Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology

Abstract

Abstract:Sociologists have long been interested in understanding the emergence of new social kinds. We argue that sociologists' formation stories have been mischaracterized as non-causal, descriptive, or interpretive. Traditional "forcing cause" accounts describe regularized relations between fixed entities with specific properties. The three dominant approaches to causality-variable causality, treatments and manipulations, and mechanisms-all refer to forcing causes. But formation stories do not fit the forcing causes framework because accounts of formation violate the assumptions that ground forcing cause accounts and instead emphasize eventfulness, assemblage, and self-representation. Yet these accounts are, we argue, fundamentally causal. In particular, formation stories provide the historical, empirical boundaries for the functioning of forcing cause accounts. We catalog the breadth of formation stories in sociology, and use examples from diverse literatures to highlight how thinking of formation stories as causal accounts can improve our understanding of the relationship of history and culture to causal analysis. * Authors listed in alphabetical order; both authors contributed equally. We would like to thank

Before they were Diamonds: The Intergenerational Migration of Kentucky's Coal Camp Blacks

“…The first scene, chapters three and four take up the black migration into of the coalfields of eastern Kentucky. Chapter Three, "The Great Migration Escape", provides a historical analysis of the in-migration, from 1915 to 1940, from Alabama to eastern Kentucky, and establishes what Hirschman and Reed (2014) call a "formation story"-historical sociological analyses that "explain how social things come to be stable enough to force or be forced" and thus "establish historical boundaries past which forcing-cause claims likely will not travel." This chapter illuminates the conditions under which this particular iteration of the African American Great Migration emerged, including the pre-migration context from which they originated and the racial landscape from which they exited.…”

“…Most would agree that such sensitivities are necessary for the analysis of any social construct. However, where we fall short in our imperative to "reassemble the social" (Latour, 2007) is the careful attention to the historicity of the process of social construction itself (Foucault, 2012;Hirschman & Reed, 2014;Reed, 2011;Somers, 1996). Although we acknowledge the fact that social categories are historically constructed, we elide the fact that the meanings of "words and things" are bounded in space and time, leading us to tacitly endow a stable and portable quality upon social categories that is not there.…”

“…Sociologists have long accepted that "the social" is constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1991;Du Bois, 1940;Hirschman & Reed, 2014;Mead, 1964;Reed, 2011).…”

Stylized Facts in the Social Sciences

“…In his summary review of understandings of causality in sociology, Goldthorpe (2001) identifies "robust dependence" as one key mode of causal reasoning (see Hirschman and Reed [2014] for a lengthy discussion). X is a cause of Y if we find an association between X and Y, and that correlation persists after accounting for all the plausible intervening causes ("controlling" for possible confounding variables).…”

“…Facts about these social kinds are the sort likely to be of interest to social scientists and policymakers. Unfortunately for researchers, social kinds are not stable, and academic research may participate in the instability of these kinds (Hirschman and Reed 2014). And, of course, academic investigations are not the only source of change in social kinds-social change has many origins.…”