A Sociology of Luck

Abstract

Sociology has been curiously silent about the concept of luck. The present article argues that this omission is, in fact, an oversight: An explicit and systematic engagement with luck provides a more accurate portrayal of the social world, opens potentially rich veins of empirical and theoretical inquiry, and offers a compelling alternative for challenging dominant meritocratic frames about inequality and the distribution of rewards. This article develops a framework for studying luck, first by proposing a working definition of luck, examining why sociology has ignored luck in the past, and making the case for the value of including luck in sociology’s conceptual repertoire. The article then demonstrates the fertile research potential of studying luck by identifying a host of research questions and hypotheses pertaining to the social construction of luck, the real effects of luck, and theoretical interventions related to luck. It concludes by highlighting the distinctive contributions sociology can make to the growing interdisciplinary interest in this topic.

Gender, Genes, and Income: How Equality of Opportunity Changed in Norway Across the 20th Century

“…The nonshared environmental influence remains a puzzle and structural systematic interpretations have proven to be elusive (Turkheimer 2016), except for birth order (Lillehagen and Isungset 2020;Plomin and Daniels 1987). Some argue that sociologists should embrace an explicit framework of luck in studies of inequality (Sauder 2020). A large nonshared component for lifetime income indicates that also in complex knowledge-based societies, a large part of our lives are subject to randomness, luck, and nonshared pathways, even for an outcome which most people seek to attain.…”

“…This makes sociogenomics, the combination of genetics and sociology (Conley and Fletcher 2017;Freese 2018;, of particular interest for social inequality research, as a large part of the picture is missing if genetics or social context is ignored. Sociogenomic studies raise several philosophical questions, like whether differences in socio-economic attainments caused by genetics should be viewed as a lottery (Harden and Koellinger 2020;Hyeokmoon et al 2020), or whether influence from shared environments should be viewed as fair or unfair (Harden 2021;Swift 2004), and how sociological accounts of social inequality should view luck (Jencks et al 1972;Sauder 2020).…”

Another Person’s Peril: Peanut Allergy, Risk Perceptions, and Responsible Sociality

“…For the individual, trust is one outcome of cognitive and affective processes for evaluating uncertainties, building confidence, and structuring interactions around expectations (Furedi 2005; Lewis and Weigert 1985). Trust thus presumes awareness of settings, situations, and people that might generate or disseminate risk—mingling emotion, calculation, and moral cognition (Boholm and Corvellec 2011; Fine and Holyfield 1996; Lupton 2013b)—whether or not the perceived probabilities of actual harm are accurate or precise (Heimer 1988; Sauder 2020). And, it is institutions that, through the creation and enforcement of policies and regulations (Hiatt and Park 2012; Weaver 2015), ostensibly target pertinent behaviors and arbitrate ensuing disputes.…”

Chance, Orientation, and Interpretation: Max Weber’s Neglected Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory

“…More generally, we find attention to the unpredictable “eventfulness” of social life in historical sociology and beyond (Clemens 2007; Goffman 2019; Wagner-Pacifici 2017). Recently, Michael Sauder (2020) appealed to the (folk) notion of “chance” by seeking to highlight the neglected role of “luck” in social explanation.…”

“…It was meant to refer to real but unknowable possibilities and probabilities to which people indirectly orient themselves in the form of expectation and judgment (essentially consisting of guessing ). This version of Chance is only partially (and poorly) approximated in the contemporary uses of “chance,” whether folk or statistical (Sauder 2020). 5 This has significant consequences for how we should understand the conceptual foundations of Weber’s sociology and how his work, immensely influential as it has been, has radical implications for contemporary sociology in bringing interpretation and probability into a mutually profitable relationship.…”