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2010 28: 326 Sociological Theory
Marc Garcelon
The Missing Key: Institutions, Networks, and the Project of Neoclassical Sociology
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The Missing Key: Institutions, Networks, and the Project
of Neoclassical Sociology*
MARC GARCELON
Yeshiva University
The diversity of contemporary capitalisms underscores the need to supplant the
amorphous concept of structure with more precise concepts, particularly institutions
and networks. All institutions entail both embodied and relational aspects. Insti-
tutions are relational insofar as they map obligatory patterns of getting by and
getting alonginstitutional ordersthat steer stable social fields over time. In-
stitutions are simultaneously embodied as institutional paradigms, part of a larger
bodily agency Pierre Bourdieu called habitus. Institutions are in turn tightly cou-
pled to networks between various people based on, but not reducible to, strategic
interests. Yet social interaction sometimes exceeds institutional boundaries, giving
rise to disjunctive fields and underscoring the prominence of institutional failures in
the unfolding of antagonistic relations such as warfare. Such disjunctive fields can
be tracked in relation to some transnational networks at the global level without
assuming developmental convergence. This last point underscores the meaning of
neoclassical sociology, which eschews assumptions of developmental convergence at
the global level.
Institution stands among the most widely used concepts in sociology today, yet para-
doxically remains underdeveloped. Lack of clarity conceptualizing institutions closely
links with chronic overburdening of the concept of structure. Overcoming this theo-
retical Gordian knot requires integrating a reconstructed concept of institution with
network theory in ways useful for empirical analysis. Such a conceptual reframing
in turn enables a regionally specific mapping of the diversity of contemporary capi-
talisms, socialisms, democracies, civil societies, authoritarianisms, imperi-
alisms, and aspects of premodern societiespeasantries, kinship groups, mythical
and religious beliefs, and so onthat continue in todays global order without be-
ing reducible to effects of modern tendencies. For the diversity of the contemporary
worldand by extension, its institutions and networkshas confounded earlier mod-
ernist expectations of developmental convergence despite real degrees of global-scale
enmeshment of aspects of regional human societies with one another and their co-
evolutionary developmental history since the emergence of a world-scale economy in
the 1500s and 1600s. Indeed, development and convergence are not synonyms. Take
the failure of capitalist-style economic policies to generate representative democracy
in China over the last 30 years, or the failure of the Washington consensusthe
prescriptive model of neoliberal development adopted widely in the developing world
in return for foreign aid and loans from the United States, its allies, the World Bank
Address correspondence to: Marc Garcelon, Department of Sociology, Yeshiva University, 500 W.
185th St., New York, NY 10033. Tel: 212-960-5400 x6982; E-mail: garcelon@yu.edu. I would like to
thank Robert N. Bellah, Jim Stockinger, commentators from Sociological Theory, the Politics and Protest
Workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, and an ASA Annual Meeting for helpful
suggestions on earlier versions of this article.
Sociological Theory 28:3 September 2010
C
2010 American Sociological Association. 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005
at UNICAMP /BIBLIOTECA CENTRAL on February 11, 2014 stx.sagepub.com Downloaded from
THE MISSING KEY 327
and the International Monetary Fund for nearly 30 yearsto effect the envisioned
patterns of economic growth in developing nations adopting it since the early 1980s.
Such examples underscore paradoxes and contradictions behind assumptions of
developmental convergence across different states in the contemporary global order.
Avoiding such assumptions entails avoiding conflation of educated guesses about the
future direction of social change with sociological hypotheses per se. Two theoretical
moves guard against such conflation. The first involves rethinking what a sociological
paradigm might look like given recognition of the historical irreducibility of social
development. The second involves some rethinking of the most general concepts
used in sociology, together with their articulation in models of social reproduction,
incremental change, and institutional collapse on the level of states.
In the first subsection below, I develop alternatives to action/structure binaries
through refinement and synthesis of the concepts of institutions, fields, habitus, legit-
imacy, and reflexive action. I then propose a new concept of institutional paradigms
analytically distinct from institutional orders, differentiating embodied from
relational aspects of institutions and underscoring the misleading nature of in-
dividualistic assumptions of [American] culture [that] lead us to believe . . . we can
live as we choose, using the big institutions . . . for our own ends, without being fun-
damentally influenced by them (Bellah et al. 1992:19). Those aspects of institutions
embodied as institutional paradigms manifest as dispositions that become routine
taken for grantedby agents in their daily lives as they get by and get along in
social interactions. Institutional paradigms develop as regions of a broader habitus,
Pierre Bourdieus concept for the array of dispositions that individuals embody and
display in everyday practices (Bourdieu 1984:16975). Institutional paradigms are
key to explaining how institutional ordersthe relational aspects of institutions
stabilize. Crucially, habitus and its core institutional paradigms highlight the distinc-
tion between a broader agency and instances of reflexive action involving conscious
deliberation and choice.
I next show how this conceptual array enables a robust and empirically useful
specification of networks and how they mediate between individual agency, patterns
of social order, and dynamics of social change. From there, I move to topics of insti-
tutional change and disintegration, as well as noninstitutional networking common
in diverse social situations from social movements to criminal activity. These argu-
ments culminate in a warrant for the project of neoclassical sociology (Eyal et al.
1998) with its recognition of the contingency of global order and the multiplicity of
regional variants of capitalisms, socialisms, democracies, authoritarianisms,
and the like. In a sentence, neoclassical sociology abandons the assumption of neces-
sary developmental convergence at a global scale. If such a convergence happens at
some point in the future, it will be the consequence of complex strings of historically
unique contingencies.
INSTITUTIONS, FIELDS, AND AGENCY
An institution can initially be conceptualized as an obligatory form of getting by
and getting along in social routines, a pattern of expected action of individuals
or groups enforced by social sanctions, both positive and negative (Bellah et al.
1992:10). Institutions may be either customary or formal. In a customary institution,
no written rules steer people toward expected ways of behaving, yet rituals may serve
as equivalents to formal sanctions. Individuals in such customary situations develop
an intuitive sensea feel for the gameof how to behave in situations. In peasant
villages prior to literacy, for example, failure to show proper respect to a village elder
328 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
may have resulted in a peasants exclusion from public festivities, and was enforced
in a ritual manner by collective shunning and spontaneous eviction of the offender
from festivities by fellow villagers. Some customary institutions may have entailed
death, liminal conditions such as temporary banishment,
1
or other harsh sanctions,
so customary here does not serve as a synonym for informal.
Formal institutions, on the other hand, presuppose some degree of literacy for they
entail the codification of expected conventions of behaviorstabilizing what sociol-
ogists often call roles and positionsin laws or corporate handbooks given
to employees. For instance, wageworkers who violate such codes may be fired, a
consequence that strips workers of the benefits of inclusion. Since workers remain
dependent on wages for livelihood, such a sanction serves as a powerful incentive to
conform to managerial rules. All formal organizations involve institutional steering
by means of rules and codes, and this codification in turn entails bureaucratization,
a relatively late historical development (Weber 1978:956). Indeed, bureaucratization
builds on a web of formal laws associated with the rise of civil societies in the early
modern West that have since spread around the globe, albeit unevenly and often
coexisting with other, sometimes antithetical tendencies such as political authoritar-
ianism.
Institutions stabilize fields, social spaces that Pierre Bourdieu described as arena[s]
in which people play a game which has certain rules (Bourdieu 1991b:215). Game
as a metaphor here should be taken in contextafter all, institutional patterns
in fields involve aspects beyond strategic considerations such as normative beliefs,
ethical expectations, and the like. Regardless, institutions form the core of such fields
by giving them order and meaning for agents (Bourdieu 1981; Fuchs 2001b:28492),
steering adaptation to power relations within them. Such adaptation shows that
power entails more than top-down authority, but also what Michel Foucault called
the micro-physics of power (Foucault 1978), a bottom-up process in which the
capillaries and synapses of power connect with the central circulatory and nervous
system of the state (Gorski 2003:2324).
Institutions are key to discerning how everyday practicesthe capillaries and
synapses of powerlink with social authority. Customary institutions tend toward
what Durkheim (1964) called segmental patterns, insofar as they may segment off
across regions even where they share common origins and help bring about similar
social orders. But formal institutions, rooted in the innovation of bureaucracy and
the generalization of literacy across populations,
2
enabled both the development of
many modern legal practices, as well as new types of organization, specifically formal
organizations. Among the latter, we see a diverse range of distinctively modern forms,
from nation-states to political parties to unions to corporations to nongovernmental
associations.
The differentiation of organizational forms co-evolved with the differentiation of
fields, and when combined in the early modern West with legal limitations on the
state to interfere with some practices in these fields, gave rise to the concept of
civil society as a means of tracing such differentiation in terms of legal regulations
restraining the exercise of political authority. Crucially, such legal limitations must
be effective in practice to some degree for the concept of civil society to have much
1
In oral societies, liminal states between inclusion and exclusion often figured as central markers of
social life: Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to
darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon (Turner 1969:95).
2
For thousands of years, literacy remained confined to narrow elites in tributary states, a condition
Jack Goody and Ian Watt termed oligoliteracy (Goody and Watt 1968:36).
THE MISSING KEY 329
analytical use. The Soviet Constitution of 1936the so-called Stalin Constitution
granted extensive rights in theory, rights that had no practical bearing in Soviet life,
rendering application of the term civil society to the Soviet Union highly misleading
(Garcelon 1997). Moreover, no single pattern of civil society has emerged in moder-
nity; rather, a variety of civil societies described in terms of the legal, political, and
social practices that augment co-evolutionary patterns of institutional differentiation
of fields and formal organizations.
3
Diverse formal organizations in turn enable geographically extensive networks,
many of whose members never know each other personally but remain loosely
connected through extensive chains, such as corporate networks. Through such
networks . . . small-scale interaction becomes translated into large-scale patterns,
and . . . these, in turn, feed back into small groups (Granovetter 1973:1360).
Of course, institutional obligations do not guarantee compliance between practices
and institutions, so degrees of conformity to obligations must be assessed probabilis-
tically in particular instances. This converges with the wide use of statistical analysis
as a primary source of evidence in contemporary sociology, as during the last cen-
tury the study of probabilities more and more displaced attempts to generalize the
concept of scientific law from the physical into the social sciences.
4
Rather than
invariant properties mapped as algorithms across different societies, sociology deals
with social realities through specific cases, comparative-historical models, and prob-
abilistic assessments (Steinmetz 2004:394). The probabilistic character of institutions
points to their historical irreducibility, as the concept of institution tells us little
concerning the relative degree of institutional observance in particular settings.
Conceiving institutions as probabilistic social phenomena differentiates them from
invariant regularities. Here, objects of algorithmic analysis give way to the modeling
of contingent institutions and networks. To be sure, distinctions between algorithmic
regularities across cases and modeling of particular cases occur across the sciences.
When scientists encounter historical irreducibility in the physical world, for example,
they switch from explaining phenomena in terms of algorithmic regularities and
instead use such algorithms to map the boundary conditions of chaotic phenomena.
5
Institutional disintegration on the scale of a state itself epitomizes chaos in the
technical sense, that is, the historical contingency of the processes it unleashes.
For instance, once the probability of observance of ostensibly obligatory ways of
getting by and getting along in a given society declines past a certain point
which varies across casesinstitutions may undergo sudden bouts of rapid change
or even disintegrate outright, in the process destroying the coherence of previ-
ously stable fields. Relatively long periods of institutional equilibrium are thus
3
This is only the briefest of treatments of the concept of civil society, which has a rich pedigree in
both Western and, more recently, global history. See the collection Civil Society and the State (Keane
1988), and Jeffrey Alexanders recent The Civil Sphere to get a sense of this. Alexander argues that a
civil sphere, that is, a civil society, ensures that conflicts are more than simple battles whose outcome
depends only on instrumental power (Alexander 2006:266). Detailing how Alexanders approachnot to
mention more than two previous centuries of writings on civil societyboth converges and diverges from
neoclassical sociology lies beyond the scope of this article.
4
Weber emphasized the centrality of probabilistic analysis to sociology in his methodological writings,
often with the phrase objective possibility (Weber 1949:18182). Fritz Ringer points out Weber literally
refers to objective possibility in German; but probability nevertheless seems the better translation
(Ringer 1997:65).
5
In the physical sciences, chaos theory provides us with understanding that is holistic, historical, and
qualitative, eschewing deductive systems (Kellert 1993:114). This does not mean nonmathematical, as
chaos theorya relatively new brand of physicsuses among the most sophisticated mathematics in all
the empirical sciences (pp. 2328).
punctuated by relatively rapid bouts of institutional disintegration, reformation,
and generation.
6
Historical irreducibility takes on a specific sociological weight in
cases of institutional disintegration because historical modeling of such disintegra-
tion must account for meaning. Meaning figures prominently in assessing patterns
of rapid institutional change where social movements, invading military forces, or
other protoinstitutions or counterinstitutions organize preinstitutional, extrain-
stitutional, and postinstitutional networks in ways that may both exacerbate insti-
tutional collapse or in rarer cases stimulate development of alternative institutions
themselves.
All of this indicates a range of conceptual problems that have tortured sociology
since its origin. Chief among these is how to conceptualize relations between so-
ciety, on the one hand, and individual agentshuman personalitieson the other.
Alongside the failure to generalize an empirically intelligible concept of social law
congruent with the concept of law in the physical sciences, the social sciences have
been plagued by persistent conceptual dualisms between individual and society, per-
sonality and social structure, subjectivity and objectivity, and so forth. Here, Bour-
dieus distinction between relational and embodied aspects of social lifepositions
and dispositionsprovides a perceptive alternative for the embodied and the rela-
tional avoids dualisms between self and society (Bourdieu 1990a:54). This has several
benefits.
First, such a distinction allows us to conceptualize institutions as both embodied
and relational. Institutions are relational insofar as they stabilize patterns of interac-
tion over time within geographically and temporally limited fields, conceived simply
as the social spaces ordered by institutions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:105). Thus,
agents perceive social order as centered upon prestigious positions sanctified through
taboo, ritual, custom, and in more complex societies, legality, formal codes, and ide-
ologies as well. Social relations often appear hierarchically organized as status and
class in what Weber called legitimate orders (Weber 1978:3138, 94145). At the
heart of such orders lie the institutions that cohere and stabilize patterns of author-
ity within them. Relational aspects of institutions form the epicenter of patterns of
power, inequality, and social change.
At the same time, institutions are embodied insofar as sufficient convergence
among individual practices inclines agents toward reproduction of social routines
over time. Degrees of convergence in turn can sometimes be mapped probabilisti-
cally, through electoral outcomes, surveys, and the like. Such mappings show how
concatenations of individual practices generate institutions over time. [I]nstituted
historythe institutionbecomes historical action, i.e., enacted, active history, only
if it is taken in charge by agents whose own history predisposes them to do so
(Bourdieu 1981:306). Institutions combine authority as a relational pattern observ-
able over time with an embodied sense of legitimacy, what Weber called a voluntary
willingness to comply with authoritative expectations and directions (Weber 1978:37).
In this sense, the relational aspects of institutions can be conceptualized as in-
stitutional orders, while the embodied aspects of institutions can be conceptualized
6
The borrowing from Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredges (1977) neo-Darwinian theory of punc-
tuated equilibrium in patterns of biological evolution is explicit. Punctuated equilibrium emphasizes long
periods of relative equilibrium in biological evolution, punctuated by historically contingent episodes of
ecological upheaval that trigger relatively rapid clusters of extinctions, followed by relatively rapid periods
of evolutionary differentiation until the full house of the ecology again tips the balance into relative
stasis (Gould 1989:283, 1995, 1997).
THE MISSING KEY 331
as institutional paradigms.
7
Institutional paradigmsthe embodied dispositions that
form as a psychological sensibility of legitimacy incrementally shifts from conscious
cognition to habitual routine among particular networks of agentssteer various
practices that reproduce institutional orders, with incremental change, over time. By
emphasizing how institutional paradigms routinize a sense of legitimacy among par-
ticular individuals, we see how rough convergences between paradigms among groups
of such individuals establish institutional orders as the cores of fields.
Institutional paradigms should be seen as a crucial aspect of a larger bodily
agency, habitus, an agents cluster of dispositions always marked by its (social)
conditions of acquisition and realization (Bourdieu 1990a:65). Habitus designates
an agglomeration of capacities that an individual does not have to consciously think
about in order to engage in a practice, such as pressing a brake while driving a car. A
lack of conscious deliberation in performing such activities is an accomplishment of
habitusto be judged a good driver, for instance, a person must develop capacities
to spontaneously react well to ongoing events without thinking much about them.
Habitus clarifies why agency entails more than reflexive action (Bourdieu
1990c:131). Indeed, reflexive action represents a special case emerging from more
habitual practices, a conception that converges with empirical findings in recent neu-
rophysiology.
8
As an amalgam of dispositions unique to each person at a given
time and place, habitus nevertheless entails limited aspects shared among individ-
uals across different fields, namely, institutional paradigms. As convergent aspects
of otherwise distinct, embodied conglomerations of individual dispositions, such in-
stitutional paradigms generate stable patterns of practices across networks and in
various fields. This highlights networks as key causal linkages between institutional
paradigms as aspects of broader embodied dispositions, on the one hand, and power,
status, and class in various fields, on the other.
Conceptually distinguishing institutional paradigms, a broader habitus, and a sen-
sibility of legitimacy that can either be consciously adopted or serve as a preconscious
habitus (and in fact can shift and change from one to the other at different times
of an agents life) clarifies relations between agents, institutions, and as we shall
see, networks. In so doing, it avoids the chronic overburdening of the concept of
structure in contemporary sociology. Whether structure is identified as one end of a
continuum along with agency at the other end (Fuchs 2001a), with the parameters of
inequality (Blau and Duncan 1978), or with social patterns per se (Mohr and White
2008:490), the variability of its use to cover just about anything creates obstacles to
seeing how social order is embodied as institutional paradigms that steer patterns of
social stability.
The embodiment of institutional paradigms as cores of habitus in turn routinizes
legitimacy as a sensibility, showing how such a sensibility moves from conscious
adoption to preconscious disposition. All of this underscores that agency per se
refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capacity of
doing those things in the first place, refining action proper as a special case of a
broader agency presupposing reflexive monitoring (Giddens 1984:9). The distinc-
tion between agency as practical activity, on the one hand, and reflexive action as an
emergent property mediating practices through conscious deliberation, on the other,
7
This develops Nicos Mouzeliss distinction between the paradigmatic level of institutions and the
syntagmatic level of actual relationships of cooperation/conflict (1995:78) as explained below.
8
P. Read Montague and Gregory S. Berns argue identifiable neural substrates . . . may support sophis-
ticated economic evaluations of diverse stimuli, in other words, economic evaluations are often tied to
nonconscious neural patterns (Montague and Berns 2002:281).
separate[s] out what an agent does from what is intended or the intentional as-
pects of what is done (Giddens 1984:10).
9
This clarifies relations between broader
practices of agency generated through habitus, and more restricted instances of re-
flexive action that constitute a smallthough often causally significantfraction of
agents practices (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:51338).
Conceiving agency in this way facilitates rethinking Webers four ideal types
of action: instrumentally rational, value-rational, affective, and traditional action
(Weber 1978:2426). The most problematic of these is traditional action that
Weber called borderline between action proper and behavior, collapsing habit, and
routine into complex variants of reflexive fidelity to, and development of, cultural
traditions. First, in light of distinguishing reflexive action as an emergent property
of agency, the habitual aspects of traditional action can be more clearly speci-
fied as habitual practices not entailing reflexive agencyat least after learning such
practicesthat generate routines through habitus, a process that begins in early child-
hood. Habitus in turn enables a potentially widening scope of reflexive action among
maturing individuals. Webers three remaining ideal types of action can then be seen
as denoting regions along a broad continuum of patterns of reflective action ranging
from instrumentally rational to value-rational to affective actions. The complex vari-
ants of reflexive fidelity to, and development of, traditions that Weber collapsed into
habit and routine thus appear among the diverse variety of value-rational actions
proper.
10
Key here is recognition that embodiment of habitus results from protracted pro-
cesses of socialization during which simplified stories presented to children of
the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, and so on generate institutional
paradigms that change incrementally over time as the capacity of deliberative action
develops over childhood and adolescence. Weber nowhere dealt with socialization and
in fact presumed his interpretive sociology always in relation to adults, a significant
shortcoming.
Routinized legitimacylegitimacy fossilized in institutional paradigms as aspects
of a larger habitusin turn helps reproduce patterns of domination in social relations
among large enough numbers of individuals sufficient to render opposition risky to
some degree by those who do not embody such legitimacy (Weber 1978:946). We
can distinguish a solidaristic variant of legitimacy derived from an agent reflexively
adopting the norms of legitimacy for his or her own sakeas exemplified in maxims
such as the duty of citizens is to support their country, moral people dont break
laws, etc.from expedient variants of legitimacy that agents develop to get by and
get along in the absence of strong convictions of the rightness or justness of
said institutional order.
11
9
Emergent properties conceptualize relations between elements that cannot be explained by the prop-
erties of the elements themselves. Thus, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and
the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as
any other (Anderson 1972:393).
10
The above develops comments made on an earlier draft of this article by Robert N. Bellah regarding
the problematic aspects of Webers concept of traditional action.
11
Weber distinguished these types in terms of pure and expedient variants of legitimacy (Weber
1978:3133). By replacing the term pure with solidaristic, we can differentiate more precisely between
convergence around a social core of beliefs among some agents, and expedient compliance among others,
in the process outlining a key aspect of how social hierarchies form. The term solidaristic is adapted
from Durkheim, who conceptualized solidarity as a moral disposition: The functions of assistance are
such that . . . they demand feelings of solidarity . . . a certain intellectual and moral homogeneity such as
the same occupation produces (Durkheim 1964:26).
THE MISSING KEY 333
an institutional field
legitimacy
(as sensibility) (as social relation)
legitimate authority
institutional paradigms institutional orders
norms embodied by patterns of
individuals as aspects obligation stable
of a larger habitus in fields over time
institutionally
enmeshed networks
Figure 1. Mapping embodied and relational aspects of institutions in fields.
Solidaristic legitimacy renders durable the social cores of institutional orders, while
expedient legitimacy reinforces strategic adjustment to institutional orders in navi-
gating relations of power, status, and class in various fields. Reproduction of both
solidaristic and expedient legitimacy fosters routinizationhabitualizationof le-
gitimacy as an embodied institutional paradigm among agents. Conformity to rou-
tines stabilizes this virtuous circle, rendering institutions natural to many agents.
Formal legality in contemporary capitalist democracies, for instance, facilitates com-
mercial activity by routinizing respect for laws governing property and contractual
obligations. In this way, institutional paradigms serve both as primary generators
of institutional orders, and causal influences shaping institutionally bound networks
that form, change, and disintegrate within and across various fields. All of this can
be mapped, starting with the case of stable institutional fields as in Figure 1.
Figure 1 clarifies how overburdening the concept of structureusing a single
concept to describe institutional order, institutional paradigms, fields, habitus, le-
gitimacy, reflexive action, and networksobscures how institutional paradigms are
embodied as part of a larger suite of dispositionshabitusroutinizing a sense of
legitimacy and stabilizing institutional orders and institutionally embedded networks.
This closely relates to actor/structure binaries, for if institutional paradigms are em-
bodied in agency, conceiving structures as external to such agency is a conceptual
error generating additional errors. Certainly, Bourdieu had a chronic tendency to
overuse the term structure, but mitigated this by describing social phenomena with
more precise concepts such as habitus.
Of course, variation in senses of legitimacy among agents presents difficulties in
empirically mapping degrees of conformity to institutional authority among pop-
ulations, whether through surveys, various administrative records, or other types
of evidence. Surveys, for instance, present methodical difficulties pertaining to the
framing of questions, the representativeness of the survey sample, and, in some
cases, the degree to which respondents answer sincerely.
12
Moreover, such surveys
12
A 75 percent disparity between men and women aged 1859 in reporting number of heterosexual
acts in the five years prior to the question marred the results of a series of surveys on sexual behavior
designed as the most rigorous taken on the subject prior to 1994. In presenting this discrepancy in the
survey data, the researchers list seven different possibilities, most highly unlikely, except for the sixth:
Either men may exaggerate, or women underestimate (Laumann et al. 1994:185).
IO
t0
IO
t1
IO
t2
IO
t3
IO
t4
IP
t0
IP
t1
IP
t2
IP
t3
IP
t4
IO = institutional order
IP = institutional paradigms, aspects of a larger habitus
t = particular times
Figure 2. The trajectory adjustment model of institutional reproduction and incre-
mental social change in a stable social field. Adapted from Eyal et al. (1998:45).
are impossible for historical cases, as well as difficult to impossible in situations
such as state collapse, authoritarian regimes, and regions such as contemporary
Afghanistan.
Degrees of social reproduction and incremental social change across a variety of
fields can be assessed in terms of consonance and dissonance between habitus and
field. Consonance between habitus and field signals relative institutional stability,
mapped as a pattern of trajectory adjustment in Figure 2 as first proposed by Gil
Eyal, Iv an Szel enyi, and Eleanor Townsley (Eyal et al. 1998:45).
Note that Figure 2 represents institutions as a whole, that is, their embodied and
relational aspects. The diagonal up from institutional paradigms at time x to insti-
tutional order at time y captures the generative role of such paradigms in stabilizing
relative social stability over time. Habitual expectation of a future institutional order
at time y by a person at preceding time x entails no teleology, as the expectation
may not be realized.
Inter alia, the above arguments enable refinement of the concept of economic
interest. Weber distinguished cases of pure self-interesteconomic interest in a
narrow sensewhich did not entail any sense of legitimacy (Weber 1978:2931). But
self-interested practices frequently occur in the context of specific fields. Markets
presuppose institutional recognition of a means of exchange, some rules regarding
property, and the like, though the causality of actual transactions cannot be reduced
to such initial conditions. It would thus be more precise to track a continuum
of economic interestspursued by individuals, groups of organized individuals, or
aggregates of these such as classesthat generate aggregate effects irreducible to
institutional routines. With this model, economic innovations and conflicts can be
accounted for as emergent properties of stable institutional orders that sometimes
lead to institutional change or in rarer cases institutional disintegration.
The irreducibility of economic activity to stable institutions underscores an irony
of classical social science. For generalization of utilitarian calculations in classical
economics turned social theory on its head by assuming the special case of reflexive
action rooted in economic interests as a sufficient model of agency. Such reflexive
action, of course, presupposed a historically specific institutional background in
regions of the early modern West. Though Adam Smith recognized this background
as forming the moral presuppositions of market economies (Smith [1797] 2002),
most of economics has since neglected his insight. Instead, sociology and political
science developed it by situating economic interests in relation to historical patterns
of institutional development (Janos 1986:730).
The continuum running from reflex behavior to habitus to reflexive action
including rational action in the sense of conscious deliberation of alternativesin
turn allows us to situate more precisely reflexive action as an emergent property of
THE MISSING KEY 335
agency per se (Elder-Vass 2007:341). Given that institutional paradigms are embod-
ied as aspects of habitus, to presume institutions as external to agency is an error.
Overcoming this error facilitates a more precise concept of networks.
NETWORKS
What, then, is a social network? Initially, I define a network as some array of
ties between individuals linked bybut not always reducible tostrategic agency
over time.
13
By this definition, many interactionsfrom incidental contacts between
individuals in crowds, on the one hand, to people passively watching a televised
speech by a politician, on the otherdo not count as examples of network relations.
Network linkages can be further differentiated in terms of hierarchies between net-
work cores, their extended connections, and outliers or more marginal individuals
in terms of power dynamics within networks. Moreover, the cores of some networks
are deeply institutionalized, such as networks of employees in public corporations, or
in authoritarian political parties such as the former Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. Networks may be hierarchal as well as institutionalized.
On the opposite end of the continuum, we find highly egalitarian networks, from
such trivial examples as networks of neighbors informally organizing reciprocal baby-
sitting patterns, to relatively egalitarian networks among, for instance, some Native
Americans surviving in marginalized positions on reservations, networks that per-
sist as highly modified aspects of earlier hunter-gatherer patterns in a surrounding
industrial environment. All of this emphasizes the contingent nature of relations be-
tween institutions and networks, with some networks co-evolutionary aspects of the
same process that generates a modern, formal group of institutionsfrom corpora-
tions to political parties to representative democracy as a state form in the current
United Stateswhile other networks develop in more peripheral relation to institu-
tions proper. Such networks are thus the key linkage between embodied institutional
paradigms and patterns of institutional order across various fields.
Take the example of Al Qaeda as a terrorist network forming out of extremist
Islamic movements in parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. Al Qaeda
exemplifies apparent paradoxes when it comes to usage of the network concept:
from the perspective of the U.S. government today, Al Qaeda is an anti-institutional
network, and yet internally Al Qaeda benefits from institutional support from some
puritanical mosques of Sunni Islam. The paradox, though, is only apparent, as Al
Qaeda-aligned networksinstitutionalized to various degrees internally and bene-
fiting from support from some religious institutionsare in strong conflict with
hegemonic global networks and institutions, including other religious institutions,
aligned with U.S. foreign policies.
Other examples, such as the emergence of pro-democracy networks into a broader
social movement during the last years of the Soviet Union, underscore how institu-
tional paradigms may aid network innovationpeople can become reflective about
that which they may have hitherto taken for granted. In late-communist Russia,
13
This formalizes a definition often implicitly worked with but rarely explicitly defined, as in DiMaggio
(1986). See, especially, Figure 2 on p. 340, where DiMaggio maps a hypothetical interorganizational
network in terms of arrows between members of different organizational cliques. Such common
working definitions are compatible with the formalization introduced here. An influential early article
emphasizing the need to conceptualize relations between networks and institutions (Mitchell 1973) uses a
generic conception of networks as linkages between individuals (1973:22, 3233), though at one point
mentions a network as an action set (1973:31) without clarifying what this entails.
networks of agents holding institutionally sanctioned positionssuch as profession-
als in academic bodiescould simultaneously organize informal networks against
the very authorities who controlled the organizations of which they remained nomi-
nally a part (Garcelon 2005). Many other examples of people informally networking
in ways risky for their positions in established institutional networks can be found:
from networks fusing into the civil rights movement in the American deep south in
the late 1950s, to pro-democracy networks among intellectuals in todays Iran where
such intellectuals have become targets of repression since the disputed presidential
election in June 2009.
Such considerations lead to adjusting common sociological concepts of networks.
Some wish to distinguish networks from groups and formal organizations (Fuchs
2001b:191292). While restricting the concept of group to agents who know one
another makes analytic sense, such a definition simply renders strategically oriented
groups as one pole along a continuum of networks, namely, the pole of discrete
networks. On the other hand, Fuchs correctly distinguishes formal organizations
from networks, as such organizations entail more than networks per se, such as
legal recognition, organizational property, and the like. But networks nevertheless
remain central to organizations, as networked agents create, reform, and disband such
organizations and their internal hierarchies, making clear that networks are vectors
through which agency drives organizational behavior. That formal organizations are
more than networks shows the need to differentiate what too often are simply called
structures.
More problematic is Fuchss and others analysis of networks in ways that method-
ologically exclude the potential causal significance of reflexive action for their devel-
opment. This reifies empirical study of networks by treating agents linked through
them as nodes without recognizing that such nodes always have agentic potentials to
engage in reflexive action of possible causal significance. Consider Fuchss argument
that a person might be a node in a network, but what the network does cannot
be explained as the result of individual actions and intentions (Fuchs 2001a:29
30). This raises two problems. First, a network per se does not do anything, only
its nodesits networked agentsdo things. Second, this comes close to eliding the
possible causal significance of human deliberation, such as the causal significance of
decisions made by the cell of hijackers linked through the Al Qaeda network who
carried out the September 11 attacks.
The tendency to reify networks and their nodes as if they were causally indepen-
dent of agents reflexive action is an influential tendency in American sociological
conceptions of networks. But this is more a philosophical than a sociological posi-
tion justified in terms of empirical evidence, as Fuchs demonstrates in the following
statement.
We might summarize sociologys approach to person, personhood, and agency
in three serious, all-too-serious, methodological rules of thumb. First, nothing
is ever anyones fault in particular. Second, no one can do all that much about
anything. And third, fewer people actually care about anything you say or do
than your vanity is willing to consider. (Fuchs 2001a:30)
So by inference, dictators are not really dictators as their reflexive action has no
causal effects, etc. Fuchss subsequent description of his sociological position as anti-
humanism (Fuchs 2001b:63) further conflates a methodological with a philosophical
position that a priori assumes agency as always an effect, not a cause.
THE MISSING KEY 337
Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin expand this criticism of reification in net-
work theory by delineating three common methodological approaches to networks:
structural determinism, structural instrumentalism, and structural constructionism
(1994:142436). As Emirbayer and Goodwin stress, two of these three method-
ological strategies either conceptualize segments of networks frozen analytically
at a given time (structural determinism), or assume ahistorical rationalthat is,
economicinterests linking such moments at all times (structural instrumentalism),
thus failing to provide a coherent model for how networks change over time. The
third strategythe structural constructionism of Doug McAdams work on the civil
rights movementpartially avoids this by questioning rational-action assumptions,
though without developing a more systematic account of agency. As Emirbayer and
Ann Mische argue (1998:99, 1012), developing a relational pragmatics of agency
and deliberationreflexive actionis central to social theory.
Problems of ahistoricity and absence of accounts of agency common in network
theory are tightly coupled to exactly what structure is supposed to mean.
14
For
instance, Centola and Macy argue that the structural strength of a tie refers to the
ability of the tie to facilitate diffusion, cohesion, and integration of a social network
by linking otherwise distant nodes (2007:70304). Here, structural refers to the
capacities of institutions and networks, a contingent, historically irreducible question
that must account empirically to what degree a network forms within or outside
of institutional orders. And yet they obscure this by describing social normsthat
is, central aspects of institutional paradigmsas social contagions, right alongside
technological innovations and (inherently noninstitutional) social movements. From
the emergence of social norms . . . to the adoption of technological innovations . . . to
the growth of social movements . . . social networks are the pathways along which
these social contagions propagate (Centola and Macy 2007:702).
Reflecting on this in light of what has been stated above, however, shows that
norms embodied as institutional paradigms by agents enable much of social net-
working in the first place, and thus networks are not necessarily prior to institutions.
Rather, agents bring to preinstitutional networks practical capacities enabled by em-
bodied institutional paradigms formed within different institutional orders, orders
distinct from preinstitutional networks. Specifically, such agents may improvise us-
ing such institutional paradigms as practical models for developing an initial sense
of protolegitimacy for potential supporters in expanding preinstitutional networks,
consolidating organizations, and in some cases, changing institutional orders as such.
It remains an empirical question whether networks can in fact also spread such
institutional norms through social contacts, as they sometimes do, thus serving as
possible vectors for diffusing institutions from core to more peripheral agents who
come under their influence and become new nodes in the network. This observation
converges with the fact that preinstitutional, noninstitutional, and postinstitutional
networks can play key causal roles in the generation, change, and collapse of insti-
tutions, as discussed above. But there can be no a priori relation between particular
concatenations of institutional paradigms, institutional orders, and networks, on the
one hand, and the question of whether a particular institution temporally preceded,
co-evolved with, or came about after the development of a particular network, on
14
The chemist James Lovelock and the microbiologist Lynn Margulis used the term tightly coupled to
map systemic relations between organisms and their environments on the surface of the Earth as a whole:
The evolution of organisms and their material environment proceeds as a single tight-coupled process
from which self-regulation of the environment at a habitable state, appears as an emergent phenomenon
(Lovelock 2001:1).
the other. This is, and must remain, an empirical question whose answer remains
contingent on evidence.
Some network theorists have already shifted from an overburdened concept of
structure to an explicit concept of institutions. Peng, for instance, states how his
research draws insights from two theoretical traditions: one is new institutional-
ism that emphasizes the role of institutions, both formal and informal, in economic
growth; the other is social network analysis, which highlights the role of interper-
sonal relations in producing and enforcing informal norms (Peng 2004:1045). He
then argues that analysis of the developmental history of institutions and informal
networks in the situations he examines turns on:
the relative strength of the normative capacity of the formal organizations (the
state apparatus) vis-` a-vis the informal social networks. When formal institutions
are vague and ineffective, informal rules do not supplement but substitute for
formal rules, and the normative capacity of social relations not only subsumes
the costs of formal sanctioning but takes its place . . . If the normative capacity
of the social networks is strong, then spontaneous social order may emerge to
reduce uncertainty. (Peng 2004:1070)
We can now circle back to our reconstructed concept of institutions to show
why such order is not spontaneous, but the result of embodiment of customary
institutional paradigms among unofficial networks. Note also that Peng refers to
informal institutions whenas stressed abovethese are customary, congealing in
this case outside of official Chinese law and politics but still rendering obligations
on those who rely on them.
A final difficulty in network theory links to a persistently reified use of the micro-
macro distinction. For instance, Mohr and White (2008:495) recognize the centrality
of the concept of institution to network theory, but struggle to trace how this can be
used in empirical analysis after positing institutions as above the analytical level of
conventions and social rules. This fragments aspects constitutive of institutions into
distinct analytical levels and places institutions above the level of agency. Mouzelis
is critical of such assumptions, assumptions that actors and face-to-face interac-
tions belong to the micro, and institutional structures to the macro level (Mouzelis
1995:20). Such a bifurcation of agency and institutions obscures how agents con-
tribute to the reproduction, change, dissolution, and generation of institutional orders
through embodied institutional paradigms. I do not reject the use of analytical levels
here, just the assignment of agency to a micro level and structure to a macro level.
The difficulty disappears once one recognizes how habitus carries institutional
paradigms, as the followings examples show. Take the Mormon sect in Texas recently
broken up by Texas state agents. Within a small, discrete network of sect members
all of whom knew each other on a face-to-face basissect routines were powerfully
institutionalized in a customary fashion overseen by sect leaders (all of whom were
male polygamists) on the basis of their interpretation of the Book of Mormon.
15
Where is the macro level here? Everything was micro in the sense that all of
the sect knew and interacted with each other on a daily basis within a compound
15
See 52 Girls Are Taken from Polygamist Sects Ranch in Texas, The New York Times, April
5 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/us/05jeffs.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, retrieved July 8, 2008;
and Texas Wrong to Take Fundamentalist Mormon Sect Kids, The Australian, May 31 2008,
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23785647-26397,00.html, retrieved July 8, 2008.
THE MISSING KEY 339
of a few buildings, yet it would be absurd to claim that the sect had no internal
institutions.
Now reverse the situation by taking several discrete meetings between American
President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair in 2002 that secured Bushs launch-
ing of the second Iraq war in March 2003. These face-to-face meetings took place at
a macro level, if what you mean is the level of structures such as the state. More-
over, understanding how the U.S. military and some of its allies entered the war at
all entails unraveling the activities of a small network of persons at the most senior
level of the Bush White House throughout 2002 and early 2003. Such a relatively
micro network at the very top of the macro state worked to discredit, marginalize,
or silence some of the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies, as documented at length
by Johnson (2004:21753). Micro-macro problems of this variety are an artifact of
a mistaken conceptualization.
16
Mouzelis suggests an alternative. By reframing both institutions and networks as
entailing embodied aspects, micro, meso, and macro distinctions become strictly spa-
tial. Some network analysts have already begun such a spatial redefinition. Take
Hedstr om, Sandell, and Stern, who argue that mesolevel network[s] had a consid-
erable influence on both the pattern and the speed at which the Social Democratic
Party diffused through Sweden (Hedstr om et al. 2000:169).
In summary, networks can be mapped in three principal ways. First, we can track
their spatial extensiveness. Again, a more discrete network remains a strategically
related group, that is, remains localized in the sense of most people in it know-
ing one another. But many networks in more complex societiesand even across
several such societies, such as in transnational corporations or transnational terror-
ist networksextend diversely in terms of both geography and social ties between
people only connected indirectly through the chain.
Second, networks can be differentiated in terms of both degrees of institutional
embeddedness and internal institutionalization. Such factors tie closely to how net-
works develop polyglots of relative hierarchy and equality that Weber distinguished
in terms of closed and open social relations (Weber 1978:4346). The degree to
which networks are embedded in institutions remains empirically contingent, with
some networks forming largely outside institutional channels, such as the networking
patterns of social movements. Sometimes, of course, such movements trigger changes
in institutions they challenge, pointing to the need to avoid reifying the boundary
between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized politics (McAdam et al. 2001:6).
Thus, even noninstitutional networks remain tightly coupled to institutions and va-
rieties of legitimacy within them.
Finally, networks remain tightly coupled with status and class. If status maps pat-
terns of hierarchy embedded in cultural sensibilities of honor and the like, class maps
commonalities of market situations. Thus, class differentiated from status as market
relations spread in the modern period, though class relations appeared occasionally
and secondarily in some premodern societies, often around trading towns.
17
And, the
differentiation of networks in terms of status and class in distinct historical periods
and regions intertwines with the history of institutions and varieties of assets that
developed with such institutions and enabled various patterns of networking.
16
For elaborations of this argument, see Mouzelis (1995:1527, 12324) and Garcelon (2006:26567).
17
This remains a Weberian conception of status and class (Weber 1978:30207). For a more Marxian
alternative, see Eyal et al. (1998:6670).
= network node, i.e., individual agent
= network linkage between individuals
= incidental linkage across networks
Figure 3. Initial mapping of a network.
Figure 3 summarizes the concept of network introduced here. This converges with
detailed maps of particular networks available in sociological literature.
18
MAPPING DISJUNCTIVE SOCIAL RELATIONS: OF FIELDS,
FIGURATIONS, AND EXPLANATORY NARRATIVES
How can the concepts and models developed so far be expanded to account for
bouts of social change entailing degrees of institutional disintegration, as well as the
generation of alternative institutions from social movements, military occupations,
coup d etats, and the like? The protracted conflict since 2001 between representa-
tive democracies and Sunni Islamic-fundamentalist movements either sympathizing
with, or actually carrying out, terrorist tactics, illustrates the prominence of dis-
junctive social relations across human societies. For though this conflict involves
institutionsfrom governments in Western nation-states to terrorist networks linked
to some Sunni mosques in different regions of the worldsuch institutions have not
only failed to constrain the many complex networks involved in the conflict as a
whole, but have often fed their antagonism. Mass media sometimes exacerbate this.
Because acts of violence and terrorism grab the headlines, we seem to know a lot
more about Islamic advocates of a clash, the militant jihadists, than about those
who are working toward a peaceful revolution and civilizational dialogue (Esposito
2002:133). Such media tendencies contribute, in turn, to intensifying antagonisms
between representative democracies, on the one hand, and regional populations of
Sunnis in the Islamic world more or less susceptible to the influence of Sunni Islamist
terrorist networks, on the other.
Norbert Elias stressed the importance of recognizing patterns of interdependent
conflict between distinct societies. Characterized by a lack of what Elias called in-
tegration, shared antagonism for others or their hatred and enmity towards each
other mark such relations (Elias 1978:175). However, Eliass insight remains un-
derappreciated in part due to his imprecise use of the term structure, such as his
description of relations between antagonists lacking overarching patterns of insti-
tutional mediation simply as structures formed between antagonistically related
substructures, that is, societies (Elias 1978:24).
By introducing a more differentiated range of concepts instead of asking struc-
ture to describe most everything, we can clarify causal factors in conflicts. For
instance, once we have specified institutional orders as the cores of fields, we
18
See, for instance, Armando Razos finely detailed maps of both Overlapping Protection of Public
Officials (Fig. 6.4) and Pimentel y Fagoagas Political Connections (Fig. 6.6) in the study of networks
and political power in Porfirio Dazs prerevolutionary Mexico (Razo 2008:146, 148).
THE MISSING KEY 341
aggregate effects ------------------------------ aggregate effects
emergent
properties
disjunctive fields
aggregate effects ------------------------------ aggregate effects
institutional fields
Figure 4. The emergent properties of disjunctive fields and aggregate effects.
can differentiate disjunctive fields as emergent properties of institutional fields
that serve as their initial conditions. Disjunctive fields entail relations between
mutually antagonistic institutional fieldssuch as colonial conflicts between the
Spanish conquest of the Americas and the end of the colonial era, or inter-
mittent patterns of exploration or trade that developed alongside colonial con-
flicts in this periodas well as gray areas emerging alongside institutional
fields such as social movements, criminal networks, and the like, as shown in
Figure 4.
In the case of transnational conflicts, disjunctive fields emerge as consequences of
relations between institutional fields that lack an overarching, shared institutional
framework. In this sense, a world-system formed many years prior to the creation
of global-scale institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary
Fund, and the like in the wake of World War II.
19
Yet such global-scale institu-
tions remain weaker than many states, and disjunctive global fields coexist alongside
them in historically irreducible patterns, ranging from spaces partially controlled
by criminal transnational networks such as the illicit drug trade to transnational
terrorist networks. Such coexistence is often highly complex, as the simultaneous in-
ternational and unilateralist policies of the United States in recent years exemplifies.
Moreover, analysts must simultaneously factor in both transnational institutional
isomorphismsas global-scale corporate organization exemplifies (DiMaggio and
Powell 1991)as well as patterns of regional institutional collapse, as in parts of the
contemporary Middle East, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Distinguishing the international from the transnational clarifies how disjunctive
relations may coexist and interpenetrate institutional orders. The absence of in-
stitutional order in disjunctive fields themselves deserves particular attention. On a
transnational level, for instance, we can map transnational demonstration effects
the selective mimicking of things from technologies to institutional design in law
operating in both institutionally and disjunctively isomorphic patterns.
20
Within
19
Caution is used here with the concept of world-system introduced by Wallerstein (1976). So long as
system simply designates causal interrelations, this term remains compatible with the argument developed
here. But locating causal priority at the world-system as a whole is problematic from a perspective that
both recognizes a multiplicity of regional capitalisms, as well as insists on the historical contingency
of global-scale development as a whole. Moreover, Wallersteins perspective excludes a range of potential
causal factors such as meanings.
20
The concept of transnational demonstration effect slightly modifies Bendix (1984) and Janos (1986:84
95) by substituting transnational for international in order to capture such effects as emergent properties
institutions, such effects at times spur change among international organizations
such as the United Nations, as well as patterns of institutional isomorphism within
groups of regional states, within a state itself, and in more geographically restricted,
substate regions. But other transnational demonstration effects operate across situ-
ations of antipathy with little or no overall institutional regulation, such as Cold
War-era competition between the Western and Soviet blocs leading to isomorphic
patterns of weapons design.
Here, the role of transnational networks must figure in analyses of how such
demonstration effects actually operate across disjunctive fields. Of course, there are
open transnational networks linking phenomena as diverse as corporations, social
movements, and nongovernmental organizations across national spaces, and their
role in spurring transnational isomorphism is obvious. But other types of transna-
tional networks coexisting or even quietly encouraged by more open networks can
figure prominently in such causal dynamics, such as covert transnational networks
connected in surreptitious ways to states, corporations, and the like. Other examples
such as organized crime and terrorist cells operate almost exclusively from highly
opaque transnational networks. All of these came together in the case of the North
Korean regimes opportunistic adaptation of military technologies across disjunctive
fields that led to detonation of a nuclear weapon based on technologies gleaned
indirectly from Western powers through the mediation of the Khan network in Pak-
istan (Corera 2006:86102). Here, we see linkages between transnational networks
operating with connections to state intelligence services, corporations, and organized
crime, on the one hand, and transnational demonstration effects, on the other.
Elias additionally developed the concept of figuration to introduce the perspective
of agents to such fields: for him, a structure from the vantage point of the social
sciences appeared as a figuration from the perspective of an agent living her or
his life in relation to other situated agents. What we call structure is, in fact,
nothing but the pattern or figuration of interdependent individual people who form
the group or, in a wider sense, the society. What we term structures when we
look at people as societies, are figurations when we look at them as individuals
(Elias 1998a:101). Bourdieus distinction between habitus and fieldrefined here
to encompass the duality of institutions as embodied institutional paradigms and
relational institutional ordersaccomplishes much the same thing. This leaves us free
to modify the concept of figuration to specify patterns of representation generated
by agents, everything from informal conversations to more elaborate discourses such
as texts, ideologies, and speeches.
A huge continuum of such figurations are bound by the doxa of a given culture,
Bourdieus adaptation (1991a:16370) of an ancient Greek term for current opinion
(Goody and Watt 1968:53) to map conventional frames of discourse that order
everyday speech in particular societies. Such doxa constitute figurational aspects of
a broader life world, a phenomenological concept postulated by Alfred Schutz and
developed by J urgen Habermas (1987:11952) to trace a horizon of relevance
(1987:12122) orienting everyday practices in a given social group at a given time.
Within this broader boundary of intelligibility, a doxa emerges as a more limited
conversational boundary of convention.
21
operative in both institutional and disjunctive fields. Bendix and Janos, in turn, reconstructed the economic
concept of international demonstration effect in more sociologically diverse ways.
21
An exchange with Robert N. Bellah inspired the synthesis of Bourdieu and Habermas proposed here.
THE MISSING KEY 343
From a doxa, in turn, emerge various orthodoxies and what Bourdieu in his
later writings called allodoxia (Bourdieu 1996a:7475), patterns of misrecognition
that sometimes serve as ideologies in Marx and Engelss early sense in The German
Ideology. Heterodoxies, in turn, form as either unconventional or oppositionaland
sometimes bothfigurations to orthodoxies and allodoxia.
Empirical criteria thus need to be developed on a case-by-case basis to establish
whether a figuration functions as an orthodox, allodoxic, or heterodox tendency in
a particular time and place. Not all orthodoxies are ideologies by any meanstake,
for example, instances of religious orthodoxy motivating highly risky human rights
work against certain states. We have thus developed a suite of concepts for mapping
continuums running from various orthodoxies through various allodoxia to various
heterodoxies, facilitating robust analyses of how terms like common sense function
practically.
Institutions order the diverse array of figurations outlined here both in terms
of class, status, and power, and more broadly in terms of simply enabling conven-
tional patterns of speech. Specifically, institutional paradigms enable such figurations
as the syntagmatic telling of stories that make conventional sense across time
in various fields. This clarifies the relation between paradigmatic and syntagmatic
(story telling) levels introduced by Mouzelis (1995:6980), insofar as institutional
paradigms enable the emergence of figurations coherent in a social group.
The recursive effects (Giddens 1984) of figurations as various patterns of nar-
rative help regenerate institutions on an ongoing basis. We thus refine our analytic
model of how the virtuous circle of stability in institutional orders works. Yet
such narratives also emerge from antagonistic relations and aggregate effects within
disjunctive fields. Distinguishing disjunctive from institutional fields clarifies how fig-
urations may order regional perceptions of both cooperation and antagonism within
and between various geographic regions. Understanding how such perceptions de-
velop in turn is key to reconstructing the history of various networks. Conceiving
various narrativesfrom skeins of common sense to journalistic discourse to ide-
ological pronouncements to academic writing and so onas figurations of both
institutional and disjunctive fields clarifies patterns of recognition and misrecogni-
tion across them.
22
Projects to create and stabilize international institutions since the end of World
War II, for instance, have simultaneously entailed attempts by the very agents in
dominant states engineering them to curtail their reach and steer them in ways that
maintain national hegemony within them. Tensions between figurations released by
U.N.s officials, and actual U.N. practices constrained by dominant powers such as
the United States, mark the U.N.s institutional history, a clear example of how
misrecognition unfolds in international institutions. Moreover, hysteresis effects
time lags between patterns of rapid institutional change and individual adjustment
to such change generated in part through conventions of habitusappear often in
history (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:130).
The complex intertwining of institutions, institutional fields, disjunctive fields,
agents, networks, and figurations indicates the sometimes importance of noninsti-
tutional relations in patterns of social change. Indeed, differentiation of institutional
and disjunctive fields, and discourses within and across them, creates social spaces
22
The regime of reproduction would thus be under constant threat . . . if this threat were not counter-
balanced by . . . misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the established order and its perpetuation, and
hence in the recognition granted to such an order (Bourdieu 1996b:375).
TI
t4
IO
t1
IO
t2
IO
t3
OS
t4
IO
t5
IN
t4
IP
t1
IP
t2
IP
t3
IP
t4
IP
t5
IO = institutional order
IP = institutional paradigms, aspects of a larger habitus
IN = informal networks
OS = organizational shells of formerly stable institutional organizations
TI = truncated institutional orders
t = particular times
Figure 5. Mapping processes of trajectory improvisation at the level of states.
Source: Garcelon (2005:23, 2006:263).
for noninstitutional networking over a period of time, as with social movements.
Such movements may have significant consequences for institutional stability, for the
power of nonviolent disruption comes mainly from its uncertainty as disorganizer
of institutional routines (Tarrow 1994:109). By extension, such movements generate
counterinstitutional figurations contesting authoritative figurations in official state
discourses. Figurations can thereby have powerful causal effects in processes of state
breakdown. Take the role of pro-democracy figures in the Soviet media in rapidly
undermining the authority of the briefly existing Soviet State Committee for the
State of Emergency (GKChP)the committee that tried to suppress perestroika in
August 1991by broadcasting things out of synch with the GKChP during its failed
attempt to seize power between August 18 and 20, 1991 (Bonnell and Freidin 1993).
In the modern period, we can describe state breakdown as rapid slippage of
hitherto stable institutional patterns of trajectory adjustment into patterns of trajec-
tory improvisation, in which a relative handful of political entrepreneurs (Garcelon
2006:26265) may mobilize everything from social movements to alliance with oc-
cupying military forces in attempting to generate alternatives to disintegrating insti-
tutions. In more authoritarian societies, state decline involving even partial loss of
control over the mass media aggravates the process by opening the political field to
alternative figurations. When state institutions disintegrate entirely, we see how such
political entrepreneurs may fashion what can eventually consolidate as alternative
institutions, though this may be a very protracted and traumatic process, as seen in
the cases of the Soviet collapse and the occupation of Iraq starting in 2003. Figure 5
graphs processes of trajectory improvisation in a preliminary fashion.
All of this gives us a way of historicizing the empirical study of social change
across the widest range of cases. Rather than assumptions of institutional con-
vergence around an assumed end point in the future, we now have concepts for
analyzing regional and historical variants of capitalisms, socialisms, democra-
cies, and authoritarianisms. Sociologyindeed all of the social sciences, includ-
ing economicsshould focus on developing historically irreducible causal accounts
of particular skeins of developmental history, rather than attempting to generate
algorithmic generalizations across cases.
Indeed, due to the nature of the object of knowledge in the social sciences, such
generalizations often prove impossible. The sciences in general are only beginning
to come to terms methodologically with the preponderance of historical explanation
THE MISSING KEY 345
in biology, and its growing importance in the physical sciences as well, such as in
the study of atmospheric dynamics, planetary surfaces, geological formations, ocean
currents, and so on. In the social sciences, little can be generalized in an explanatory
sense beyond boundary disciplines like neuropsychology and physical anthropology.
Rather, generalization is largely conceptual in the social sciences for all the reasons
discussed above, and recognition of this stands as a sine qua non for consolidating
theoretical coherence across sociology.
What forms, then, do viable explanations take in sociology? One of the most
important such forms develops narratives that identify causally significant junctures
in historically irreducible sequences. Andrew Abbott (1988, 1991, 1992, 2004) calls
such explanations exercises in narrative positivity. Here, the moniker explanatory
narrative is used, as it better captures what Abbott is driving at, for he means
by narrative positivity not so much a philosophical as a methodological position.
Such explanatory narratives grapple with the empirical problem of how to factor
multiple perspectives of various agents into a broader narrative sequence focused on
key causal links in the chain.
Explanatory narrative does not abandon an alternative explanatory strategy, the
variables paradigm (Abbott 1992). It simply shifts it to an available auxiliary mode
of analysis useful for isolating and clarifying key aspects of sociohistorical pro-
cesses. For instance, geology used variables analysis in formulating the historically
irreducible hypothesis that identified a meteorite as the key causal initiator of a
planet-wide sequence of events we know as the Cretaceous extinction 65 million
years ago (Alvarez 1998). Explanatory narratives are thus common across the sci-
ences, and such a strategy of causal analysis should be predominant in the social
sciences.
We thus see how distinctions between institutional paradigms, institutional orders,
institutional fields, disjunctive fields, habitus, legitimacy, reflexive action, networks,
and figurations can be used to supplant overburdened concepts of structures and con-
struct explanatory narratives of differing outcomes in differing regions at different
times without assuming cross-case algorithmic generalizations. Such explanatory nar-
ratives can use both cross-case models and variables analysisand very usefullyas
auxiliary methods so long as they avoid positing cross-case algorithmic uniformities
as empirical theories per se. The recognition of the irreducible historicity of trajecto-
ries of relative social stability and social change converges with an ongoing attempt
in recent years to initiate a paradigm shift in sociology called neoclassical sociology
by Eyal, Szel enyi, and Townsley (1998).
WHAT IS NEOCLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY?
Over the last 30 years, Karl Marxs historical materialism, Emile Durkheims struc-
tural functionalism, and Max Webers interpretive sociology have emerged as the
cornerstones of classical sociology. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber all conceived social
science as the project of the universal theory of modernity, and all referenced what
we now call classical economics in doing so. Starting in the 1930s, Talcott Parsons
attempted to unify sociology theoretically by both marginalizing historical materi-
alism and incorporating psychoanalysis, but his project evinced strong opposition
from within the discipline and collapsed in the late 1970s. With the eclipse of Par-
sonss project, sociology fell into protracted disagreement over its theoretical core.
Nonetheless, the drive to achieve a unified disciplinary matrixThomas Kuhns
modification of what he earlier called a paradigm
23
persisted, gaining momentum in
the last 15 years. Sometimes this appears as a generic project to reunify sociological
theory (Mouzelis 1995), and sometimes as the more specific project of neoclassical
sociology (Eyal et al. 1998).
Consolidating a neoclassical disciplinary matrix entails recognizing and avoiding
the conundrums that undermined the various classical projects. In particular, the col-
lapse of a universal theory of modernity into the generation of empirical hypotheses
proved the Achilles heel of the classical theorists otherwise distinct projects, bring-
ing the classical period to grief. Neoclassical sociology revives the project of unifying
theory through generalizable concepts and heuristic models, but organizes research
around the comparative study of a multiplicity of socially and geographically dis-
tinct historical outcomes within a larger pattern of interrelations currently called
globalization but stretching back as far as the Spanish conquest of the Americas
five centuries ago.
24
Crucially, the moniker globalization maps planetary-wide as-
pects of a process that remains empirically contingent. This foregrounds a crucial
implication of neoclassical theory, namely, that fragmentation of planetary relations
as extreme as a new dark ages through ecological catastrophes brought about in
part as unintended consequences of modernization such as planetary-scale climate
change, are possible outcomes of the very processes so often called modernization
themselves.
Failure to distinguish contingent and regionally unique patterns of institutions
and networks underscores how continued use of an overburdened concept of struc-
ture itself embodies what Elias called sociologys retreat into the present (Elias
1998b), the inability to see the contingency behind what may appear fleetingly
as universal, such as the contemporary admixture of representative democracy,
corporate capitalism, the welfare state, civil society, superpower foreign policies,
and the like in todays United States.
25
Worse, continued use of overburdened con-
cepts of structures as detailed above obscures contingent social processes such as
global warming that may well be undermining contemporary institutions, fields, and
networks.
To foreground the historically irreducible and regionally diverse nature of global-
ization, then, neoclassical theory distinguishes theory as concept development and
generic model formation from theory as the generation of hypotheses, and indeed
argues that generalizable theory per se leaves the formation of specific hypotheses
to empirical work on specific chains of events.
26
As development of global order
itself presents such a historical process, framing global relations requires no uni-
tary telos or projected end point in order to proceed analytically. Recognition of
the causal contingency and historical irreducibility of contemporary global relations
also differentiates neoclassical from classical social theory. Generalizing in neoclassi-
cal theory, in short, concentrates on refining the conceptual and modeling tool kit
23
Unfortunately, most readers of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions have missed what was for
me its central function and use paradigm instead in a sense close to that for which I now suggest
disciplinary matrix. I see little chance of recapturing paradigm for its original use, the only one that is
philologically at all appropriate (Kuhn 1977:307).
24
So the project of neoclassical sociology is to explain . . . diversities of capitalisms and the differences
in their origins and operations (Eyal et al. 1998:188).
25
For superpower politics and its dilemmas, see Johnson (2008); for U.S. economic decline in the
context of the global order through 2002, see Pollin (2003).
26
This converges with Mouzeliss distinction between conceptual framework and substantive theory
(1995:111).
THE MISSING KEY 347
available to empirical sociology (Swidler 1986), leaving hypothesis formation largely
to empirical work.
Neoclassical sociology thus utilizes generalizing developmental assumptions as
heuristics for framing the modern global order, heuristics that shift with the shifting
social-scientific influence of hypotheses in empirical work itself.
27
This project en-
tails a theoretical reconstruction of a variety of economisms (from various Marxian
to rational action theories), structural functionalisms, interpretive sociologies, phe-
nomenologies, ethnomethodologies, structuralisms, and poststructuralisms.
Sociologists, of course, assume human society as their object of study. And various
meanings of social life for those engaged in it stabilize sufficient aspects of society,
analytically differentiating patterns of social relations from culture as patterns of
meaning enabling such relations (Griswold 2004:1213). Here it is important to
bear in mind that institutional paradigms, institutional orders, networks, fields, and
the like entail both social relations and forms of meaning. The analytic distinction
between social relations and culture cuts across the various concepts and their inter-
relations outlined above. Meaning, in fact, always presupposes the culturally specific
background of a lifeworld and its doxa. Such a lifeworld and its doxa co-evolve with
dominant languages spoken at specific times in specific regions implicitly ordering
institutions and networks in such regions. Patterns of spoken language thereby serve
as archetypes for all other institutions that emerge, develop, change, and disintegrate
with them.
Neoclassical sociology breaks from attempts to reduce meaning to an effect of so-
cial relations prior to empirical analysis, as when Marx framed meanings as effects of
causal patterns located in the economic organization of classes.
28
Understanding cul-
ture and social relations as analytic distinctions within societies implies that meaning
may become causally significant in the developmental history of such societies.
For this reason, social theory must tightly couple patterns of meaning to patterns
of social relations over time. Various rational actor theories do this by simply stereo-
typing meaning as economic interests (Coleman 1990:3132). Such a move limits
interpretation of meaning to the observational mapping of such interests, bypassing
the difficult methodical problem of accounting for the causal significance of meaning
in its own right. Neoclassical synthesis rejects this as a viable solution, for it renders
a wide range of behavior irrational in its own terms and excludes it from study, such
as motives for suicide bombings that appear a priori irrational from the perspective
of rational actor theory and thus cannot be explained by such theory beyond psy-
chologistic assumptions of delusion or insanity. Rational actor theory thus appears
a limited variant of a more general theory applicable when evidence justifies assum-
ing economic motives as sufficient for validating a particular empirical hypothesis.
Indeed, rational actor theory is a variant of economism, and by extension a position
to be reconstructed within the broader neoclassical synthesis.
27
Failure to specify what exactly is being generalized in social theoryconcepts, models, or substantive
cross-case hypothesesis a persistent problem. For instance, Lucas (2003) frames theoretical validity in
terms of general knowledge across cases, without clarifying what type of knowledge beyond theory
per se is being generalized, concepts, models, or hypotheses.
28
Variants of Marxism have been continually vexed as to the meaning of Marxs claims that the
economic base determines the superstructure of ideology, law, culture, and so on. This fundamental
ambiguity was present in Marxs own writing showing up in tensions between his theoretical work such as
Das Kapital, and his close historical analyses of events, such as the development and aftermath of the 1848
revolution in France in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. This tension manifested continually
throughout the history of Marxism, leading Alvin Gouldner to describe two Marxisms: that of economic
determinism, and that of political analysis and strategy (Gouldner 1980). Marxs own insistence that social
theory and political action stood a priori unified (Marx [1845] 1978:14345) exemplifies this problem.
Framing meanings so they can be factored in as possible causes in the develop-
ment of events and processes over time begins with differentiation of patterns of
symbolic interests from economic interests.
29
Of course, meanings do not always
entail such interests, as individuals may risk social death by refusing the strate-
gic logic of practical circumstances, a possibility that appears a limit case from the
perspective of interests. Care should thus be taken to distinguish the limit case of
social deathmarginalization without any strategic value for the situated pursuit of
various interestsfrom perceptions of disinterestedness whose very recognition as
such entails misrecognition of its strategic value (Bourdieu 1998:8588). Semioti-
zation conceptualizes the broadest range of such meanings, including notions such
as dignity that cannot be reduced in their entirety to their strategic value per se.
30
Within this range fall more limited strategic uses of meaning, averting strategic
determinism. Whether or not the pursuit of dignity carries strategic value for peo-
ple remains an empirical question whose answer depends on study of historically
irreducible concatenations of institutions and networks.
The strategic use of meaning entails the valorization of meaning as assets, and
tracking patterns of valorization entails distinguishing types of assets. The latter take
the form of various capitalseconomic, cultural, social, and subtypes of thesein
societies where monetization has progressed sufficiently.
31
Note how this transcends
economism, where economic interests appear the alpha and omega of social analysis.
Differentiating various assetscapitals in monetized societiesallows us to identify
a range of strategic assets differentially available to particular individuals at partic-
ular times in particular places as they network in various institutional settings. We
thus fashion a sufficiently broad tool kit for analyzing how meanings entwine with
strategic practices without always being reducible to such practices.
Such a clarification of the irreducibility of social relations and meanings to one
another enables neoclassical sociology to overcome action/structure binaries by
recognizing that much of human behavior remains habitualpre- or nonconscious
in ways mapped out by the concepts of habitus and institutional paradigm. This
in turn entails recognizing that the degree to which human agency plays causally
significant roles in the development of particular structures such as institutions
and networkslet alone the degree that such causal significance is bound up with
reflective action proper and not mere habitusremains historically contingent.
Moreover, using an undifferentiated concept of structure for both institutions
and networks obscures their cognitive and psychological aspects, as if structures
somehow existed outside of agency, an incorrect assumption underscored by the
embodiment of institutional paradigms. Displacing an undifferentiated concept of
structure by the concepts of institution, institutional paradigm, institutional order,
institutional field, disjunctive field, habitus, legitimacy, reflexive action, network,
29
The distinction between economic and symbolic interests sharpens Webers distinction between ma-
terial and ideal interests (Weber 1946:280), as ideal interests are in fact material in the sense of being
real. This follows Bourdieu, who often merely referred to a plurality of interests, variable with time and
place (1990b:87).
30
Semiotization has been loosely adapted from Saussure ([1916] 1986) and Eco (1973).
31
Forms of capitals here follow Bourdieu (1986), who used the term cultural capital for what Robert
Putnam (2000:1819, 289) calls human capital. For arguments that cultural capital is more termino-
logically precise than human capital, and that capitals represent monetization of nonmonetary assets in
premonetary societies, see Garcelon (2006:25659). For a discussion of forms of capital and their relation
to institutional history, see Eyal et al. (1998:2024). Subtypes and admixtures, such as academic or polit-
ical capital, are omitted here for simplicity. Of course, this use of capitals ultimately derives with many
modifications from Marxs concept of (economic) capital as the accumulation of surplus value (Marx
[1890] 1977:74243).
THE MISSING KEY 349
and figuration thus avoids a chronic problem of reifying either structure or ac-
tion into a set of binary dualisms. This poses the degree to which reflective action
plays a causally significant role in skeins of developmental history an empirical
question.
All of this brings us back to the promise of neoclassical theory for empirical re-
search, for such theory emphasizes the historically contingent degree of unconscious
behavior, habit, and reflexive action operative in particular times and places. This in
turn means the empirical analysis of interestsand meanings both associated and in
tension with such interestsneeds to be causally situated in relation to historically
and geographically diverse societies, one purpose of explanatory narratives.
CONCLUSION
Neoclassical sociology promises much in terms of a potential paradigm in the social
sciences. We have seen how it specifies two models of path dependence unique to
human societies, trajectory adjustment and trajectory improvisation, and why these
models presuppose making explanatory narrative the primary causal strategy in so-
ciology. Moreover, we have clarified how a diverse range of conceptsinstitutions,
institutional paradigms, institutional orders, institutional fields, disjunctive fields,
habitus, legitimacy, reflexive action, networks, and figurationscan supplant over-
burdened concepts of structures that tend to obscure the complexities involved, as
well as create wrong-headed binaries between actor and structure, the subjective and
the objective, and so on. All of this is offered as a more robust formulation than
may be warranteda prolegomenafor heuristic purposes, an invitation to engage
this project critically. Yet the project remains pragmatic, as its goal is to foster a
reengagement of social theory with the empirical concerns of sociology by making
theory again more relevant to the formulation of empirical hypotheses. Since Parsons,
we have witnessed a split that has led to the virtual segregation of much theoreti-
cal work from empirical investigation in Western sociology. Surely, this cannot be a
happy condition for an empirical science.
Ironically, this situation is in part a consequence of a high degree of institutional
stability in the postwar Western democracies in which post-1945 sociology subse-
quently developed. This does not mean absence of periods of social and political
turmoil or lack of social movements, as the 1960s in the United States, Western
Europe, and Canada attests to. Nor does it mean lack of institutional change, which
at times has been extensive in many postwar representative democracies. However,
political revolutions, coup d etats, and the like have not occurred in Western nation-
states with representative democracies since 1945, signaling a deepening of some
aspects of civil society right alongside increasingly centralized corporate power. But
in many areas with more authoritarian regimes and less industrial economies, rapid
bouts of institutional collapse and violent periods of institutional change have per-
sisted. Moreover, political revolutions between 1989 and 1991 destroyed the former
Soviet bloc despite its extensive industrialization.
In recent history, then, institutional stability seems closely tied to sufficient insti-
tutional flexibility to assimilate social change without triggering widespread institu-
tional collapse. But this remains a contingent fact. In the United States, for instance,
a marked polarization of wealth and income has been underway since 1980, such
that by the early 2000s growing income inequalitiesmanifesting now as widen-
ing class inequalitieshad reversed the substantial moderation they had undergone
between 1947 and the mid 1970s (Mishel et al. 2005:7072). At the same time,
concentration in the U.S. mass media has now reached an unprecedented degree,
despite the important countertrend of the Internet (McChesney 2004). Indeed, the
number of companies dominating 90 percent of American mass media outlets ex-
cluding the Internet declined from 50 to 6 between 1984 and 2002.
32
In addition,
we have witnessed a number of laws passed by Congress such as the Patriot Act
that raise questions related to constitutional coherence in ways reminiscent of con-
troversial decisions taken during World War II, such as the sending of Japanese
Americans to internal camps that provoked several generations of controversy. All
of this casts a shadow over the continuing resilience of American civil society as an
institutional order, underscoring its historical contingency and thus vulnerability to
historical change for the worse.
Yet controversial measures of the George W. Bush administration triggered po-
litical reforms rather than institutional disintegration, as shown by the November
2006 congressional elections and then the election of Barack Obama as president in
November 2008. At the same time, the period since Obamas election has also shown
times of institutional paralysis potentially corrosive of constitutional democracy and
thus dangerous to institutional stability in the United States. Closely associated with
this danger is serious economic turbulence such as the financial crisis that began in
late 2007, as well as other problems associated with probable declines in world oil
production, climate change, and other ecological factors connected with the explosive
growth of global population since World War II. Economic and ecological dynam-
ics in short may impact social developments without determining them. Institutional
stability thus remains historically contingent. For these reasons, questions of linkages
between relative social stability, flexible institutions such as representative democracy,
various networking patterns, figurational patterns of misrecognition fostered in the
mass media, and enabling factors such as sustainable economic conditions deserve
continuing sociological scrutiny. And such scrutiny, in turn, presupposes reversing
sociologys retreat into the present by emphasizing a comparative-historical focus
on institutions and networks, their genesis, reproduction, change, and sometimes
collapse.
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