Chance and Societal Change

Abstract

This article advances a theory of societal change I am developing: rather than the usual pseudo-evolutionary view which presents each phase of societal change as supplanting its predecessor, I argue that societal change is accumulative in character and that in this process of accumulation chance may play a part. In the first part of the article, using the historically important example of the British rise to paramountcy in Gujarat (now a state in northern India) as a case study, I show that the interventions of chance in this historical episode is undeniable. In the second part, I examine the contemporaneous reactions of historians and others to the British rise to paramountcy and their suppression of chance, then I examine key reasons why chance became obscured in sociological writings and in most present-day evolutionary biological studies of human behaviour. I argue that there is no single, uniform essence of chanciness, that chance events bear a family resemblance, and that the Gujarati case study permits the identification of several sibling forms, two of which are theoretically illuminated, with some qualifications, by the writings of Raymond Boudon and Jared Diamond. I conclude that while there is more theoretical work required to distinguish and accommodate other forms of chance, nonetheless, it is time chance was rehabilitated because its readmittance into the disciplinary fold will not exclude sociological explanations, but it will help to avoid the unsavoury consequences of neglecting the topic whose exclusion is both empirically and theoretically unjustified.

A Sociology of Luck

“…It is not just that luck has been deemed by some as being outside of sociological concern but also that it is viewed as antithetical to a sociological approach to understanding the world. It is seen, like chance, as occupying “a space repugnant to reason” (Hacking 1990:13), as a threat to some of sociology’s core methodological and epistemological commitments, and therefore as “taboo” (Mattausch 2003). In its quest to be scientific, much of mainstream sociology has come to focus on causation, attempting to establish, clarify, or debunk relationships between or among variables (see Abend, Petre, and Sauder 2013).…”

‘Luck, chance, and happenstance?Perceptions of success and failure amongst fixed‐term academic staff inUKhigher education’

“…There remains a striking lack of sociological literature engaging with notions of luck outside of the sociology of gambling (e.g. Reith ), which can perhaps be explained by Smith's (: 513) contention that ‘luck’ has remained at the level of a ‘residual category’ in much sociological research, and thus ‘chance’ has remained somewhat ‘taboo’ (Mattausch : 506). What, then, might be the dangers of conceptualizing the concept of ‘chance’ as being beyond the purview of sociological analysis?…”

Contingency, novelty and choice. Cultural evolution as internal selection

“…Sociological positivism, encouraged by the statistical “taming of chance” (Hacking, ), saw probability as a first step towards certainty and predictability. Mainstream sociology treated chance as statistical noise which would be clarified by more research and could, in the meantime, be hidden in constants or error terms (Smith, ; Mattausch, ). Where it was acknowledged, it was not as a constructive but a disturbing force, “the dark side of modernity” (Giddens, , p. 122), or was relegated to a few spheres of life such as environmental risk or career choices.…”