Formations and Formalisms: Charles Tilly and the Paradox of the Actor

Abstract

Charles Tilly was a pioneer in joining sociology and history. Throughout his career, he was especially concerned with the ways in which ordinary people made political claims, and how this was shaped by transformations in the state and in capitalism. Most often seen as a structuralist, Tilly was nevertheless deeply concerned with how to understand actors. This article traces Tilly's work from early research on French contention through his later, synthetic work on mechanisms and regimes to show how Tilly's understanding of actors, agency, culture, and social construction developed. Further, we show how this development went hand in hand with Tilly's development of distinctive methodological approaches to historical and sociological data.

The Structure of Causal Chains

“…Of the major sociologists writing on mechanisms, only Tilly seems an exception. On one reading of his corpus, he had no consistent action model because of his interest, derived from White, in how individual and collective actors’ identities, interests, and other qualities are formed through their webs of social relations—what Krinsky and Mische (2013:2) called the “problem of actor constitution.” Yet even Tilly, as he moved into the later, mechanisms-centered phase of his work, saw the need to impose analytic fixity. He began to view actors as collective, experimental problem solvers, and his historical accounts turned on the interplay between mechanisms and actors thus conceived (Gross 2010).…”

Collective Action and Political Change: Public and Semipublic Strategies of Brazilian Rural Movements (1990s–2017)

“…Charles Tilly dealt extensively with the way collective action changes. Gradually, the concept of repertoires became more contingent, performative, and relational, prone to being modified by the group in its political interactions (Alonso, 2012;Krinsky and Mische, 2013). Tilly (2006: 19) proposed a theory of the relationship between the forms of contentious politics and variation in political regimes ("repeated, strong interactions among major political actors").…”

“…The FBP is a broad articulation ranging from social movement organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and union confederations to loose associations and sectors of political parties such as the PT, the Partido Comunista do Brasil, and the Partido Socialista Brasileiro, groups variously positioned with respect to the PT. 3 Some of the most relevant organizations, such as the MST and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (Unified Workers' Central-CUT), emerged in the same political environment as the PT and shared ideas, theoretical basis, and constituencies (Keck, 1995). Over 30 years, however, new political divisions had developed.…”

The fifteen days: building claims and contexts

“…For social movement researchers, the abundance of digital posts presents another aspect of the puzzle of how, then, protest-related texts, i.e., posts, can be compartmentalized without noise. The nature of this puzzle has never fallen beyond the purview of SMS researchers in terms of utilizing text materials (Tilly et al 1975;Johnston 1995;Wada 2012;Krinsky and Mische 2013). In particular, the cultural strand of SMS has developed its theories by incorporating various speech acts and different kinds of interaction settings.…”