Essential Sociology

Sturgeon's Law Notwithstanding

OG reader Jabril recently requested I repost this piece from the old blog. I provide an edited version below. The piece itself was written at the request of X user @aaedwards333, who asked for “essential readings” from a sociologist who was critical of the state of the field.

The state of the field is a mess — fragmented, chaotic, and often unscientific. What follows is not a list of readings for understanding the academic discipline as it actually is. Instead, these are important pieces for understanding the subject matter of sociology — at least, as I understand it.

Sociology is the study of variation in social life. Its intellectual boundaries overlap with those of anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology. Indeed, the distinctions between these disciplines has more to do with organizational politics and professional subcultures than with any logical slicing up of the subject matter.

Social life includes behavior at various scales — large or “macro” scales, such as differences in class systems from one society to another, or small “micro” scales, like differences from one face-to-face situation to another.

The best overview of broad differences between societies is the textbook Human Societies, by Gerhard Lenski and Patrick Nolan (and sometimes Jean Lenski, depending on the edition). Unlike some sociology textbooks, which are glorified glossaries of jargon, it is actually an excellent summary of factual knowledge. And while much sociology is overly focused on contemporary societies, the title here is accurate: It addresses all the major forms of human society from the Stone Age until now.

Societies are classified according to their techno-economic base, such as whether they primarily make their living through hunting and gathering (foraging societies), gardening with a hoe or digging stick (horticultural societies), or intensive cultivation with plowing and/or irrigation (agricultural societies). For each of the types, the book covers the prevailing tendencies in forms of social organization such as division of labor, social stratification, political organization, and so on. The book also acknowledges some exceptions to those tendencies, such as when rich sources of wild food allow some forager societies to have features more typical of farming societies. For your time and money there’s no better source for getting a picture of the broad patterns of human society.

This is the only textbook on the list. The oldest editions are hard to find, but if you poke around you can get a more recently used one for under $40. A new copy of the latest edition will run in triple digits, because the college textbook industry is what happens when your business model is based on forcing people to buy things with other people’s money.

Knowing something about how and why societies vary is good, but what about variation within societies? For example, even within societies where a government provides courts, the vast majority of dispute are handled in some other way. Zooming down to compare individual disputes, we see a wide variety of reactions to conflict.

Donald Black’s The Social Structure of Right and Wrong looks at how we can explain this sort of variation. It introduces a major topic in sociology: conflict, the clash of right and wrong that occurs whenever people express grievances or define and respond to deviance. This is a major category of human behavior that includes a large amount of what is most consequential to us, from arguments to lawsuits to street protests to executions. Black’s central question is why, given that a grievance occurs, does it get handled one way rather than another?

The book covers a lot of ground and serves several functions. One is as a kind of field guide to studying conflict: It will arm you to classify behaviors as avoidance or self-help, rebellion or discipline, partisanship or moralism, or as different varieties of settlement.

It also provides testable propositions about how different aspects of conflict vary with the social environment. Moralism increases with social distance, settlement becomes more authoritative as the settlement agent grows more superior, avoidance is most likely and extreme in settings of fragmentation, independence, and individuation.

If you follow me or my work, you know Black was going to be on this list, and I think this the best of his books for new readers. It illustrates his unique approach to sociology but leaves the philosophy of it for the prologue and the appendix, so someone new to the field doesn’t have to get bogged down in metatheory.

Another virtue of the book is that it addresses a wide range of cross-cultural examples. Black presents general principles of conflict that hold throughout different human societies across history.

Sociologists can study variation across societies, across conflicts, and also across social networks. The study of networks is a major branch of the field and looks at how the structure of networks affects things like the flow of information (or goods or viruses) through human groups, how they are exposed to opportunities and whether they are drawn into social movements.

There’s an enormous amount of work here, but I always start students with Mark Granovetter’s classic “Strength of Weak Ties.” This article looks at the role of weak social ties in providing a bridge between local networks and discusses the implications that follow.  For instance, this explains why jobseekers are more likely to get useful leads from weak ties than from strong ones.

For a more in-depth analysis, see the book Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition by Ron Burt, who uses the impact of network structure on opportunity to explain things like why some firms are more profitable than others and some employees get promoted more quickly than others.

I discuss both of them more in my post on Opportunity Theory. In addition to talking about the properties of networks as such, these works also double as readings on the topics of business and social mobility.

In addition to societies, interactions, and networks, we can also examine variation across individuals. I think this is an area that’s going to, or at least should, see the most shakeup from the advance of behavioral genetics, which shows us that things like childhood socialization explain less variation than we thought. But less isn’t zero, and people’s experiences do impact their beliefs and behavior.

We can see this in studies of religious conversion. For example, people are more likely to convert to the extent they develop close ties with those promulgating the new beliefs and sever their ties with those who hold to the old ones. This is especially so if they form these new relationships at a time of personal upheaval, such as moving to a new town or losing a job.

These ideas are part of John Loftland and Rodney Stark’s classic study “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to the Deviant Perspective.” Based on their study of converts to the Unification Church, they posit a series of steps that all converts followed on their path to becoming “full converts” of the new faith.

I discuss this article in my post on Motivational Theory. In the years since this publication the theory has been tested, modified, and applied to all manner of beliefs and groups — including mainstream religions, jihadi terrorist cells, and Alcoholics Anonymous.

We can also study the content of religion, as well as other aspects of human culture like novels, music, film, rumor, or science.

Regarding religion, Guy Swanson’s Birth of the Gods looks at cross-cultural variation in religious beliefs, finding that things like monotheism or ancestor worship correlate with certain social structures.

Richard Peterson helped usher in the modern study of culture as a dependent variable with his “production of culture” approach. I’ve always had a soft spot for his “Why 1955? Explaining the Avent of Rock Music.”

Another classic in this vein is Wendy Griswold’s “American Character and the American Novel.” Her thesis is that differences between US and British novels have less to do with differences in the “character” of the two nations than with differences in copyright laws. It’s an interesting example of how the seemingly grand and abstract is explicable with the mundane and concrete.

Speaking of mundane causes, Marcus Felson and Lawrence Cohen’s article “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activities Approach” demonstrates how something as simple as whether people spend longer hours at work can affect rates of home burglary versus residential burglary. More broadly, crime trends vary with the behavior of the noncriminal population, showing that explaining crime doesn’t necessarily require explaining criminals. I discuss this paper more in my post on Opportunity Theory.

Their theory also represents the study of crime and predatory behavior. Criminology is a subfield unto its own. For work that does attempt to explain criminality, see Lonnie Athens’s The Creation of Violent Dangerous Criminals. I think it’s valuable as a descriptive work if not as an explanatory one.

Here again, though, sociologists explaining differences across individuals often fail to control for genetic confounding. But in the diverse world of sociology, there are also sociobiologists who focus exactly on biological factors and evolutionary explanations. For examples, J. Richard Udry’s article “The Biological Limits of Gender Construction” looks at how gendered behavior is influenced by the biological substrate. He provides evidence that prenatal hormone levels help predict how butch or femme a woman is later in life.

Richard Daley and Margo Wilson’s book Homicide (in latter editions, subtitled “Foundations of Human Behavior”) looks at common patterns of killing in evolutionary terms. For instance, that males account for the vast majority of homicides fits with the pattern seen in many other species and is explicable with males having greater fitness variance.

Learned or instinctual, human behavior can also be modeled as groups and individuals responding to incentives. Mancur Olson wasn’t a sociologist, but an economist and political scientist. But I don’t care much about disciplinary identities and if studying collective action isn’t sociology, I don’t know what is. The theory he lays out in his Logic of Collective Action hasn’t been empirically tested nearly enough, but things in society that can be described as “collective action problems” are so consequential that this analysis is worthwhile.

I discuss Olson’s work in more detail in my post on Rational Choice Theories. Sociologists don’t use the rational choice approach nearly as uniformly as economists, but then sociologists don’t do anything uniformly. If you want this kind of explanation by someone with a degree in sociology, see Theodore Caplow’s Two Against One: Coalitions in the Triad.

Finally, and this is a late edition inspired by some of the current atmosphere of instability, there’s Peter Turchin’s Secular Cycles, along with its main influence, Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Here we go back to a macro-social level of analysis to ask when and where societies will experience spasms of political violence, including civil wars and revolutions. Historians have long thought that these things seem to come in waves, and thinkers like Goldstone and Turchin look at how structural and demographic factors like state structure, population growth, and intra-elite competition could be the cause.

Before he got hounded off his old blog and out of his psychiatric practice by the New York Times doxing him, Scott Alexander wrote a detailed review of Turchin’s book. You can still see it here.

Now any actual sociologist is going to look at this and be incensed at the many good things I left out. And since I threw in one economist and some sociobiologists, you can also complain about all the missing economics or biology or anthropology or whatever. But this list was a quick attempt to represent scientifically promising work on different topics, using different approaches, and examining different scales of variation. If I had free rein to make a sociology curriculum, this is a fair sampling of the kind of stuff I’d include.

A trained sociologist might be especially surprised that I left out “the classics” — a cannon of work by older European writers who, sometime around the mid-twentieth century, were retconned as the founding fathers of sociology. While I do value the intellectual heft of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber more than a lot of what passes for sociology nowadays, I wouldn’t start a newbie on erudite works from the 19^th century, very little of which is testable anyway. But I will give some honorable mention to Durkheim’s Suicide. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is interesting as an investigation into the early Calvinist worldview, but I don’t think its well-supported as an explanation of economic development.