Processual Sociology
by Andrew Abbott
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cloth: 978-0-226-33659-6 | Paper: 978-0-226-33662-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-33676-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

For the past twenty years, noted sociologist Andrew Abbott has been developing what he calls a processual ontology for social life. In this view, the social world is constantly changing—making, remaking, and unmaking itself, instant by instant. He argues that even the units of the social world—both individuals and entities—must be explained by these series of events rather than as enduring objects, fixed in time. This radical concept, which lies at the heart of the Chicago School of Sociology, provides a means for the disciplines of history and sociology to interact with and reflect on each other.

In Processual Sociology, Abbott first examines the endurance of individuals and social groups through time and then goes on to consider the question of what this means for human nature. He looks at different approaches to the passing of social time and determination, all while examining the goal of social existence, weighing the concepts of individual outcome and social order. Abbott concludes by discussing core difficulties of the practice of social science as a moral activity, arguing that it is inescapably moral and therefore we must develop normative theories more sophisticated than our current naively political normativism. Ranging broadly across disciplines and methodologies, Processual Sociology breaks new ground in its search for conceptual foundations of a rigorously processual account of social life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Andrew Abbott is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He edits the American Journal of Sociology.

REVIEWS

“Abbott has long been one of sociology’s most fertile and original thinkers. These lucid and challenging essays display Abbott’s remarkably wide-ranging sociological intelligence at its best. Cumulatively, they articulate the core principles of a distinctively processual sociology, and they challenge us to recognize the irreducibly humanistic and moral nature of the sociological enterprise.”
— Rogers Brubaker, University of California–Los Angeles

Processual Sociology’s essays draw on a dizzying range of sources and examples, blended into a stunningly original, disruptive, and fecund analysis. The interrogation of such basic concepts as actor and outcome; the insights into the way that sequence and ecology frustrate causal reasoning; the effort to reconstitute macro-sociology on a radically micro-sociological foundation; and the reclamation of the moral dimension are just a few of this volume’s important themes. Processual Sociology is both a good read and an ambitious and compelling challenge to the way that social scientists understand and carry out their craft.”
— Paul DiMaggio, New York University

“In Processual Sociology, Abbott makes clear that his ambition is to change sociology fundamentally. In elegant but also rigorous essays, he connects his seemingly disparate past writings and foreshadows a basic rethinking of social ontology. This starts from the historical character of individual life and moves on to connect historical demography to the nature of groups, the constant making and remaking of all cultural and social relationships, and the inextricable connection between the empirical and the moral. It is a brilliant book that makes one want to drop everything else to join in thinking about sociology’s hardest, most basic questions.”
 
— Craig Calhoun, director, London School of Economics

“Abbott is the most surprising and innovative of today’s social theorists, in part because he combines disciplines as diverse as mathematical philosophy and literary theory. His work cuts in an entirely different way across the quantitative/qualitative and most other divides. Abbott repeatedly reverses the gestalts, advocating a lyrical sociology of contemporaneous flows rather than narratives explaining ‘outcomes’ abstracted from time, proposing that more is explained by problems of excess than problems of scarcity, and exposing concepts of inequality that run contrary to what we do in our own lives. This is a book to change the way sociologists think.”
— Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

“Varieties of Social Imagination is an experiment in rejecting these habits, and its rhetorical tactic of choice—decentralizing the author’s history and identity—seems aimed at delivering a shock to our identity-obsessed twenty-first-century systems. The author constructs a female persona who reviews old works of social theory, with no one era, nationality, or gender favored.”
— Jessa Crispin, The Baffler

“Abbott’s essays demand the full attention of their readers because, unlike almost any other current theorist, Abbott’s passionate attachment to the humanities, in conjunction with vigorous attention to slick methods, gives his voice the unique authority it has on the current intellectual scene.”
— American Journal of Sociology

“Abbott’s initial consolidation of his general theory, Processual Sociology, long in development, is such a welcome intervention. Reading the book is like opening the windows in an old, abandoned house, letting the wind sweep away the dust and cobwebs to reveal perfectly useable furnishings and foundation. Without hyperbole, the book should be required reading for every working sociologist, not least because processual sociology takes for granted, and is perfectly compatible with the ontological, structurational and liquid turns mentioned above. Indeed, process is the norm. . . . Many readers might be familiar with Abbott’s work on ‘linked ecologies’, ‘lyrical sociology’ or ‘outcomes’ – each of which works as a stand-alone essay. But, the collection is undoubtedly greater than the sum of its parts, bringing into view the long gestation and effort the Chicagoan has been elaborating piece by piece for over twenty years.”
— Sociological Review

“Abbott’s book is such a rich and complex one that it is not easy to give a summary of its contents. . .The point of Abbott’s book is to change the way of thinking about social phenomena rather than lay out rules of sociological method.”
— Acta Sociologica

“Andrew Abbott’s new book is another masterful installment in what is now a long series of important works by one of the leading sociologists in the United States. The reader of Processual Sociology will find some very creative and useful ideas in its pages. Abbott’s work, in brief, represents a most welcome contribution to modern sociology.”
— Contemporary Sociology

“One cannot discuss contemporary sociology without mentioning the work of Andrew Abbott. . . .Processual Sociology well represents his admirable intellectual diversity [and] merits attention from practitioners within all domains of the discipline.”
— European Journal of Sociology

"Andrew Abbott is one of those rare sociologists who are able to speak to different audiences without losing any of their rigorous arguments, their charm, or their ability to stimulate the sociological imagination. . . . Almost every book he writes is capable of taking center stage among sociological research by virtue of his extraordinary eclecticism, absolute mastery of data, and sociological writing that is, at times, captivating and always reflective of deep thought."
— Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia (Translated from Italian)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Part 1

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0001
[biological historicality, change, encoding, historicality, memorial historicality, recorded historicality]
Because processual social thought takes change to be universality, even the historical continuity of individuals requires theorizing. This continuity arises because of biological, memory-based, and recorded continuity. Not all of it is “cultural;” much is structural, or even biological. These continuities “encode” the immediate past into the present, and so provide stepwise continuity across time. An individual “is” a lineage of such continuities, as indeed is any social entity. Because individuals have this historicality, the mass of individuals constitutes one of the major determining social forces of social life, far more enduring and influential than “larger” forces like the division of labor or means of production. (pages 3 - 15)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0002
[choice, corporeal historicality, human nature, lineage, locality, personality, sequentiality, substantive historicality]
Human nature concepts have four properties: the site of human nature, their focus on emotions, actions, or meanings; their preference for form over content; their approach to mutability. Human nature concepts may seem inappropriate in processual sociology, where the world is conceived in perpetual change. However, processual concepts of human nature are rooted in substantive historicality and involve the various means by which the evolving lineages of personalities choose between optative futures and thereby bind various events into or out of their lineage. This process is irredeemably local. (pages 16 - 32)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0003
[actors, avatars, bundles, ecology, hinges, ligation, locations, settlements]
Previous work has shown the fruitfulness of the ecology concept as a general representation for capturing relations between actors in a social space. However, that work tended to assume external criteria (e.g., of fitness or success) that are exogenous to the ecology itself. Here, after giving a general theorization of the ecology concept, I argue that different ecologies are linked together such that each provides such external criteria for itself. This implies the importance of alliances across ecologies and the hinges that bind them together by providing (often quite different) payoffs to the allies, each in its own ecology. (pages 33 - 74)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part 2

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0004
[emotion, location, lyrical sociology, narrative, passage, present, Paul Lazarsfeld]
Although ecology captures the causal structure of the present, it does not capture the feel of temporality itself. Lyric is the sense of temporal passage in the present. Beginning with an analysis of temporal passage in the work of Paul Lazarsfeld, this chapter uses literary and philosophical theories to discuss the role of the present in the social process and the analysis of that present by “lyrical sociology,” sociology that is deliberately non-narrative. Lyrical sociology is characterized by image rather than story, concrete emotion rather than abstract mimesis, and naturalism rather than artificiality. It is organized around location in social time and space. (pages 77 - 121)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0005
[abundance, excess, habituation, scarcity, surfeit]
This article argues for a new branch of theory based not on presumptions of scarcity—which are the foundational presumptions of most existing social theory—but on those of excess. The chapter first discusses the emergence of scarcity’s dominance in social theory. It then considers and rejects the idea that excess of one thing is simply scarcity of another. It discusses the mechanisms by which excess creates problems, noting three such mechanisms at the individual level (paralysis, habituation, and value contextuality) and two further mechanisms (disruption and misinheritance) at the social level. The article then considers four types of strategies with which we address excess: two reduction strategies (defensive and reactive) and two rescaling strategies (adaptive and creative). It closes with some brief illustrations of how familiar questions can be recast from terms of scarcity into terms of excess. (pages 122 - 160)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part 3

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0006
[discounting, momentary outcome, outcome, tensed outcome, trend outcome]
The chapter considers how we evaluate the results of periods of time for social actors, contrasting the economic focus on evaluation from the beginning through forward-thinking and discounting with the sociological focus on a single-value at the end. Many different forms of outcome are discussed. In terms of “breadth” of concept there are process outcome, trend outcome, and point outcome. In terms of temporality, there are “tensed” and “untensed” outcome (depending on whether the crucial point of measure moves with time). In terms of direction, there are prospective, momentary, retrospective, and pantemporal outcomes. All are possible, and the choice between them is purely normative. (pages 165 - 197)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0007
[conservatism, equilibrium, progress, social control, social order, tradition, trusteeship]
The chapter gives an analysis of possible conceptions of social order, focusing on how they are embedded in time and conceive of temporality. It begins with the simple concepts of order that treat order simply as the absence of disorder, (e.g., the contractarians). It moves from unprocessual concepts like equilibrium, with its many variations, to empirical concepts of process like habituation, socialization, and tradition, and then to normative concepts like progress, conservatism, and trusteeship. Order concepts are evaluated in terms of whether they have substantial content, whether the concept is “at-a-point” or transtemporal, how the concept addresses the modification of social entities in time, and how it resolves the relation between social and individual temporalities. (pages 198 - 228)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Part 4

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0008
[classical liberalism, equality of opportunity, inequality, injustice, overeducation]
The chapter first shows that out inequality concept is inherently normative. The term is in fact used to mean “injustice.” The normative implications of three measurement problems affecting inequality are then discussed: linearity, additivity, and generality. More general measurement problems are the improbability of inequality and metrizability; it may be that justice is specifically conceptualized as unmeasurable. The chapter then analyzes the problems raised for concepts on inequality by the simple-minded social ontology of classical liberalism, and starts to sketch the issues involved in a more general processual account of injustice. (pages 233 - 252)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0009
[John Dewey, Emile Durkheim, functionalism, knowledge alienation, Talcott Parsons, pragmatism, professionalism, Max Weber]
The chapter first demonstrates that sociological students of professions typically disclaim any normative intentions, but in fact live professionalism on a daily basis – a contradiction I call knowledge alienation. It then considers the Weberian concept of value-free social science, finding Weber’s analysis problematic Durkheimian analysis of morals, finding that Durkheim’s claim to have resolved the normative/empirical divide is specious. Parsons’s functionalist analysis of professions is shown to function by sleight of hand, defining the empirical as normative, tout court. The chapter concludes with a pragmatist-inspired analysis of the fact-value dichotomy, continuing to use the concept of professionalism as an example and developing a processual definition of processual as a mode of becoming. (pages 253 - 276)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Andrew Abbott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226336763.003.0010
[causality, humane sympathy, humanism, normative argument, public sociology]
The Epilogue makes an extended argument for the unification of empirical and normative research in sociology. The processual enactment of the social process creates openings for causal determination and moral action to jointly determine social life. As a consequence, sociology cannot but be simultaneously empirical and moral. It is argued that sociology must begin with humane sympathy, a stance that must precede–although it does not rule out – political commitment. This implies that sociology requires a normative subdiscipline and above all that the discipline must be informed by a comprehensive sympathy for the variety of social life. (pages 277 - 292)
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References

Index