern University

For many Black people in the United States, George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer on a Monday evening in late May must have sparked feelings of deep and genuine outrage.

But such feelings could hardly have been new, and they must have been accompanied by a wearying sense of déjà vu. Scores of unarmed Black men and women had been slain by police officers and would-be vigilantes since 2013, when a Florida jury’s refusal to convict Trayvon Martin’s killer of second-degree murder or manslaughter fueled the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the eyes of many Black people, Floyd’s killing must have seemed like the latest entry in a lengthy catalog of indignities, atrocities, and tragedies that together formed only the most obvious manifestations of anti-Blackness in American society.

As much as it was a source of outrage for many Black people, Floyd’s killing also surely evoked unsettling memories of their own troubling encounters with the police, and it must have served as a reminder of pained conversations that many of them have had about how to behave around police officers—conversations with their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends.

George Floyd’s killing held a different significance for many non-Black people in the United States—and especially for many White people.

It could hardly have been a visceral reminder of police brutality to millions of non-Black Americans. The problem had barely registered in their awareness of the world. For many of them, it functioned more like a graphic introduction to police brutality and a primer on how senseless, cruel, and infuriating it could be.

One of their first lessons concerned the drastic way that official accounts could differ from what body-camera footage or bystander videos might later show.

An early statement from the Minneapolis police claimed that Floyd had “physically resisted officers” and was “suffering medical distress.” But a bystander video posted to Facebook conspicuously diverged from the official account, which made no mention of the fact that a White police officer had been casually kneeling on Floyd’s neck for several minutes as he gasped repeatedly, “I can’t breathe.” The officer did not stop even after it was clear that Floyd had been subdued. Shortly before he lost consciousness, Floyd called out for his mother. Not long after, he was dead.^[1]

The video’s revelations were a clap of thunder for many non-Black people, and consciences that had slumbered through the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Brown, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and dozens of others, now found themselves jolted awake.

———-

Beyond the unusually shocking nature of the cellphone footage, there are many reasons why George Floyd’s killing might have mattered to a new majority of Americans when all of the killings that went before it did not.

In the New York Times Magazine, Nikole Hannah-Jones notes that years of “unrelenting organizing by the Black Lives Matter movement” were a major reason why. Indeed, from the moment in 2012 when Marcus Anthony Hunter devised the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, to the subsequent year when Alicia Garza posted her “love letter to black folks” on Facebook, to the acts of protest and disobedience that gripped Ferguson, Missouri and then New York City in 2014, to the surprising 2016 declaration of Rahm Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force that the Chicago Police Department’s “own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color,” Black Lives Matters has led the way.^[2]

BLM has been far from the only voice calling for the dignity and humanity of Black people to receive full recognition. There have been other actors who have also demanded a transformation of the justice system. But it is hard to deny that BLM has played a key role in touching off a cascade of interrelated changes in various dimensions of our culture, politics, and society. I would argue that it has made police brutality a policy issue among political elites, and that it has forced elected officials at all levels of government to take a stance. I would further argue that at the level of the mass public it has kept the issue in the forefront of the public imagination at a time when our attention itself has become more of a commodity than ever.

Perhaps most profoundly, however, BLM-led activism around the country may have contributed vitally to the beginnings of a fundamental change in the consciousness and attitudes of many non-Black people. The change was revealed by the May and June protests in such a way that some Black people who I know have reported the feeling of being seen, heard, and understood for the first time in a long time. This feeling, in turn, comes not from a change in Black people but from a growing capacity of many non-Black people to identify with Black people—not just Black athletes and Black rappers but “normal,” non-celebrity Black people. In ever greater numbers, non-Black people and especially White people look at the killing of a Black man like George Floyd and ask themselves questions that had simply not occurred to ask in the past. What would I have felt in the last moments of my life if I were him? How would I feel about what happened to him if he were my brother, son, or father? What must it be like to worry every time someone I love sets foot outside that an encounter between them and the police could go fatally off the rails? In a sense, what BLM’s activism has done is help to precipitate a moment of disenchantment with the racial status quo among growing numbers of non-Black Americans. It gradually seeded skepticism of the odious notion that the violence perpetrated by the police against Black people was simply a case of just deserts. At the same time, it rendered increasingly legible the myriad ways in which police brutality and other expressions of anti-Blackness were actually the consequence of our collective political choices. To borrow the words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, BLM’s mobilization over time has led to a piercing of the “prevailing common sense about our society.”^[3]

There can be little denying that the outbreak of COVID-19 formed an indispensable context in which the innumerable changes wrought by BLM could potentially take effect. If it makes sense to think of BLM’s mobilization over time as gradually potentiating the possibility of a sea change in public concern about police brutality and anti-Blackness, then the onset of the pandemic was the final ingredient that made the social situation in many parts of the country ripe for a triggering event.

The pandemic has mattered in myriad ways.

Hannah-Jones observes that millions of Americans had been suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into a state of precarity and hardship, and the scales fell from their eyes. Only during a time of pandemic did it dawn on many non-Black people on lockdown at home that delivery drivers, grocery clerks, and many other “essential,” low-wage workers were Black and Latinx. Only during a time of pandemic did many Americans become keenly tuned into the behavior of the police, who they witnessed “beating up white women, pushing down an elderly white man and throwing tear gas and shooting rubber bullets at demonstrators exercising their democratic right to peacefully protest.” If they would unapologetically perpetrate such blatant abuses against White people in the presence of a thousand iPhones, what were they doing to Black people when there were no phones around?^[4]

Opal Tometi, who co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement with Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, offers a concurring judgment in an interview recently featured in The New Yorker. Tometi highlights the sociology of emotion behind the shift. For weeks, “we have been sitting in our homes, navigating the pandemic, dealing with loved ones being sick, dealing with a great of fear and concern about what they day and the future will hold.” In more settled times, feelings of empathy and concerns about fairness might have been successfully kept at arm’s length, but such sentiments were now close to the surface and hard to ignore. The collective ordeal brought on by the pandemic has made many of us “more tender or sensitive to what is going on.” Tometi also offers a more practical reason. The pandemic has given people the opportunity to act on their newfound feelings. Many people who would have been at work “now have time to go to a protest or rally.”^[5]

It mattered especially that the pandemic happened more than three years into the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Has there been a modern American president whose electoral success has been more centrally and explicitly predicated on the status anxieties of downwardly mobile white Americans than Trump? Has there been a modern American president who has more eagerly stoked the very anxieties that got him elected in the first place? Has there been a period in modern American political history when ideas about race have so sharply differentiated the electoral coalitions of the two major parties?^[6]

To a degree that is exceptional in modern times, race is front and center in American politics, and Trump’s openly racist appeals and bald prejudice have led significant numbers of non-Black people to see that anti-Black and anti-Brown racism of the most explicit kind is not some dying atavism of a bygone time or a figment of the liberal imagination. As anticipated by Christopher S. Parker in a 2016 article in The American Prospect and recently highlighted by Dana Milbank, Trump’s “clear bigotry” has rendered it “impossible” for a non-trivial subset of “whites to deny the existence of racism in America,” and it has encouraged them to “honestly confront the persistence of racism as never before.”^[7]

By the evening that George Floyd was killed in 2020, Americans had been watching for more than three years as Trump smeared Mexican Americans and praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” rarely seeming to pay a political price for his slurs and effrontery. If any non-black Americans were slapping their foreheads in disbelief at his conduct in the initial years of his presidency, they were largely accepting of prejudice and discrimination as an incontrovertible if lamentable fact of life a few years later. As much as BLM or the pandemic, Trump’s promotion of white supremacy was a necessary ingredient for turning George Floyd’s killing into the trigger that it became.

———-

Further research will determine whether these points have any merit, and I certainly hope comparative-historical sociologists will lead the intellectual charge. But what seems difficult to dispute is the remarkable scale, wide scope, and diverse character of the protests that have occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.

This month-long wave of protest began in Minneapolis on May 26. Thousands of people, many of them wearing masks, gathered at 38^th Street and Chicago Avenue outside Cup Foods, where Floyd had been killed, and they then marched to the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct station. The protest in Minneapolis intensified over the next few days and spread to other cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. After several days of unrest, President Trump threatened to suppress the demonstrations, tweeting “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”^[8]

Trump’s echo of a segregationist mantra only seemed to fuel further protest. On the day of his “looting, shooting” tweet—Thursday, May 28—there were perhaps 50 protests around the United States. The number leapt upward sharply each subsequent day. According to data collected by the New York Times, there were 150 protests on Friday, May 29; 400 protests on Saturday, May 30; and then nearly 500 protests on Sunday, May 31. The protests peaked on June 6 (which saw more than 500 protests), but June 13 (which saw 250 protests) and Juneteenth (which also saw around 250 protests) also witnessed major protest activity. By the end of June, there had been more than 4,700 protests in 2,500 cities of varying sizes all across the country. Anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people had participated. The scale and extent of the wave seemed utterly unprecedented. “I’ve never seen self-reports of protest participation that high for a specific issue over such a short period,” Neal Caren is quoted as saying.^[9]

As significant as the raw number of protestors involved was their racial composition. Whereas earlier protests led by Black Lives Matter involved participants who were predominantly Black, many American protestors in May and June were not Black. In fact, many were non-Black and indeed White. This is readily discernible in news photos, but it can also be cautiously inferred from the demographics of the locations where protests took place. For instance, one analysis in the New York Times shows that three-quarters of the counties that saw a protest are more than 75 percent white. Better evidence of the racial composition of recent protests is reported by Michael Heaney and Dana Fischer (via Doug McAdams), whose surveys in Los Angeles, New York, and the District of Columbia indicate that something like three-fifths of protestors there were White, while Blacks, Latinx, and Asian protestors each represented about a tenth of protestors.^[10]

The protests were not confined to the United States for long. Marches were staged and gatherings were held in London, Bristol, Oxford, Edinburgh, Paris, Osaka, Brussels, Nairobi, Frankfurt, Berlin, Cologne, Toronto, Pretoria, Capetown, Mexico City, and Sydney, to name just a few places. The slogan “Black Lives Matters” appeared not only online in social media but on cardboard placards in the hands of protestors around the world. It is no exaggeration to say that George Floyd’s killing struck a global nerve, leading hundreds of thousands of people outside the United States to take collective action in response.^[11]

What seems as equally difficult to dispute as the unprecedented number and diverse makeup of protestors is the rapidity and extent of the shift in public opinion that occurred in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.

In a June survey administered by the Monmouth University Polling Institute, three-quarters of those surveyed agreed that “racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States is a “big problem” (compared to two-thirds of those surveyed in 2016). Seven-one percent of White respondents and eighty-four percent of people of color agreed with the statement. In the same June survey, fifty-seven percent of respondents agreed that police officers were “more likely to use excessive force if the culprit is black” (compared to just thirty-four percent in 2016). Half of white respondents and seventy-one percent of people of color agreed with the statement.^[12]

The shift is even more apparent when data of higher granularity is examined. Looking at the Civiqs tracking poll of registered voters, Michael Tesler argues that George Floyd’s killing accelerated pre-existing trends. Support for the BLM movement had hovered around forty percent among all respondents for much of 2018, 2019, and 2020. It began ticking upward with the availability of CDC data on COVID-19 by race, and it experienced a sharp jump with Floyd’s death. (Interestingly, so did the percentage of respondents opposing the BLM movement.) Half of all respondents now express support for the BLM movement. A similar jump with Floyd’s death can be seen in the views of white respondents.^[13]

Looking at data from UCLA/Nationscape, Tesler observes that sixty-two percent of those surveyed (in the period from May 28 to June 3) agreed that Black people face a significant amount of discrimination, compared to fifty-five percent of those surveyed a week earlier. Fifty-six percent of White respondents agreed, which was seven percentage points higher than the previous week. Over the same stretch of time, it appears that the percentage of White respondents who have a very or somewhat favorable impression of police officers fell from seventy-two percent to sixty-one percent. At the same time, thirty-one percent of White respondents held a somewhat or very unfavorable view of the police, compared to eighteen percent the week earlier.^[14]

The interracial character of the recent protests and the signs of a shift in public opinion have been accompanied by various degrees of government action. A nominally bipartisan majority in the U.S. House of Representatives approved the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” by a 236-181 margin. Although the legislation is a non-starter in the Senate, it nevertheless put a number of long-sought reforms on the congressional agenda. This includes among other things lowering the intent standard in the section of the federal criminal code (18 U.S.C. Section 242) that is currently used to prosecute cases of police misconduct involving the use of excessive force; modifying the section of the federal criminal code (18 U.S.C. Section 1983) that is currently interpreted by the federal courts as giving local and federal law enforcement officers “qualified immunity” from liability in private civil actions in which they have committed constitutional violations; giving the U.S. Attorney General court-enforced subpoena power in “pattern and practice” investigations of law enforcement agencies suspected of violating constitutional rights; providing $750 million to state attorneys general for use in conducting independent investigations of excessive use of force that led to someone’s death, contingent on the passage of state legislation setting up a framework for the independent prosecution of law enforcement; establishing a National Police Misconduct Registry and requiring state and local law enforcement agencies to report all incidents involving use of force to the U.S. Attorney General; banning no-knock warrants in federal drug cases, making the use of chokeholds a civil rights violation, and denying federal monies to localities that do not adopt similar restrictions. Many provisions in the bill will surely serve at minimum as the initial bargaining position for the Democrats in future sessions of Congress.^[15]

States and localities have arguably taken more serious steps than the federal government to curb police brutality. Elected officials in Los Angeles and New York City have begun looking at cutting their police budgets. Officers around the country who might not have faced charges for the conduct in earlier times—including George Floyd’s killer—have now been charged by prosecutors with violating the law. California’s state police training program has stopped teaching choke holds; Memphis police officers must now restrain colleagues who are engaging in misconduct or face consequences; Kansas City’s mayor has committed to having every local police shooting reviewed by an external party; Seattle has banned the practice of covering up badge numbers. These are admittedly small changes, and they may not eventually add up to comprehensive reform, but many of them are more substantive than the responses of Congress or the Trump administration.^[16]

The stirrings of broader social change are evident as well. Mississippi retired its state flag, which prominently featured a symbol of the Confederacy. A statue of Stonewall Jackson was removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. A statue of Jefferson Davis was taken away from the rotunda of the state capitol building in Frankfort, Kentucky. In the private sector, thousands of American companies have asserted that Black lives matter and vowed to make good on their proclamations. Some of them have even committed real resources. Doug McAdams points out that Comcast announced it was allocating $100 million over three years to “fight injustice and inequality against any race, ethnicity, sexuality orientation, or ability.” McAdam also guardedly highlights the symbolic significance of NASCAR’s ban on the Conference flag and the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s mea culpa, in which he confessed the error of the league’s earlier ways and proclaimed that “we, the National Football League, believe black lives matter.” Many such examples exist, McAdams writes. “Put together, we appear to be experiencing a social change tipping point that is as rare as it is potentially consequential.”^[17]

———-

 “It feels different this time,” writes Hannah-Jones. BLM’s Tometi agrees. Many other close observers share the same sentiment. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates in a recent interview with Ezra Klein. “But I see hope. I see progress right now.” What is different about the current moment is the fact that “significant swaths” of non-Black people in places like Des Moines and Salt Lake City and Berlin and London care about the “pain” and “suffering” of “black folks in their struggle against the way the law is enforced in their neighborhoods.” Much of the credit for the transformation of the collective consciousness, he believes, should go to BLM. “Within my lifetime, I don’t think there’s been a more effective movement than Black Live Matter.”^[18]

It therefore seems fitting that Alicia Garza, another one of BLM’s three founders, feels a sense of hope as well. Just a few years ago, she observed, Garza and her fellow activists struggled to simply assert that Black lives matter without getting an earful of unmitigated grief. “Now everybody’s saying Black lives matter. The question now is, ‘Well, what do you mean? I would say that’s progress.’” It is a huge achievement that BLM is a “major part of our global conversation right now,” when things are just “bonkers.” And what it is doing is “forcing people across all walks of life, all sectors in our economy, and every corner of the planet really, to assess whether we are where we need to be—and what we need to do to get to where we’re trying to go.”^[19]

Despite all of the optimism, few close observers are under the illusion that transformative potential of the current moment can be identified easily or realized immediately. There is a keen awareness that additional phases of conscious, sustained struggle are required and that it will be necessary to address and overcome the limits of the initial phase. Garza stresses the importance of making sure “we keep this momentum going where everybody feels like this is a movement that is theirs. It’s not just for Black people.”^[20]

There is also a sense that BLM might need to address organizational limits that have held it back from being even more effective. Taking stock of BLM last fall, Yamahtta-Taylor expressed a concern that the decentralized, leaderless structure set up by the organizers was not suited to creating the organic goodwill that they wanted to exist at the heart of the movement. Instead, it simply ignored the growing tension within BLM between a reformist contingent (interested in body cameras and the like) and a “revolutionary” contingent (interested in the abolition of the carceral state). Nor did such a decentralized structure make it possible for the movement to build cumulatively on the lessons that were there to be learned. “The lack of clear entry points into movement organizing, and the absence of any democratically accountable organization or structure within the movement” made it challenging to “evaluate the state of the movement, delaying its ability to pivot and postponing the generalization of strategic lessons and tactics from one locality to the next or from one action to the next.” Each locality often wound up reinventing the wheel. Yamahtta-Taylor was also concerned that BLM’s ethos of leaderlessness was not serving it particularly well. “The issue is not whether there are leaders, it is whether those leaders are accountable to those they represent.” The ideology of “horizontalism” that guided it often caused confusion or led to “hard feelings,” and it made it difficult to course-correct when things began going in the “wrong direction.”^[21]

The biggest question of all naturally is whether the current moment will lead to more than stopgap measures, symbolic gestures, and incremental improvements. Is the optimism justified? What kind of enduring achievements and institutional changes will come of it, if any? “It doesn’t take a lot, nor does it cost a lot, to protest the torture and killing of a man on video,” says Vince Hutchings. Grappling seriously with the “original sin of racism is going to take a lot more than condemning murderous police officers.”^[22]

Especially sobering is the idea that the remarkable wave of protests that we witnessed in May and June—and the green shoots of social change that have emerged in their wake—have been possible only because one of the most compelling social movements in the last fifty years found itself mobilizing in the context of a once-in-a-century pandemic after three years of shambolic rule by the most bigoted man to sit in the Oval Office since perhaps the Civil War. ^[23]

The protests are exceptional, for sure. But they have come out of exceptional times. What happens if our times become less exceptional? Will the current sense of urgency dissipate? Will the concern of non-Black people about the dignity and equality of Black people fade away as the pandemic is gradually overcome and economy begins to right itself? Will public concern be satisfied by incremental reforms that do little to challenge the power of police unions once the outrage over George Floyd subsides? Will the outrage be hijacked by other actors with other aims?

———-

There have been times in the American past when the momentum for social change borne of an exceptional moment was sustained and led to meaningful institutional achievements. One example that comes to my mind is the two-and-a-half-year stretch from the Birmingham campaign in 1963 to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

This remarkable period began with one of the most exceptional episodes of collective action in U.S. history, one that remains central to the study of social movements to this day. The campaign to dismantle segregation in Birmingham, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Fred L. Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, involved a boycott of local businesses followed by an escalating succession of mass demonstrations. Thousands of Black people participated in various ways throughout April and May, including the Black schoolchildren who famously took to the streets in the face of police dogs and water cannons.^[24]

The situation came to a head on May 7, according to Aldon D. Morris’s authoritative analysis. That day, thousands of protestors were able to flood the unguarded downtown business district after a team of decoy marchers around the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church succeeded in distracting the police. This made it impossible for local authorities to control the situation. Nothing could be done about the downtown protestors, as Birmingham’s jails were already full from days of arrests. The economic and political order had clearly broken down, and the city’s business leaders capitulated early the next morning, conceding most of the movement’s demands. Not long afterward, the Kennedy administration accepted the need for a legislative approach. Birmingham contributed mightily to the nationalization of the civil rights issue. It was a stunning achievement for a disenfranchised people, made possible by the exceptional circumstances that they themselves had been responsible for creating.^[25]

There was no backsliding in the two or three years after Birmingham, as exceptional as it was. In fact, Birmingham might well be seen an initial, catalytic step in a dynamic sequence that culminated with the Voting Rights Act.

What followed the Birmingham campaign was a clear intensification of mass mobilization and political engagement, much of it led by an overlapping (and sometimes competing) set of actors. Birmingham provided a “model of protest” for protestors elsewhere in Morris’s words. In the weeks thereafter, several hundred demonstrations took place in scores of cities throughout the South, and civil rights groups organized the now-storied March on Washington at the end of the summer. By the end of 1963, it was clear that Black protest events had leapt sharply upward over the previous two years. News coverage of the four most prominent civil rights groups also shot up, and the volume of pro-civil rights letters written to the White House similarly increased. ^[26]

In 1964, there was a falloff in the raw frequency of protest events, news coverage, and constituency mail, but there was still a great deal of notable activity. This was the year of Freedom Summer; the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner; the passage of the Civil Rights Act; and the controversy over the seating of delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.^[27]

The subsequent year saw high levels of mass mobilization and political engagement reach a peak. Black protest activity swing sharply upward again. There were nearly 250 Black protest events in 1965, nearly twice as many as 1963. Many of them were connected to the campaign to win federal legislation on voting rights, based in Alabama and led by the SCLC’s King and the late John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. News coverage also remained at a high level, and Johnson’s White House saw a deluge of constituency mail, more than tripling the volume that had been generated in 1963. A large number of letters came in the wake of Bloody Sunday, the murders of Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, and Johnson’s address to a joint session of Congress. The culminating achievement of the period was the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which no less a constitutional authority than Lawrence H. Tribe has pronounced “probably the most radical piece of civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.”^[28]

———-

The comparison between our current moment and the years from Birmingham to the Voting Rights Act is not just inexact. The outcome of the May and June protests is simply not known. What kind of case is it? We do not know right now; we cannot know yet. It is possible that little will come of the current moment. The possibility for major change may simply fade after the arrival of a vaccine and a Biden election. There could be backsliding or backlash. Perhaps the moment that should come to mind is not the mid-1960s but the late-1960s. A study by Omar Wasow exploits rainfall as an instrumental variable to show that “protestor-initiated violence” in 1968 “tipped” the election toward Nixon. A comparison should be approached with the utmost caution.[29]

To the extent that it is valid to think about the current moment as a case of success analogous to the mid-1960s, what a comparison suggests to me is the relevance of federal action to significant, lasting change. In a widely read essay in Medium, President Obama argues that protest is important because it raises public awareness and discomfits the “powers that be.” But he also argues that political participation and electoral politics are important because our “aspirations” are translated into “specific laws and institutional practices” in our democracy only when “we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.” President Obama goes on to point out that that “the elected officials who matter the most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels.” Mayors appoint police chiefs and bargain collectively with police unions. District attorneys and state’s attorneys decide whether to investigate, charge, and prosecute the perpetrators of police misconduct. Hence our current moment could be a turning point for “real change” because protest and politics have come together in a way that responsive governance is actually possible.^[30]

Yet it is not clear that the state and local officials are capable of responding effectively to newly resonant demands for “real change” without robust federal assistance. Police unions continue to wield enormous political power in most cities. In a sharply observed portrait of the New York City Police Benevolent Association (NYPBA), William Finnegan argues convincingly that it has thoroughly succeeded in not just winning generous salaries and retirement benefits for its members, but it has also dominated various aspects of public policy. For instance, there has been no requirement that police officers live in the five boroughs since the sixties. Finnegan points out that the NYCPBA has succeeded for decades in rebuffing every attempt to restore it, and a majority of white members continue to live in Long Island and other nearby suburbs. When it comes to public policy around brutality and misconduct, police union influence translates into collective bargaining agreements that shield the “bad apples” (maybe ten percent according to analysts most favorable to police). Typical contracts are stuffed with provisions that often make it difficult to collect the most elementary evidence that is needed to establish whether brutality or misconduct occurred in the first place, and many contracts require binding arbitration if major discipline is meted out to officers. Even if voters wanting real change manage to elect state and local officials who intend to be responsive to their constituents, other political actors like police unions remain powerful enough to thwart reform—major or minor. Various types of federal action might be necessary to make local and state government sufficiently responsive.^[31]

Here the comparison to voting rights reminds us that it has previously been the case that federal action was ultimately necessary in order to encourage change on the part of state and local officials. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required covered jurisdictions to obtain “federal pre-clearance” before making any changes to their election procedures, was necessary because state and local officials had been enormously creative over the years in their disenfranchisement of Black people, and pre-clearance was necessary to make sure that changes state and local officials wished to make that seemed innocent on their face did not simply make things worse for Black people.

Similarly, federal action seems necessary today, albeit for different reasons. If the George Floyd protests have finally convinced state and local officials to respond robustly to voter demands, they still need all the help they can get when trying to restructure police union contracts in a way that makes police officers accountable for their misconduct.

Is the difficulty of achieving democratic representation at the state and local level a reason to abandon reform in favor of a full-throated abolitionist agenda? Perhaps it is, but I am not so sure yet.

Even if the Minneapolis Police Department’s embrace of “procedural justice” reforms did little to prevent George Floyd’s killing, it strikes me that other types of reform may still be worth exploring. David Thacher argues persuasively to my mind that the police are unique as a government institution because they are invested with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and a “meaningful agenda” for reform should aim to help the police resolve problems that might require the use of force with as little force as possible.^[32]

This will necessitate among other things the adoption of a new portfolio of policies designed to regulate use of force; to monitor compliance with these regulations; and to give the police the capacity to address the wide range of situations they encounter in a manner that uses the minimal degree of force necessary.^[33]

One of the most compelling ideas along these lines was introduced several years ago in the aftermath of Laquan McDonald’s killing in Chicago. Max Schazenbach argued that mayors and police superintendents should be given the authority “to fire any officer for any reason that does not otherwise violate a general employment statute.” This authority would be used to purge the police department of problematic, abusive officers. A “less dramatic” change would be to “prohibit local governments from paying for officers’ settlements in civil rights cases” and “require officers to buy professional liability insurance.” Officers exceeding regulations on the use of force or accumulating too many complaints would simply be priced out of the market for insurance.^[34]

One sign of the latter idea’s promise is the movement recently afoot among some insurers and brokers to design the kind of professional liability coverage that Schanzenbach had in mind. In response to New York state senator Alessandra Biaggi’s proposal to require officers to carry insurance covering liability for excessive force and abuse, companies like Marsh & McLennan, Hylant Group, and Prymus Insurance are looking into how to set premiums and structure payouts. There is not yet a consensus about the viability of such a product, but some companies believe that “this is absolutely something they will be able to work with.”^[35]

Still, putting either of Schanzenbach’s ideas into place—or pursuing other kinds of meaningful reform—would very likely require modifying union contracts, which would in turn require mayors to muster up enough political will to win the right set of contractual provisions in the next round of collective bargaining.

This is where it is not hard to imagine that the federal government could play a powerful and beneficial role. One conceivable way to incentivize mayors and cities to be more responsive to demands for stronger policies would be for the federal government to step in and offer reinsurance for professional liability coverage on certain terms.

Reinsurance is basically insurance for insurers, and it is purchased by insurers (or self-insured entities) who wish to offload specified financial risks that they face as a result of the insurance policies they have written. In the context of health care insurance, for example, some states have created reinsurance programs for health insurers in the individual market. Insurers who participate in the state program are provided payment for some portion of the cost for their enrollees above a certain amount. Successful reinsurance programs can help to lower premiums and maintain the viability of a market that might not otherwise be able to function properly.

A federal reinsurance program for professional liability coverage might work by picking up a substantial portion of the payment for all losses above a certain threshold incurred by an insurer or self-insured municipality due to “wrongful acts” by a covered officer. (This is technically called “specific stop-loss excess insurance.” A policy that covers aggregate losses by an insurer for a particular period of time is called “aggregate stop-loss excess insurance.”) Depending on exactly where the threshold is set, which is a decision that would naturally affect the pricing of the premium, such a program could save large cities a substantial sum of money. These cities are usually self-insured and pay out millions of dollars each year in misconduct cases. For smaller cities that purchase professional liability coverage, such a program could potentially lower premiums and encourage more insurers to participate in the market.^[36]

The way that a federal reinsurance program might be leveraged to catalyze responsiveness on the part of state and local officials is that federal reinsurance coverage could be made contingent upon the maintenance of high underwriting standards on the part of insurers. The federal reinsurance program would work directly with self-insured cities (instead of working with insurers), and here coverage could also be made contingent upon high underwriting standards. These high standards would be geared toward loss prevention, and they could include (for instance) whether the mayor and the police chief have the authority to fire officers without being subject to reinstatement by an arbitrator; whether there is a “cooling off” period before an officer accused of misconduct is obliged to make a statement about what happened; whether the police department penalizes officers for making false statements about misconduct; whether there are detailed guidelines on the use of force; whether compliance with those guidelines is monitored; and whether officers are trained to resolve situations using the least amount of force necessary.

Hence the establishment of a federal reinsurance program could potentially give state and local officials a financial incentive to heed demands from their constituents for meaningful reform; furthermore, it could help to set a nationwide “floor” for the reform of use of force policies.

Just as federal action once proved necessary to extending the franchise to Black people in the United States, federal action may well be essential to defeating the scourge of police brutality in the current moment. Depending on the next phase of mobilization, if there is one, police brutality could just be the beginning. It is not inconceivable that some form of reparations could move squarely into the national discussion. Regardless, without a considered degree of federal involvement, meaningful reform of any kind seems out of reach, no matter how powerful the calls for change become.

———-

The subfield of comparative-historical sociology operates at a remove from the most immediate issues that gave rise to the George Floyd protests, but it is certainly implicated in the larger system of anti-Blackness of which police brutality is only one expression.

In comparative-historical sociology, anti-Blackness is manifested in myriad ways. It is recognizable in our canon, our syllabi, our topics of investigation, our lists of award-winning authors, our elected leadership, our editorial boards, and our new hires. In these and other areas of our intellectual and professional life, there are simply fewer Black sociologists in the mix than there should be. 

These issues were foremost in the minds of the Officers and Council of the ASA CHS Section in the second week of June, as all of us discussed what to do in response to the protests sweeping the country. (The protests had just reached their second and highest peak on June 6, although we obviously could not have known it at the time.) Several us had learned that the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section under the leadership of David Brady had decided to donate all of the funds that would have gone to finance their conference reception to the ASA Minority Fellowship Program, and there was a strong sense that ASA CHS should consider doing likewise. But there was also a sense that it was incumbent upon us to do more. In particular, we felt that it was important to publicly express our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and Black people more generally. At the same time, we felt that our expression of solidarity would be even more meaningful if we took serious steps to identify and address anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism in our own intellectual backyard—that is, comparative-historical sociology.

Over the course of the week, we sought to take steps that would begin to address these issues. We decided to contribute a large portion of our reception funding to the ASA Minority Fellowship Program, and we drafted and unanimously approved a statement of solidarity that articulated our basic values and commitments. (See inset.)

We also resolved to take a moment at the next Council meeting to form a Standing Committee on Anti-Blackness and Racism in Comparative-Historical Sociology. The basic charge of the committee would be to identify and address manifestations of anti-Blackness in our subfield. It might do so in a number of ways. It might undertake an analysis of graduate syllabi at top departments to determine the extent to which Black authors are underrepresented. It might consult with the Elections Committee to help develop a sufficiently diverse pool of candidates for annual elections. It might be asked annually by Section Chairs to assess whether the Section’s program each year reproduces a larger pattern of anti-Blackness.^[37]

Lastly, we resolved to commission a panel on “Identifying, Confronting, and Addressing Anti-Blackness and Racism in Comparative-Historical Sociology” at the next CHS mini-conference.

These are modest actions and initiatives when compared to bigger steps that are needed to take down police brutality and challenge the carceral state. But they are actions and initiatives that are borne out of the same moment of collective recognition that gripped many non-Black people around the world in the wake of George Floyd’s killing—that anti-Blackness must be confronted now in all of its multifarious incarnations and that comparative-historical sociologists must not shrink from doing our part.

---

[1] On the circumstances of Floyd’s killing, see Audra D.S. Burch and John Eligon, “Bystander Videos of George Floyd and Others Are Policing the Police,” New York Times, May 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/us/george-floyd-minneapolis-police.html (accessed July 15, 2020). See also “Video shows man dying under officer’s knee,” Minneapolis StarTribune, May 26, 2020, https://video.startribune.com/video-shows-man-dying-under-officer-s-knee/570780382/ (accessed July 15, 2020).

[2] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “What is Owed,” New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/24/magazine/reparations-slavery.html (accessed July 9, 2020); Marcus Anthony Hunter, “How does L.A.’s racial past resonate now?” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-08/six-writers-on-l-a-and-black-lives-matter (accessed July 9, 2020); Jamilab King, “#blacklivesmatter: How three friends turned a spontaneous Facebook post into a global phenomenon,” California Sunday Magazine, March 2015, https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-03-01/black-lives-matter/ (accessed July 9, 2020); Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, Recommendations for Reform – Executive Summary (April 2016), p. 8, https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Final_Report_Executive_Summary_4_13_16-1.pdf (accessed July 9, 2020), cited in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?” Jacobin, September 30, 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/black-lives-matter-laquan-mcdonald-mike-brown-eric-garner (accessed on July 9, 2020).

[3] Taylor, “Five Years Later.”

[4] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “What is Owed.”

[5] Isaac Chotiner, “A Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Explains Why This Time Is Different,” The New Yorker, June 3, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-black-lives-matter-co-founder-explains-why-this-time-is-different (accessed July 14, 2020).

[6] On the status-based nature of Trump’s appeal, see Christopher S. Parker and Matt Barreto, “The Great White Hope: Polarization and Threat in the Age of Trump,” in Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization, edited by Robert C. Liberman, Suzanne Mettler, and Kenneth M. Roberts (forthcoming manuscript, on file with author); Christopher S. Parker, Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Diana Mutz, “Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, V115, N9 (2018): E4330-E4339. For research that stresses economic factors, such as exposure to trade with China, see David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson and Kaeh Majlesi, “A Note on the Effect of Rising Trade Exposure on the 2016 Presidential Election,” working paper, https://economics.mit.edu/files/12418, accessed July 14, 2020 and David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi, “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” American Economic Review, forthcoming. For evidence on the success of Trump’s ethnic and racial appeals in attracting white, working-class voters, see Alan Abramowitz and Jennifer McCoy, “United States: Racial Resentment, Negative Partisanship, and Polarization in Trump’s America,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 681 (January 2019): 137-156. On the role of race in fueling a growing feeling of mutual antipathy that obtains between the electoral coalitions of the two major parties, see Nicholas A. Valentino and Kirill Zhirkov, “Blue is Black and Red is White? Affective Polarization and the Racialized Schemas of U.S. Party Coalitions,” working paper, n.d., https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/pe_04_17_valentino.pdf, accessed July 14, 2020.

[7] Christopher S. Parker, “Do Trump’s Racist Appeals Have a Silver Lining?” The American Prospect, May 19, 2016, https://prospect.org/power/trump-s-racist-appeals-silver-lining/ (accessed July 14, 2020); Dana Milbank, “A massive repudiation of Trump’s racist politics is building,” Washington Post, July 3, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/03/massive-repudiation-trumps-racist-politics-is-building/ (accessed July 14, 2020).

[8] Ryan Faircloth, “Rubber bullets, chemical irritant, water bottles in the air as thousands march to protest George Floyd’s death,” Star Tribune, May 27, 2020, https://www.startribune.com/rubber-bullets-chemical-irritant-water-bottles-in-air-as-thousands-march-to-protest-george-floyd-s-death/570786992/

(accessed July 15, 2020); “Protestors march after death of George Floyd while in custody of Minneapolis police,” Star Tribune, May 26, 2020, https://video.startribune.com/protesters-march-after-death-of-george-floyd-while-in-custody-of-minneapolis-police/570785262/ (accessed July 15, 2020); Andy Mannix, “Minneapolis police station set on fire,” Star Tribune, May 29, 2020, https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-station-set-on-fire-protesters-march-downtown/570849592/ (accessed July 15, 2020); “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” New York Times, July 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html (accessed July 15, 2020).

[9] Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html (accessed July 15, 2020).

[10] Audra D.S. Burch, Weiyi Cai, Gabriel Gianordoli, Morrigan McCarthy, and Jugal K. Patel, “How Black Lives Matter Reached Every Corner of America,” New York Times, June 13, 2020.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/13/us/george-floyd-protests-cities-photos.html (accessed July 15, 2020); Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History”; Doug McAdams, “We’ve Never Seen Protests Like These Before,” Jacobin, June 20, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/george-floyd-protests-black-lives-matter-riots-demonstrations (accessed July 15, 2020).

[11] Washington Post Staff, “How George Floyd’s death sparked protests around the world,” Washington Post, June 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/2020/06/10/how-george-floyds-death-sparked-protests-around-world/ (July 16, 2020).

[12] Monmouth University Polling Institute, “Protestors’ Anger Justified Even If Actions May Not Be,” June 2, 2020, p. 4-5, https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_060220.pdf/

 (accessed July 16, 2020).

[13] Michael Tesler, “The Floyd protests have changed public opinion about race and policing,” Washington Post, June 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/09/floyd-protests-have-changed-public-opinion-about-race-policing-heres-data/ (accessed July 16, 2020); Civiqs, “Do you support or oppose the Black Lives matter movement?,” https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter?uncertainty=true&annotations=true&zoomIn=true (accessed July 16, 2020).

[14] Tesler, “The Floyd protests have changed public opinion about race and policing”; Rebecca Morin, “Percentage grows among Americans who say Black people experience a “great deal” of discrimination, survey shows,” USA Today, June 8, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/08/survey-higher-percentage-us-agree-black-people-face-discrimination/3143651001/ (accessed July 16, 2020).

[15] Congressional Record—House, June 25, 2020, H2440-2453, https://www.congress.gov/116/crec/2020/06/25/CREC-2020-06-25-pt1-PgH2439-4.pdf (accessed July 16, 2010); Catie Edmondson, “House Passes Sweeping Police Bill Targeting Racial Bias and Use of Force,” New York Times, June 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/us/politics/house-police-overhaul-bill.html (accessed July 16, 2020).

[16] Paresh Dave, “Factbox: What changes are governments making in response to George Floyd protests?” Reuters, June 10, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-response/factbox-what-changes-are-governments-making-in-response-to-george-floyd-protests-idUSKBN23I01D (accessed July 16, 2020).

[17] Rick Rojas, “Mississippi Lawmakers Vote to Retire State Flag Rooted in the Confederacy,” New York Times, June 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/us/mississippi-flag-confederacy.html (accessed July 16, 220); Alan Taylor, “The Statues Brought Down Since the George Floyd Protests Began,” The Atlantic, July 2, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/07/photos-statues-removed-george-floyd-protests-began/613774/ (accessed July 16, 2020); Doug McAdams, “We’ve Never Seen Protests Like These Before”; Brian Robert, “Comcast Announces $100 Million Multiyear Plan to Advance Social Justice and Equality,” June 8, 2020, https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-announces-100-million-multiyear-plan-social-justice-and-equality (accessed July 16, 2020).

[18] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “What is Owed”; Isaac Chotiner, “A Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Explains Why This Time Is Different”; Ezra Klein, “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful,” Vox, June 5, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/5/21279530/ta-nehisi-coates-ezra-klein-show-george-floyd-police-brutality-trump-biden (accessed on July 16, 2020).

[19] Rachel Hartigan, “She co-founded Black Lives Matter. Here’s why she’s so hopeful for the future,” National Geographic, July 8, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/07/alicia-garza-co-founded-black-lives-matter-why-future-hopeful/ (accessed July 16, 2020).

[20] Hartigan, “She co-founded Black Lives Matter. Here’s why she’s so hopeful for the future.”

[21] Taylor, “Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?”

[22] Dan Balz, “The politics of race are shifting, and politicians are struggling to keep pace,” Washington Post, July 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/race-reckoning/ (accessed July 16, 2020).

[23] Jon Meacham argues that Trump is the most racist president since Andrew Johnson. See Shane Croucher, “Trump Is Most Racist President Since Andrew Johnson, Says Historian,” Newsweek, July 16, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/trump-racist-president-andrew-johnson-historian-tweet-1449449 (accessed July 20, 2020).

[24] Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), Chapter 5.

[25] Aldon D. Morris, “Birmingham Confrontation Reconsidered: An Analysis of the Dynamics and Tactics of Confrontation,” American Sociological Review 58 (October 1993): 623.

[26] Morris, “Birmingham Confrontation Reconsidered”; J. Craig Jenkins and David Jacobs, “Political Opportunities and African American Protest,” American Journal of Sociology V109, N2 (September 2003): 287; Edwin Amenta, Neal Caren, Sheera Joy Olasky, and James E. Stobaugh, “All the Movements Fit to Print: Who, What, When, Where, and Why SMO Families Appeared in the New York Times in the Twentieth Century,” American Sociological Review 74 (August 2009): 647; Taeku Lee, Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 127, 131, 133.

[27] Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality.

[28] Jenkins and Jacobs, “Political Opportunities and African American Protest,” 287; Amenta et al, “All the Movements Fit to Print,” 647; Lee, Mobilizing Public Opinion, 127, 131, 133; Lawrence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law (New York: Foundation Press, 1978), 336. The radicalism of the Voting Rights Act inhered in the fact that the legislation did not simply provide for enforcement of a generic new prohibition again treating individuals in a discriminatory way. Instead, it banned or called into question specific voting practices, such as the literacy test and poll taxes. One of the most robust provisions, Section 5 required covered jurisdictions that wanted to change their election laws to first obtain permission from the federal government, and the formula that determined coverage was based on whether a jurisdiction’s level of voter participation met specific numerical thresholds at particular moments in time. Hence the Voting Rights Act did not take an individualistic approach to protecting the franchise; it took a more structural and substantive approach that was motivated not by abstract ideals like “freedom from discrimination” but historically specific instances of injustice.

[29] Omar Wasow, “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting,” American Political Science Review V114, N 3 (August 2020): 638-659. Wasow argues that the Floyd protests started out like protests in 1968 and became more like protests in 1964. Omar Wasow, “The protests started out looking like 1968. They Turned into 1964,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/11/protests-started-out-looking-like-1968-they-turned-into-1964/ (accessed August 3, 2020).

[30] Barack H. Obama, “How to Make This Moment the Turning Point for Real Change,” Medium, June 1, 2020, https://medium.com/@BarackObama/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-point-for-real-change-9fa209806067 (accessed July 24, 2020).

[31] William Finnegan, “How Police Unions Fight Reform,” New Yorker, July 27, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-police-unions-fight-reform (accessed July 29, 2020); Max Schanzenbach, “Union contracts key to reducing police misconduct,” Chicago Tribune, November 23, 2015, https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-police-excessive-force-laquan-mcdonald-perspec-1124-20151123-story.html (accessed July 24, 2020). On the problematic role of prosecutors in holding police accountable for misconduct, Kristy Parker, “Prosecute the Police,” The Atlantic, June 13, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/prosecutors-need-to-do-their-part/612997/ (accessed July 24, 2020). For an open-source database of police contracts, see www.checkthepolice.org.

[32] David Thacher, “The Crisis of Police Reform,” unpublished manuscript on file with the author. See also David Thacher, “The Limit of Procedural Justice,” Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives, edited by David Weisburd and Anthony A. Braga (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and David Thacher, “The Learning Model of Use-of-Force Reviews,” Law and Social Inquiry V45, N3 (August 2020): 755-786.

[33] Thacher, “The Crisis of Police Reform.”

[34] Schanzenbach, “Union contracts key to reducing police misconduct.”

[35] Suzanne Barlyn and Alwyn Scott, “U.S. Carriers Begin Crafting Police Professional Liability Cover,” Carrier Management, July 24, 2020, https://www.carriermanagement.com/news/2020/07/24/209484.htm (accessed July 29, 2020); Biaggi’s proposal would require local governments to pay a basic premium for every officer, but any premium increases stemming from the misconduct of a particular officer would be borne by the officer themself. On the kind of liability insurance currently purchased by small cities around the country and the role of insurers in reforming the police, see Kit Ramgopal and Benda Breslauer, “The hidden hand that uses money to reform troubled police departments,” NBC News, July 19, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hidden-hand-uses-money-reform-troubled-police-departments-n1233495 (accessed, July 29, 2020). But see especially John Rappaport, “How Private Insurers Regulate Public Policy,” 130 Harvard Law Review 1539 (2017), https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ccfe/86d2cf8f20d9f1469cf19f2a725185519c10.pdf (accessed July 29, 2020).

[36] Chicago is an outlier when it comes to the cost of police misconduct, but it is nevertheless instructive to observe that it paid in aggregate $757 million in settlements, losses at trial, and other payouts from 2004-2018. See Dan Hinkel, “A hidden cost of Chicago police misconduct,” Chicago Tribune, September 12, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-met-chicago-legal-spending-20190912-sky5euto4jbcdenjfi4datpnki-story.html (accessed July 20, 2020).

[37] I want to note that I initially suggested that the committee be called the Committee on Diversity in Comparative-Historical Sociology or something similarly bureaucratic and anodyne. My sense from my research on affirmative action—especially at a moment when Students for Fair Admissions is appealing last year’s decision to uphold Harvard’s affirmative action plan by the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts—led me to think that it might be perfectly fine to lean on the word “diversity” again. But two younger, more thoughtful colleagues on the ASA CHS Council disabused me of the notion, arguing persuasively that it was critically important for a range of reasons to include the terms “Anti-Blackness” and “Racism” in the names of the committee and panel.

*This essay is originally published at Trajectories (Spring/Summer 2020) pp.23-38

Isaac A. Reed & Paul Lichterman

Let’s say you are advising, or writing, a three-case study dissertation. You want the dissertation to be welcome scholarly news. That usually means it makes a causal argument with comparisons. You also are alive to the criticisms of approaches that define comparison cases as collections of factors or variables.

What do you do?  Our paper proposes a novel answer that draws on pragmatist epistemology and social philosophy, and ethnographic research procedures. This short summary focuses on our approach to defining cases, and theorizing and justifying case comparisons, and then ends with the briefest mention of normative criteria in selecting cases. The paper illustrates our approach with Reed’s research on the Salem witch trials and the Whiskey Rebellion in the US.

Historians and ethnographers potentially share an orientation to chains of meaningful action that emerge in relation to problems. Actors conceive, often change, their ends in view depending on their encounters with problems. Chains of action unfold across time and space, crisscrossing between collective and individual actors. Custom, habit, creativity and reflexivity all play a part in the unfolding action. Of the perhaps innumerable chains, which do we choose to interpret? And which do we compare in order to arrive at an interpretive explanation?

We propose that historical sociologists embrace this scenario of action, and we offer a pragmatist approach to the problem of which actions to interpret and compare. It is indebted to John Dewey and his notion of “conduct”—meaning social action that occurs somewhere on the arc between reflexive understanding and habit. Making the historical sociologist an investigator of conduct opens up challenges but also possibilities that we would lose with a current, deservedly prominent approach.

We call that approach “causal combinatorics.” A category of approaches really, it draws on set theory to formalize comparative method in the interest of causal analysis. This line of research includes Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and important work by our fellow panelists. Work in this category uses cases to represent different combinations of elements or factors that do or don’t work, in experimental time, to produce outcomes of interest: fascism or no fascism, for example. The focus is on combinations of qualities or factors, not average effects of linear correlations taken as causes. This approach bids us produce medium-N research design, not small-N. And that’s not a bad way to write a dissertation, or an award-winning mature work!

The causal combinatorics approach has been one of many different approaches to the fine line between history and sociology. Another conversation that has taken place concerning the relationship between history and sociology has been focused on events and temporality. Causal combinatorics itself considered temporality through concepts such as path-dependence and critical events. Others have plied a more interpretive approach, asking how events are cognized as events by the actors involved, while events are happening. For example, Abbott advocates for a concept of duration—referring to an experience of time that is holistic—-using the metaphor of a musical phrase to capture this. In contrast to Abbott, but also outside the causal combinatorics frame, Sewell has advocated “eventful time” in contrast to “experimental time.” In his view, precisely because events transform the basic rules of the game of social life, events also render causality temporally heterogeneous.

For us, the turn to events and temporality has two implications. First, these works invite a larger reorientation toward action, interaction and interpretation as a process. And second, they reintroduce the problem of comparisons in the service of causal analysis—even if Abbott’s perspective seems to shift away from that enterprise. That means we are back to looking for relevant counterfactual cases, since we don’t determine the relevant counterfactuals from a table of factor-combinations (searching the historical record for a given combination). Of course, we could just foreswear comparisons. But do we really tell colleagues and students not to do comparison?

We propose a different justification for comparisons, a pragmatist historical sociology of conduct that imbibes the spirit of ‘taking action on its own terms’ while maintaining the comparative causal enterprise. Let’s come back, then, to a typical three-case study dissertation. In the causal combinatorics mode, each case is a different, independent collection of factors. The investigator supposes these different collections have led to different outcomes of the same class of event–revolution or no revolution, for example.

Our approach defines and relates cases differently. Each case is an end in itself (a problem of interpretive explanation for the investigator). Each is also a means to solving the problem of explanation in the other cases. The investigator defines cases in terms of different sequences of meaningful action — rather than in terms of similar/different outcomes. The investigator conceives the different action sequences as different iterations of a shared conceptual category, not different collections of variables. These mutually informing cases constitute a triangle, a “mini-world” of interpretation and explanation. Our approach involves four aspects: theoretical casing; comparison by way of “theoretical translation”; critical-reflexive judgments by a community of inquiry; and (occasionally) the use of normative counterfactuals.

Casing. For ethnographers, including historical ethnographers (for example, Glaeser, 2011), the challenge is to case the chains of meaningful action in a way that honors and juggles the actors’ meanings and the investigator’s meanings (Lichterman and Reed 2015). We don’t want to uncritically adopt actors’ categories as our own terms of analysis. Yet actors’ meanings of course are integral to meaningful chains of action. We have to ask, as ethnographers do: “What do we have a case of?” In order to case our historical observations on the French Revolution, for example, typically we would draw on theories of revolution and say we have a case of a particular kind of revolution. But a theory of revolution usually is a theory of a class of outcomes; the revolution happens or doesn’t happen, or ends in dictatorship or democracy.

Our method, in contrast, starts with a conceptual casing that admits of meaningful action. We want to have cases of unfolding conduct, and then follow conduct toward eventual outcomes, rather than starting with outcomes—as in a theory of revolution-—and looking back, combing the empirical record with preselected factors taken from theories of revolution. That method usually truncates meaningful action. So we have to tack back and forth between a sociological concept of action and the acts and actors’ meanings we have observed. This is the core hermeneutic process leading to interpretive explanation in historical sociology.

Comparison through theoretical translation. Conceptualization and comparison work together with casing. In our approach, causal claims are contrastive. We ask a “why question”: Why did some series or “duration” of linked actions unfold, instead of a series that could have transpired but didn’t? The comparison cases in our mini-world of investigation are contrasts, just as they are in ethnographic studies that follow analytic induction.  We “translate” cases into theoretical terms that admit of situated action—whether the “situation” is of the sort Goffman studied, or rather Geertz. Reed’s (2016) comparison of the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials illustrates these first two aspects of our method.

While a rebellion is not a witch-hunt, Reed compared the episodes as cases of a conceptual category: the coherence of an ideological response to “unsettled times.” Reed found in Salem ample evidence of an uncertain situation, in which a group of ministers could use the power of coherent rhetoric to make their interpretation of the situation convincing. The why-question emerged: Why did the Whiskey Rebellion not seem to go this way? The Whiskey rebels had access to a coherent, millenarian worldview, but their speeches and other communications conveyed incoherence, humor, nervousness—not the grinding seriousness of Cotton Mather. Having translated the casing concept across both cases, Reed took the 1692 Salem case as the counterfactual comparison for the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, and vice versa. Each was cased with the same conceptual category, assisting the other’s ability to address the question of how historical actors render action into a coherent story in times of crisis.

Following this lead, Reed discerned in the Whiskey Rebellion a series of varyingly coherent interpretations, rather than a preponderance of explicit, coherent worldviews as were articulated in Salem. The Whiskey Rebellion thematized grievances and social conflict, without resolving them in an overarching, dominant interpretation. Understood this way, the Whiskey Rebellion case shed more light on Salem. Again, cases illuminate each other. While the Whiskey Rebellion was a site of varied interpretations—a thematization of extant conflict—the Salem Witch Trials, in contrast, were a site of “fetishization” of scapegoats (accused women), opening a gap between the conflicts and the terms in which actors interpreted them. So Reed theorized two formats of rhetorical struggle—thematization and fetishization in unsettled times.  But how did Reed know which comparisons to select?

The community of inquiry. Put compactly, both C.S. Peirce and John Dewey argued that adequate knowledge claims emerge only in critical-reflexive dialogue with a community of inquiry that assesses the empirical worth of claims and the claims’ ability to generate further inquiry. Contemporary Deweyan and feminist epistemologists would point out those communities—disciplinary, sub-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary—rest to some degree on conventional relevance criteria for “a good question” or “a good comparison.” These criteria keep the community focused on shared concerns—but may also induce some tunnel vision. Sometimes, the researcher has reason to try reorienting the community’s dominant approaches to its shared research concerns; we call that meta-communicative dialogue. In this case, the community’s concern is how to conceptualize crisis. Is it a historical conjuncture of organizational and institutional dynamics, or a state of feeling that elicits in different actors various kinds of action and uses of culture? Reed’s discussion of thematization and fetishization was an attempt to re-orient some of the community’s dialogue about crisis times. Finally, and very provisionally:

Enter the normative? Communities of inquiry sometimes engage practical or “normative,” questions, as Dewey knew. A classic example is “why no socialism in the US?” Our paper considers the use of comparisons and theoretical translations that derive not only from other chains of historical action, but from normative aspirations about how action could have unfolded.

 Consider Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Du Bois compares the trajectories of the nineteenth century Black and White worker, and in turn makes comparisons with European, especially British working-class politics. He also compared with a normative counterfactual case of “what might have happened.” That was the possibility that proponents of universal suffrage and advocates of subordinated labor could have united in a democratic front to challenge racialized capitalism.  DuBois analyzed incipient efforts to unite white and black workers, actual instances of black suffrage before the end of Reconstruction, as well as the post-civil war political ambitions of abolition advocates.

Our paper discusses how contrasts drawn from normative questions can be subject to the same critical-reflexive scrutiny as other contrasts.  A community that is ready to critically examine cases inspired by normative causal questions, rather than assume those questions aren’t operating, is one that is more ready to identify normative blinders in case and concept selection. Under these conditions, comparisons in the service of normative questions may be generative for future inquiry.

References

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1935. Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Vol. 6. New York: Oxford University Press.

Glaeser, Andreas. 2011. Political Epistemics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lichterman, Paul and Isaac Reed. 2015. “Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography.” Sociological  Methods and Research 44(4):585-635.

Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2016. “Between structural breakdown and crisis action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion  and the Salem Witch Trials.” Critical Historical Studies. 3(1): 27-64.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.

Anna Skarpelis

History is produced from what the archive offers – Marisa J. Fuentes

If history is indeed produced from what the archive offers, sociologists need to better understand the epistemological implications surrounding the collection, analysis and interpretation of archival documents—the process of “production of knowledge about social life” (Reed 2010: 20). Records and archives are part of a life cycle that ranges from record creation to record keeping and record display and end in their deployment in scholars’ analyses, and yet historical sociology has remained comparatively silent on both the precise nature of these archival objects, as well as on the implications of their genesis, preservation and archivization for our scholarly practice. I do not suggest, as Paul Rabinow did about ethnographic writing thirty years ago, that historical sociology is in crisis; rather, my intervention targets comparative historical sociological (CHS) research methodologies and practices, and suggests ways in which scholars can be more epistemologically conscious when reconstructing the past (Rabinow 1986). Just like ethnographers reflect on site choice and demographers submit their data and analyses to robustness checks, historical comparative sociologists ought to interrogate their records. My aim here is to connect documentary production to archivization and scholarly interpretation, and to ask how taking this relationship seriously affects comparative historical sociological work as well as sociological theorizing.

“Archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Manoff 2004: 12), and hence unpacking the material bases of documents is critical, particularly in comparative research. Archival bodies become a tool for better understanding the relationship between history, technology, the archive and its interpretation. This holds relevance beyond our subfield: It speaks to organizational sociology by treating the creation of documentary reality as an organizational and thus traceable and legible process; to cultural sociology by unboxing how the meanings we can recover are contingent on specific power structures, organizational processes and the agency of professional archivists; to historical comparative sociology by providing a framework to think about comparison of distinct datasets; and to mainstream sociology in advancing how we can think about what it means to conduct robust research, as archival bodies can help us dispel the illusion of false necessity.

Archival Bodies as Epistemology, or: Subjectivity in the Archive

An epistemology of the archive has to consider the archive as a field in itself, a space for the production of historical knowledge, rather than seeing archival work simply as a form of fieldwork that extracts evidence or works on the basis of found objects. Framing the question of archival bodies around epistemological concerns allows addressing questions of positionality, subjectivity and a pluralism of meaning structures, thus productively melding the literatures of standpoint theory within sociology, memory studies within history, and postcolonialism within anthropology. In sociology, standpoint theory has dealt with the impact of positionality most urgently. Patricia Hill Collins best described distinct epistemologies as localized, partial and situated forms of knowledge, and makes sense of how some epistemologies have historically trumped others: “Far from being the apolitical study of truth, epistemology points to the ways in which power relations shape who is believed and why” (Hill Collins 2015: 252). In history, concerns about power and the archive are localized in the field of memory studies. Scrutinizing lieux de mémoire means untangling practices of generating history, means understanding the ‘structuring of forgetfulness’ (Nora 1997: 4; Rousso 1994: 4). Both perspectives overlap with anthropological and postcolonial engagements with the archive that ask us to see state actors as “cultural agents of ‘fact’ production” and that caution scholars to engage an ethnographic, rather than purely extractive, ways with the archive (Stoler 2002; Stoler 2010).

Archival Bodies as Theory

The relationship between theory and comparative historical sociology has been a fraught one, with the ‘death of theory’ proclaimed at regular intervals, just to be refuted in due course (Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Sewell 2005). In Event Catalogs as Theories, Charles Tilly asserted that “all social research rests (…) [on] two theories: a theory explaining the phenomenon under study, another theory explaining the generation of evidence concerning the phenomenon” (Tilly 2002: 248). The recovery of traces, our observation of them and the reconstruction of the original phenomena hence become a question of theory. Analogously, I argue that epistemological considerations – epistemology defined here as issues pertaining to “the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry” (Steup 2017) – around archives fall as much under the purview of sociological theory as they do under the purview of research methods.

Tilly set out three questions scholars should ask about the generation of evidence in order to explain phenomena: 1) How does the phenomenon of interest leave traces? 2) How can a researcher elicit or observe these traces? And 3) how can we reconstruct whatever is of interest of the phenomenon (cause/effect)? Here, I deploy the term archival bodies to set out a partially analogous argument about epistemology in archival research and illustrate what is at stake with examples from my own historical archival fieldwork into racialization processes of the mid-20th century German National Socialist and the Japanese authoritarian regimes. Archival bodies thus denote processes of knowledge construction and organization around the recovery, reconstruction and depiction of events, processes and persons on three levels:

1. The creation of documentary evidence from social life by persons and organizations, i.e. the turning of a person into a record, an archival body in the singular [establishing what is a trace, or identifying appropriate data];
2. The construction of sets of files into a body of records, an archival body made up of a plethora of files, by archiving professionals working in organizations dedicated to the preservation and archiving of records who have their own archival projects in mind [data collection, and archivization];
3. The recovery of persons from an institutionally preserved archival body by the researcher [transcending the ‘mere record’ through subjectivity reconstruction and interpretation].

Archival bodies are corporeal in the double sense: First, they denote how researchers draw together a corpus, or bodies of material, for analysis; second, they are birth-giving in that they govern how a person can emerge in and through archival documentation. Both are decisively important for the reconstruction of events, but more importantly, for that of subjectivities: How are lives partially pre-narrated through modalities of the record? How do the files themselves act? Questions of personhood and agency are crucial to most sociological analyses even at the macro-historical level, and yet we spend little time reflecting on how the material we draw on contributes to shaping the characters that materialize in our narratives. Archival bodies allow for a more cautious reassembly of historical lives while taking seriously both the individual subjectivities of those captured in the records, as well as the organizational and historical prerogatives shaping the fixing of life on file. The paper this excerpt is based on—which I will submit as part of an invited issue on the sociology of archives curated by Andrew Deener and Claudio Benzecry for Qualitative Sociology later this term—illustrates the argument empirically with examples from my own dissertation fieldwork on racial classification in the multi-ethnic annexationist empires that were Germany and Japan, collected over three years in roughly a dozen archives on three continents.

Archival Bodies in History

Bodies are acted upon when traces are left on paper; this is not merely a figurative observation. In the National Socialist regime’s use of archives, being found in the archive could be advantageous if you wanted to prove Aryan status, and not being found could be detrimental; on the other hand, being recorded in religious registers could spell deportation and death (Adler 1974; Majer 2003). Perversely then, the giving of life—by creating a record that was preserved in the archives—could also lead to the taking of life, for those whose existence had been tallied on paper for deportation and murder.

The file is “the most despised of all ethnographic objects” and yet may be the object closest to recording social action of the historical past: Files are “closest to the presence of speech” in “the imagined chain of replacements for the spoken language, supplements” (Latour 1986: 26; Vismann 2008: 8). Dorothy E. Smith refers to the phenomenon of treating the text as internally determined structure of meaning as document time: An instance in which the text becomes fixed as a social accomplishment (Smith 1974). This fixing of people and processes through “routine textually-mediated practices of people engaged in their daily activities” of course leaves us with a curtailed record of interaction (Cahill 1998: 143; Kameo and Whalen 2015: 210); but in their proximity to quotidian action, files also unwittingly record additional information, and the physical scars they bear of handling and use—marginalia, stamps, burn marks on the pages—allow insights into action a transcribed digital record no longer contains.

And yet, the relationship of truth between files and the social world they purport to record is a tense one. On the one hand, quod non est in actis, non est in mundo: this tenet of Roman Law, that what isn’t in the records, isn’t in the world condenses one of the fundamental epistemological and cultural sociological challenges facing historical comparativists – that of dealing with questions of state power in determining what is kept in the archive, of whose stories are told (Taeger 2002). If Nazi killings and Japanese colonial atrocities are less frequently recorded than observations of genealogical presence, this is a sign of power, and not of an absence of the phenomenon in question. Foucault described the archive as a “‘system of discursivity’ that establish[ed] the possibility of what can be said” (Manoff 2004: 18). Even a strong interest in population control does not necessarily lead to the population appearing in the archive in detail: In Dispossessed Lives, Fuentes retells how the only ‘voice’ she could find of the enslaved women of 18th century Bridgetown, Barbados, was reference to their screams in court records and accounts by abolitionists. Screams, she writes, became “the historical genre of the enslaved in the colonial archive” (Fuentes 2016: 143). While historians and sociologists can read the archive against the bias grain, as Fuentes suggests, the files themselves in their accessibility and usage are already imbued with meaning. Archives are not “an objective representation of the past, but rather [as] a selection of objects that have been preserved for a variety of reasons (…). These objects cannot provide direct and unmediated access to the past” (Manoff 2004: 14). They move through the world and in their interpretation by different actors, they become agents of collective memory, taking on vastly different meanings and use values depending on context. Rousso famously remarked that historical memory was structured forgetfulness (Rousso 1994). If forgetfulness is structured, so is remembrance: archival records are often selectively used, and contested files are read as representing the truth.

Even where records are plentiful, sociology as a field may refuse engagement – the expansion of sociology as a profession under National Socialism is an open secret in the history of German sociology that few acknowledge, and that others have made their life’s work at the cost of professional marginalization and their work being labeled ‘un-sociological’ (Christ and Suderland 2014; Klingemann 1996). In many ways, this mirrors American sociology’s failure to engage with the history of slavery more generally, and the American history of slavery in particular (Patterson 2018). Calling for a mindful form of subjectivity recovery of those treated poorly by history, but how differently should we write the history of perpetrators? And more generally, beyond asking ‘how should we read a source,’ what does a critical engagement with archival records look like?

Returning to Tilly’s search for reconstructing traces of real-life phenomena, we have to take account of the different types of archival bodies—first recorded in files and records, then selectively archived and ultimately interpreted by us—by adequately stripping them down to their historical and archival-organizational scaffolding. Quite apart from normative obligations to do right by the dead, the question of person recovery is also fundamentally ontological in nature. Craig Calhoun termed the danger inherent in seeing the archive as a record of ‘how it really was,’ rather than treating it as a potentially unreliable informant, the illusion of false necessity (Calhoun 2003). When confronted with her Stasi files, East German author Christa Wolf wrote that the “perverse mountain of files has turned into a kind of negative grail, to which one makes a pilgrimage in order to experience truth, judgment or absolution.” (Gitlin April 4, 1993). Forms of inquiry that take the archive as a fixed historical record, in which documents are taken in lieu of the ‘lost object’ and are used for “positivistic authentication and pseudo-scientific legitimization”, are problematic (Freshwater 2003: 730).

Archival Bodies in Sociological Practice

How does a person emerge through archival documentation? How do files act? What is preserved, why, and how accessible are the files? These questions surrounding archival bodies ought to be of particular concern to comparativists. After all, how can we engage in meaningful comparison when the organizations and contexts the person of interest is embedded in are so fundamentally different? Power and agency are inevitably bound up with one another in the archive: whether a person at all appears in the archive offers some cues about their status. Eastern European ethnic Germans appear in the German Federal Archives because the National Socialist (NS) regime had a strong interest in identifying and resettling this diaspora for purposes of ethnic cleansing; genealogical records that were mostly kept in church and city archives became a tool for implementing these racial policies. Being found in the archive could conversely also protect from this new form of violence, ranging from harassment to murder—if one could prove non-Jewishness through the Aryan Confirmation. In colonial Japan on the other hand, although colonial subjects were registered in ‘ethnic registries,’ the information contained within were much less multi-dimensional than the German archives, ostensibly because what was of interest to the Japanese state was a blanket ethnic designation. In practice, this left me with paper trails of up to one hundred pages per person for the German case, and little more than basic demographic data, tabulated in endless military booklets, on Japanese colonial subjects. That ethnic Germans emerge as much more three-dimensional characters through the files than ethnic Koreans do in Japanese archives has nothing to do with any characteristic pertaining to the persons we are seeking to reconstruct themselves, and everything to do with organizational practice, file creation and archival preferences and practices. The resulting differential availability in quantity of files does not mean that the Japanese were unconcerned about ‘racial fit,’ but that they in many cases drew blanket conclusions for entire populations.

If Pascal in Meditations espoused a materialist vision of archives, Walter Benjamin turned to a culturalist interpretation of remembering, “in which mental habits across time rather than physical things in the present are what bring the past into view, and in which specific heirs are necessary for the work of memorialization to succeed” (Fritzsche 2006: 185). It is the task of historical sociologists to recognize the contingency of files, without fearing that this responsible epistemological practice be misconstrued as casting a shadow over the robustness of our research. Recovering the person from the archive demands ‘transcending the mere record’ and justifies the sociological part of historical sociology in that we can productively draw on theory and comparison to construct our arguments (Calhoun 2003). Archival bodies one and two—how organizations put bodies onto file by pinning real life onto documentary reality, and the ways in which archives construct, preserve and make accessible documentation—both shape archival body three, or what type of person can emerge from the archive. If we think of authoritarian or colonial state records of subjected populations as partisan fragments, it becomes the task of the researcher to engage in acts of exposition, recovery and rehabilitation. It is our task to engage alternative interpretive devices and dislodge the historical genres already present in the archival record.

References

Adler, H. G. 1974. Der verwaltete Mensch : Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland. Tübingen: Mohr.
Cahill, Spencer E. 1998. “Toward a Sociology of the Person.” Sociological Theory 16(2):131-48.

Calhoun, Craig. 2003. “Afterword: Why Historical Sociology?” Pp. 383-93 in Handbook of Historical Sociology, edited by Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Isin. London: Sage.

Christ, Michaela, and Maja Suderland. 2014. Soziologie und Nationalsozialismus : Positionen, Debatten, Perspektiven. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Freshwater, Helen. 2003. “The Allure of the Archive.” Poetics Today 24(4):729-58.
Fritzsche, Peter. 2006. “The Archive and the Case of the German Nation.” Pp. 184-208 in Archive stories facts, fictions, and the writing of history, edited by Antoinette M. Burton. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fuentes, Marisa J. 2016. Dispossessed lives : enslaved women, violence, and the archive: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Gitlin, Todd. April 4, 1993. “‘I Did Not Imagine That I Lived in Truth’.” in The New York Times.

Hill Collins, Patricia. 2015. Black feminist thought : knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment.

Kameo, Nahoko, and Jack Whalen. 2015. “Organizing Documents: Standard Forms, Person Production and Organizational Action.” Qualitative Sociology 38:205-29.

Klingemann, Carsten. 1996. Soziologie im Dritten Reich. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.

Latour, Bruno. 1986. “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together.” Pp. 1-40 in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, edited by H. Kuklick: Jai Press.

Majer, Diemut. 2003. “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich: The Nazi judicial and administrative system in Germany and occupied Eastern Europe with special regard to occupied Poland, 1939-1945. Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Manoff, Marlene. 2004. “Theories of the archive from across the disciplines.” portal: Libraries & the Academy 4(1):9-25 17p.

Nora, Pierre. 1997. Les Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Quarto Gallimard.

Patterson, Orlando. 2018. “American Sociology’s Denial of Slavery.” Trajectories – Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section 30:17-23.

Quadagno, Jill, and Stan J. Knapp. 1992. “Have Historical Sociologists Forsaken Theory?: Thoughts on the History/Theory Relationship.” Sociological Methods & Research 20(4):481-507.

Rabinow, Paul. 1986. “Representations are social facts: modernity and post-modernity in anthropology.” Pp. 234-61 in Writing culture : the poetics and politics of ethnography : a School of American Research advanced seminar, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2010. “Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era.” Sociological Theory 28(1):20-39.

Rousso, Henri. 1994. The Vichy syndrome : history and memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sewell, William H. 2005. Logics of history : social theory and social transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Dorothy E. 1974. “The Social Construction of Documentary Reality.” Sociological Inquiry 44(4):257-67.

Steup, Matthias. 2017. “Epistemology.” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/epistemology.

Stoler, Ann. 2002. “Colonial archives and the arts of governance.” Archival Science 2(1/2):87.
Stoler, Ann L. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Taeger, Angela. 2002. “Analysis of Records in Historical Research on Criminal Law. Criminal Records on Male Homosexuality in Paris in the 18th Century.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research: Qualitative Methods in Various Disciplines III: Criminology 3(1).

Tilly, Charles. 2002. “Event Catalogs as Theories.” Sociological Theory 20(2):248-54.

Vismann, Cornelia. 2008. Files: law and media technology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.

Armando Lara-Millán, Brian Sargent & Sunmin Kim

In this paper, we offer guidelines on how historical sociologists should engage with archives. Rather than focusing on the epistemological value of archival evidence—e.g. how we can generalize from a limited number of historical cases—we highlight the pragmatic aspects of doing historical sociology in archives: how do historical sociologists approach the material within archives? What sorts of materials should they look for while attempting to generate a theory? We argue that historical sociologists can benefit from thinking like an ethnographer. By specifying ethnographic dispositions, we lay out what it means to think like an ethnographer in archives.

Thinking Like an Ethnographer

When a historical sociologist goes into an archive, she may feel overwhelmed, for multiple reasons. First, it is difficult for the researcher to know which documents are relevant to the study. As soon as she gets into a relevant archive and opens up a storage box, she will discover that there is no folder labeled with her specific topic of interest. The challenge of identification can be overwhelming, especially for those who embark on their first archival project. Second, many individual documents simultaneously feel as if they contain one small part of the key to the puzzle and are also so trivial that they might not be worth attention. Each document may push the researcher in a small way, but collectively they can add up to something greater than their parts. Even after passing the hurdle of identification, a historical sociologist faces the challenge of weighting: what is important and what is not? Third, when faced with a large body of documents containing various ideas, behaviors, and value statements, separating what actors openly profess from what they truly believe is difficult. Actors can be duplicitous while attempting to persuade an audience in the course of making a decision. As Paul Willis (1981) demonstrated in his classic ethnography of working class youth in Britain, “penetrating” the minds of historical actors is always a difficult feat, even after correctly identifying and weighting all the relevant materials. Identifying the shortest path out of this maze becomes a key goal for the researcher. Researchers often move through these false starts and dead ends before finally reaching an effective and parsimonious theoretical explanation of complex historical phenomena.

These detours, we argue, are not just failed attempts at discovering the “right” kind of evidence, but valuable opportunities through which we can gain insights into the historical actors and processes that we aim to study. Just like an archival researcher, historical actors often experience confusion when faced with a challenge of making crucial decisions. There are too many things for them to consider, and they know too little about the possible implications of their actions. What we perceive as a historical outcome often emerges from such processes of confusion and mistakes, as a consolidation of nervous, haphazard decisions by historical actors.

Just like an ethnographer attempting to immerse themselves into a new social setting, a historical sociologist in an archive should adopt the attitude of a (purported) naive observer, pay attention to the social contexts of historical actors, and follow them along in their journey as they move through historical events. Rather than projecting an abstract explanation from a top-down perspective, a historical sociologist should first attempt to immerse herself in the situation of the historical actors, pursuing the position of “fly on the wall” eavesdropping on people in the archives.

Although sociology has been late to the conversation, the methodological and theoretical discussions on archives have been going on for decades (Foucault 1982; Ginzburg 1989; Koselleck 2002; Stoler 2010; Agamben 2009), and the exchange between history and ethnography (Stoler 2008; see also Biernacki 2012; Hunter 2013) has produced a novel understanding of the relationship between archival evidence and theory construction. Drawing inspirations from these precedents, we discuss how a historical sociologist can actually think like an ethnographer in an archive. In our manuscript, we also discuss how this approach led us to rethink our respective cases in our book projects—i.e. jail overcrowding in the L.A. county in the 1990s, the federal reserve and housing desegregation in the 1980s, and the immigration restriction in the 1920s—by forcing us to consider new evidence and theory. In this feature, however, we focus on explaining the analytical leverages and pragmatic guidelines emanating from ethnographic dispositions.

Ethnographic Dispositions

Naiveté

It can be all too easy to approach the archives with a sense of knowing what comes next, due to our temporal relation to those represented in the archival materials. Simply put, by virtue of living in the present, we already know who won the key historical struggles and who survived to tell the tale. Because our interest lies not just in discovering historical facts but in constructing theories out of historical events, we tend to start with a set of research questions based on an observed outcome. The traditional approaches have often relied on comparison of carefully selected cases, designed to isolate key variables of interest. Before going into an archive, we are told, we should be able to clearly articulate our research question and hypothesis, in order to effectively obtain the answer we want. This is one way of approaching the archive, but not the only way.

We call for those venturing into the archives to approach the materials with a disposition similar to ethnographers. When an ethnographer embarks on fieldwork, she often assumes the position of a naive, untrained observer. Indeed it is often the case that an ethnographer knows little about the setting, at least not as well as the people whom she is trying to study. This naiveté is not just being inexperienced and ignorant, but a particular epistemological stance an ethnographer takes to maximize analytical leverage in the given setting. An archival researcher should attempt to approach the archive with as few presuppositions as possible, and remain open about what the story could be, what the outcome might mean, or what actors intend when they talk. Just like an ethnographer seeing the quotidian in new ways, an archival researcher should assume the position of a novice observer, leveraging her naiveté to uncover the hidden structure under the mundane.

Through naiveté we can develop a better appreciation for contingency in historical processes. As Ermakoff (2015) argued, “positive contingency”—defined as a moment when individual agency gain maximum leverage in a causal process—remains underappreciated when we look at a historical process from a deterministic perspective. By maintaining a naive stance, however, we are freed from our preconceived notions and better equipped to capture the key moments and decisions.

Observing Actions in Context

Ethnographers are typically advised to prioritize their own eyes over their assumptions about people and setting—in other words, they are encouraged to forget about who the actors are and instead collect data on how they act in their respective social settings. We tend to assume that a certain type of people (e.g. colonial administrators) act in a certain way (e.g. denigrate indigenous culture), but often times this assumption is dependent on the situation (e.g. identifying more with indigenous rulers to boast their standing in homeland; see Steinmetz 2007). As Howard Becker (1998: 45) puts it, “people do whatever they have to or whatever seems good to them at the time, and that since situations change, there is no reason to expect that they act in consistent ways.”

This theoretical perspective has implications in archives as well. When historical sociologists read documents, the focus should not only be on “what” happened, but also on “how” something happened—events and actions should be understood in their context, in their relationship to things around them. When ethnographer urge people to tell “how” something happened, it is an invitation for stories with more informative detail, accounts that include not only reasoning for whatever was done, but also the actions of others that contributed to the outcome. When going into a field site, Becker (1998: 60) “wanted to know all the circumstances of an event, everything that was going on around it, everyone who was involved,” Because he “wanted to know the sequence of things, how one thing led to another, how this didn’t happen until that happened.”

With this stance, we can understand how historical actors learn from their mistakes and change through a particular historical process. Just as researchers learn from dead ends and false starts in archives, historical actors also learn through blunders, and their dispositions and actions evolve as they engage in historical processes. By focusing on “how,” we develop a more dynamic appreciation of how actors and situations come together to produce historical outcomes.

Incrementalism

Ethnographers typically stay within a field site for an extended period of time, following along as events unfold. In the process, they pay attention to the specific manner in which events unfold rather than starting with the outcome and working backwards. Because events of interest are by definition rare, ethnographers often try to spend as much time in the field site as possible, immersed in the mundane everyday routine of the setting, waiting for that spark of eventfulness. Being there and seeing it first hand, as they say, is an ideal of ethnographic immersion, although it is easier said than done. After all, things happen fast and one cannot be present in the field site every day, every hour.

The ideal of immersion has a better chance in archives. Luckily for an archival researcher, the time in the archives progresses rather slowly. Different, but limited accounts of historical events are frozen in the format of documents, waiting to be discovered. It is as if there is not just one but a multitude of flies on the wall, reporting to historical sociologists their own accounts of how things unfolded. By going through these multitude of accounts, a historical sociologist obtains not just a birds-eye view but a Rashomon-like perspective into the historical process.

In pursuing incrementalism, we can gain comparative leverage to exclude alternative explanations. It is tempting to divide archival evidences into two camps, ones that mattered in producing outcomes and ones that led to dead-ends. In reading incrementally and sequentially, a historical sociologist is better able to pay attention to these diverging paths: what propelled historical actors to go down a particular path that was not successful? What does that tell us about the path that was eventually successful? By doing this we can see which alternative routes were actually feasible to the actors in their particular contexts and rule out explanations that made no sense to actors embedded in those contexts.

Deep Dive into Archives

With ethnographic dispositions, the troubles we encounter in the archives as researchers become an asset rather than burden. That is, much like ethnographers, we try to walk the path along with historical actors, tracing the process through which they learned, as we are learning from archival documents ourselves. We do understand that time and funding are limited for our historical sociologists, and that a historical sociologist cannot stay forever immersed in the historical setting. In order to make a new contribution to knowledge, however, one cannot avoid the exercise of getting lost and finding her way back again. We hope the ethnographic dispositions presented here help future researchers finding their way in archives.

References

Agamben, Gorgio. 2009. The Signature of All Things: On Method. The MIT Press.

Becker, Howard. 1998. Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing it. University Of Chicago Press.

Biernacki, Richard. 2012. Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ermakoff, Ivan. 2015. “The Structure of Contingency” American Journal of Sociology 121(1): 64-125.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Vintage.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hunter, Marcus. 2013. Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America. Oxford University Press.

Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford University Press.

Steinmetz, George. 2007. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. University of Chicago Press.

Stoler, Ann. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press.

Willis, Paul.1981. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Columbia University Press.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.  Photo is from http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/images/overcrowding/CSP-Los-Angeles.jpg

Laura García-Montoya and James Mahoney

Historical and case study analysts have long focused attention on critical events—sometimes referred to as watersheds, turning points, or critical junctures—when explaining outcomes of interest. These analysts suggest that, during relatively well-defined periods, cases experience occurrences that are highly consequential for their subsequent development. Examples of critical events from comparative- historical work include the choice of coalitional partner by liberal political parties in interwar Europe (Luebbert 1991); episodes of labor incorporation into the state in Latin America (Collier and Collier 1991); the fate of tribal groups during independence struggles in North Africa (Charrad 2001); the formation of inter-ethnic associations in Indian cities (Varshney 2002); and the choices by white moderates about racial exclusion in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa (Marx 1998).

In this paper, we seek to contribute to this literature by offering a framework for the identification and analysis of critical events in case study research. The paper is motivated in part by the lack of a theory of causality in the literature on critical junctures and path dependence. As a result, when researchers assert that event X was a critical juncture for outcome Y, it is hard to know exactly what they mean by the assertion. This framework offers a general theory of causality for the analysis of individual cases.

We define a critical event as a contingent event that is causally important for an outcome of interest in a particular case. The definition features three components: event, contingency, and causal importance. An event is a temporally bounded state of affairs. To serve as causes in explanations, events must be well-defined. We define a contingent event as an event that was not expected to occur, given well-specified expectations. Causal events are also a subset of all events, X as a causal event for Y if: (1) X and Y are events that occur in the actual world; (2) X occurs before Y in time; and (3) there is a logical relationship between X and Y that can be specified using necessary and/or sufficient conditions. Causally important events are a subset of causal events. We define and measure the causal importance of an event for an outcome using two dimensions: logical importance (i.e., the extent to which the event is necessary or sufficient for an outcome) and logical relevance (i.e., the extent to which the event is necessary and sufficient for an outcome). A causally important event has a high level of logical importance and a non-trivial level of logical relevance.

In this framework, critical events are at the intersection of contingent events and causally important events. We show why both causal importance and contingency are essential ingredients of critical events by considering non-critical events in which only one of these features is present. We emphasize that critical event analysis is not always an appropriate mode of explanation. Non-critical events often or usually best explain outcomes of interest. In seeking to clarify critical event analysis, therefore, we do not wish to suggest that most explanations in the social sciences should take this form. We view the question of whether critical event analysis is an appropriate framework as an empirical matter: it depends on whether a critical event best explains the outcome of interest.

Token Causality

Our framework is part of a larger and ongoing scholarly effort to develop a theory of token (or actual) causality. With token causality, one explores whether a specific state of affairs is a cause of a specific outcome in a particular case. Although case study and historical researchers have made much methodological progress in recent years, they still lack a fully adequate framework for the study of token causes.

Our approach to critical event analysis is broadly consistent with regularity theories of causation. Regularity theories hold that causation between X and Y is marked by spatiotemporal contiguity, temporal succession, and constant conjunction (Mackie 1974; Wright 1985; Psillos 2002; see also Hume 1975; Mill 1911). We introduce two refinements to extend a regularity theory to the analysis of individual cases. First, the cases under analysis are almost entirely possible cases rather than actual cases. The use of possible world semantics and counterfactual analysis allow us to gain the leverage needed to examine regularities when only one actual world case is under analysis. Second, our framework derives inferential power by analyzing the chain of events that links an initial event X to a final outcome Y. In analyzing this causal chain, however, we retain a regularity approach: each of the links in the chain is a separate relationship among events that is analyzed as a causal regularity.

The distribution of possible world cases across an event (X) and its logical complement or negation (X) allows the researcher to make a statement about the probability of the event even though the researcher analyzes only one actual world case. If the researcher asserts that X is or was more likely than X, she does so because a higher proportion of possible world cases are or were located in set X than in set X. If she asserts that the probability of event X is 80%, she does so because 80% of all possible world cases are located in the set for event X (the remaining 20% are in X). We use this approach in defining events, contingency, and causally importance—i.e., the constituents of a critical event.

Defining Critical Events

Events

Events are well-bounded episodes marked by the unfolding of coherent modes of activity. They serve as temporal and substantive anchors for organizing the analysis of a case study. A well-defined event is temporally bounded; that is, it has a crisp beginning and end. The temporal boundedness of events facilitates their use in causal analysis. In addition, a well-defined event calls attention to its specific components—what we call its sufficiency properties and its necessity properties.

First, events play a productive and generative role in actively bringing about an outcome (cf. Lewis 2000; McDermott 2002). We call this aspect of an event its sufficiency properties. Events produce outcomes by generating a distinctive process that culminates in the outcome of interest. Second, events play a permissive and enabling role in allowing for the occurrence of an outcome. We call this aspect of an event its necessity properties. Events enable and permit outcomes by influencing the context or circumstances in which the outcome occurs. To identify necessity properties, therefore, the analyst can consider those aspects of the event whose counterfactual negation would (or would likely) cause the negation of the outcome of interest.

In sum, when formulating hypotheses about the sufficiency properties of an event, the challenge is identifying the productive causal chain that links the event to the outcome. When formulating hypotheses about the necessity properties of an event, the challenge is identifying the aspects of content and circumstance that the event shifts to allow for the outcome of interest.

Contingency

The concept of contingency has been used in the social sciences in different ways. However, we argue that despite differences, formulations have in common the following idea: an event is contingent when it is not expected. The source of these expectations may vary, ranging from likelihood functions to theoretical traditions, to known causal factors, to common sense intuitions. In each case, however, the contingent event is not well anticipated by the relevant model, theory, function, or belief system. In this sense, events are contingent vis-`a-vis our expectations; our expectations make events contingent. It is worth noticing that this understanding of contingency is consistent with the philosophical definition: a contingent event is neither necessary nor impossible. Contingency calls attention to the non-necessity of the occurrence of the event; a contingent event happens in some possible worlds but not in others. In turn, we propose an empirical measure of contingency that examines the distribution of possible world cases across the event and its negation. For a token event X, contingency is measured as the percentage of possible world cases in the set ∼X.

Causal importance

The idea that causal importance should be built into the definition of a critical event is not particularly controversial. However, case study researchers currently lack a widely shared framework for conceptualizing and measuring causal importance. We propose heuristics involving counterfactual analysis to help estimate this distribution. The heuristics require the analyst to consider possible world cases that are and are not consistent with necessity and sufficiency. Of special importance is the closest possible inconsistent case, which is the case closest to the actual world in which X = 0 and Y = 1 for the evaluation of necessity properties or X = 1 and Y = 0 for the evaluation of sufficiency properties.

With necessity properties, the analyst constructs possible worlds by considering different versions of X while holding all else constant in context and circumstance. Some versions of X require more extensive rewrites than others and thus are more distant from the actual world. Under this approach, X is more necessary for Y to the degree that the closest possible inconsistent case requires a large miracle for the occurrence of X. With sufficiency properties, by contrast, the analyst constructs possible worlds by holding X constant (identical to the actual world) and introducing via miracle changes to contingent aspects of context and circumstance. Some of these changes are more significant than others, requiring larger rewrites for their instantiation. In the approach, X is more sufficient for Y to the degree that the closest possible inconsistent case requires large changes to contingent aspects of context and circumstance.

The relative importance of any given token cause is a function of its necessity properties and its sufficiency properties. Any token cause will become more important as it comes closer to being both necessary and sufficient for the outcome of interest. For our purposes, a core issue concerns the threshold of necessity and sufficiency required for causal importance and thus a critical event. In addressing this issue, we give identical weight to necessity and sufficiency, privileging neither. We require that a critical event meet minimal thresholds on the dimensions of logical importance and logical relevance. To measure logical importance, we consider the extent to which a condition is necessary or sufficient for an outcome. To qualify as a critical event, we propose that a condition must be substantially higher than 50% on either the necessity dimension or the sufficiency dimension. For logical relevance, we measure the extent to which a condition is necessary and sufficient for an outcome. To qualify as a critical event, we propose that a condition must be substantially higher than 0% for both the necessity and the sufficiency dimensions. The first threshold of logical importance has the effect of ensuring that all critical events are conditions that approximate necessary, sufficient, or necessary and sufficient conditions. The second threshold of logical relevance has the effect of ensuring that no trivial conditions are included as critical events.

Discussion

Defined by both causal importance and contingency, a critical event allows for a parsimonious explanation of a puzzling outcome. The appeal of this mode of explanation is partly linked to its causal austerity. But its attraction is also related to the idea that an event that was not predetermined decisively shapes the future of a case. With critical event analysis, the counterfactual question of what would have happened – what could have happened – is spotlighted and given center stage. Critical event explanation accords with self-understandings of one’s own personal development: we often explain our own trajectory using critical event analysis. Given these appealing features, historical and case study researchers will surely continue to search for critical events in their explanations of puzzling outcomes.

Yet our goal has not been to suggest that all or even most case study explanations should or will be able to identify critical events. In fact, in other modes of explanation, non-critical events are key to understand puzzling outcomes. The category of non-critical event can be partitioned into three kinds of events: events that are contingent but not causally important; events that are causally important but not contingent; and events that are neither contingent nor causally important.

First, some events are contingent but not causally important. This is the case if their occurrence of is theoretically surprising but does not play a major role in enabling or generating an outcome. These events may appear as pieces of noise that shape an outcome in small, unpredictable, and inconsistent ways. In general, they are assumed to be too random and inconsequential to merit sustained attention. Another important set of events, are those that are important causes that are not contingent. These events differ from critical events in that their occurrence is anticipated by and encapsulated within theoretical orientations. When explaining contingent outcomes, these non-contingent, important causes are not featured in the explanation because they are logically impossible: an individually important cause of a contingent outcome must itself be contingent.

Finally, some events are neither causally important nor contingent. These events may help set the general context against which important causal processes unfold. They may also contain within them important events; or they may be overarching events within which important sub- events are located. Usually, however, events that are neither causally important nor contingent refer to trivial and expected occurrences that are ignored or taken for granted in case study explanation. A major exception exists in which unimportant, non-contingent events do play the leading explanatory role: gradualist explanations of contingent outcomes. With a gradualist explanation, many small, unexceptional causes push in a consistent direction to enable and produce a puzzling outcome (cf. Thelen 1999; 2003; 2004; Streeck and Thelen 2005; Mahoney and Thelen 2010).

In one sense, critical event analysis and gradualist analysis are rival frameworks that compete with one another. For any puzzlingly outcome in a particular case, one can pose the question of whether critical event analysis or gradualist analysis better explains the outcome. Likewise, if a scholar asserts that a critical event explains in substantial measure an outcome, one can always explore the rival hypothesis that a gradual process actually explains the outcome (or vice versa). In another sense, however, the two modes complement one another rather than compete. On this view, some contingent outcomes are best explained by critical events, whereas others are best explained by gradualist processes of change. The two frameworks may both be useful for case study research, though not simultaneously useful for a specific outcome in a particular case. This complementarity view suggests an important research agenda focused on identifying when and why a given framework is more useful for explaining a given outcome. It is an open empirical question regarding the frequency of punctuated versus gradual change in the social and political world. And it is an open question regarding the kinds of puzzlingly outcomes that are best explained by gradual processes of change versus critical events.

Going forward, the framework of token causation developed in this paper could offer a common vocabulary and a common orientation for synthesizing work on critical events and work on gradual change. The point of such a synthesis would not be to dissolve critical event analysis and gradualist explanation into a compromise framework in which all change follows an intermediate pace. Rather, the goal must be to arrive at a satisfactory solution for understanding when and why one kind of change prevails rather than the other. By beginning to clarify the critical event side of this possible synthesis, we hope that this paper encourages new methodological work by scholars interested in the other gradualist side.

References

Charrad, M. 2001. States and Women’s Rights: the Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Collier, Ruth Berins, and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton University Press.

Hume, David. 1975. Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals. 3rd ed. OCLC: ocm01466028. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, David. 2000. “Causation as Influence”. The Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 4: 182.

Luebbert, Gregory M. 1991. Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy: Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe. New York: OUP USA.

Mackie, John L. 1965. “Causes and Conditions”. American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (4): 245–264.

Mahoney, James, and Kathleen Ann Thelen, eds. 2010. Explaining institutional change: ambiguity, agency, and power. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Marx, Anthony W. 1998. Making race and nation: a comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. 1st pbk. ed. Cambridge studies in comparative politics. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

McDermott, Michael, and Journal of Philosophy, Inc. 2002. “Causation: Influence Versus Sufficiency”. Journal of Philosophy 99 (2): 84–101. Visited on 08/03/2018.
Mill, John Stuart. 1911. A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: Longmans, Green, / Company.

Moore, Barrington. 1993. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Beacon Press.

Psillos, Stathis. 2002. Causation and explanation. Central problems of philosophy. OCLC: 249620406.

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press.
Quadagno, Jill, and Stan J. Knapp. 1992. “Have Historical Sociologists Forsaken Theory?: Thoughts on the History/Theory Relationship”. Sociological Methods & Research 20, no. 4: 481–507.

Thelen, Kathleen. 1999. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics”. Annual Review of Political Science 2, no. 1 (): 369–404.

—2003. “How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis.” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschmeyer, 305–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—2004. How Institutions Evolve: the Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge studies in comparative politics. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Varshney, Ashutosh. 2003. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. 2nd Revised edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wright, Richard W. 1985. “Causation in Tort Law”.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019. The cover image is from https://mikedeakinart.com/art-journal-page/art-journal-page-cause-effect/

Emily Erikson

We have four outstanding papers here, two tackling archival issues and two tackling causal issues. Anna Skarpelis and Armando Lara-Millan, Brian Sargent, and Sunmin Kim are all advocating for a more thoughtful approach to archival research. Interestingly, Skarpelis suggests stepping outside of the archive to map its structure whereas Lara Millan, Sargent, and Kim suggest immersing and indeed losing oneself in the archives in a sort of directionless way to pull out some of its hidden structures. Similarly, Laura García-Montoya & Jim Mahoney are in tension with Isaac Reed & Paul Lichterman, where one team calls for focus on events and the other on dissolving events into linked chains of meaning and conduct. Both, however, converge in situating their conversation around counterfactual causal reasoning and in focusing on the drivers of action rather than the outcomes, which I think is interesting as well as potentially problematic.

Let me begin with the archivists. Skarpelis has a very interesting and eminently readable paper. She refers to the subfield of “computational historical sociology”, which I’m going to say is possibly overstating things but I am happy to see this term in circulation and hope it gains traction. She makes many excellent points, but there are three areas where I would raise questions.

There is a potential conflation here between the archives and the state, which makes for a particularly dark view of archives. Anna’s cases are two fascist states, so I can see how she arrived here. But many archives are not state products. Company archives, merchant archives, market records, letters, museum collections, the list goes on and on. In many of these the structural is incidental to what the people were trying to accomplish, accidental and much less insidious than the power of records of activity in a fascist state. But also very important. Second, Skarpelis writes of the inevitability of the archival process turning a person into record. Again, I will say this is not the case in many non-state archives, which record transactions. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that most archives record interactions and transactions, not people. But again, this may be about different types of archives. And third, there is Borgesian tension in the argument, which calls for a careful reconstruction of the history of archives in order to fully understand their documents. Essentially you need an archive for the archive. To me this suggests not that this is an impossible task, but that the best way to conduct historical research is to combine archives. I wonder if Skarpelis would agree that this is consistent with her argument and an effective approach.

A different tack is suggested in Lara-Millan, Sargent, and Kim’s thoughtful paper about the ethnographic imagination in archival research. I like the idea of losing oneself in the archives, and agree alongside luminaries like Charles Peirce and Guy Debord, that this is an intuition building strategy. But there is a danger here. Is a detailed description of events always good? Do we always want to see from the eyes of one person. What we might lose is the systematic and comparative perspective. We are scholars, and I think the end goal is not only to understand why people made the choices they did. It is also to understand how certain outcomes were produced. We want to know more than the people. We want to see for example how opportunities constrain action, how interdependencies in decision-making produce unexpected outcomes, and how long-term structural processes can explode into visibility in sudden events.

Garcia-Montoya & Mahoney share with Lara-Millan, Sargent, and Kim. a focus on contingency, so let me then ask both what if these contingent events are just moments of visibility for temporally unfolding structural conditions, in the way that revolution can be tied to demographic change? I also worry that the emphasis on truly contingent events may give you the least predictive power of all approaches. If an event is truly unusual, it is not likely to occur again, so then our theories aren’t very powerful.

But accepting that there is a benefit to identifying these significant events. I think there still maybe issues that are difficult to work out. What parts of an event are important? How you do case an event? Does it matter that there is an election or is it more important that the election was between Bush and Gore? If it is about estimating the causal effect of Bush and Gore running against each other with Ralph Nader as a 3rd party contender, then what is the value of that for understanding future elections. I am also very unsure as to how I can estimate the probability of events that don’t happen. And finally, I wonder about the choice of elections as an example. Elections are a highly structured moment of contingency. They are designed that way. How useful is this approach for less structured and contingent moments?

Isaac Reed and Paul Lichterman are also concerned with causal analysis and make a compelling case for investigating “actively constructed cases to compare different chains of meaningful action that theoretical categories make comparable.” The idea here is to focus on similar patterns of conduct and their outcomes rather than picking chains of action that are tied to some particular outcome. My first question, is how different is this from that refrain we all got drilled into us in graduate school: don’t select on the independent variable. Does study of collective action accomplish this approach to situated chains of meaning and conduct? It seems to satisfy some of the conditions.

The paper raises very serious and under-thought issues: Can settings be variables? Can structures be agents? Are forms different from contents? And importantly, are we doing damage to our explanations by swapping out these fundamentally different types of objects and inserting them into the same causal models. It is terrific to progress being made on these issues. But I wonder if meta communication is going to provide an answer. In the end metacommunication in the sciences failed Du Bois, but sustained Dewey and James. How can we make it better?

In conclusion, while I think this each of these papers makes important contributions, the common thread running throughout may be an animosity to outcomes and an emphasis on contingency. I find this concerning. Now more than ever, don’t we want research that helps us solve particular problems?

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.