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DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9558.2010.01378.x

2010 28: 326Sociological TheoryMarc 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: [email protected]. I would like to

thank Robert N. Bellah, Jim Stockinger, commentators from Sociological Theory, the Politics and ProtestWorkshop at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, and an ASA Annual Meeting for helpfulsuggestions on earlier versions of this article.

Sociological Theory 28:3 September 2010C 2010 American Sociological Association. 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005

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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 theoreticalmoves 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 ofneces-

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

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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 theyentail 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 oftencoexisting 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 calledthe 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 formalorganizations. 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

1In oral societies, liminal states between inclusion and exclusion often figured as central markers ofsocial life: Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, todarkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon (Turner 1969:95).

2For thousands of years, literacy remained confined to narrow elites in tributary states, a conditionJack Goody and Ian Watt termed oligoliteracy (Goody and Watt 1968:36).



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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 differentiationof 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 algorithmicregularities 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

3This is only the briefest of treatments of the concept of civil society, which has a rich pedigree inboth Western and, more recently, global history. See the collection Civil Society and the State (Keane1988), and Jeffrey Alexanders recent The Civil Sphere to get a sense of this. Alexander argues that acivil sphere, that is, a civil society, ensures that conflicts are more than simple battles whose outcomedepends only on instrumental power (Alexander 2006:266). Detailing how Alexanders approachnot tomention more than two previous centuries of writings on civil societyboth converges and diverges fromneoclassical sociology lies beyond the scope of this article.

4Weber 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 literallyrefers to objective possibility in German; but probability nevertheless seems the better translation(Ringer 1997:65).

5In the physical sciences, chaos theory provides us with understanding that is holistic, historical, andqualitative, eschewing deductive systems (Kellert 1993:114). This does not mean nonmathematical, aschaos theorya relatively new brand of physicsuses among the most sophisticated mathematics in allthe empirical sciences (pp. 2328).



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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]nstitutedhistorythe 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

6The 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 longperiods of relative equilibrium in biological evolution, punctuated by historically contingent episodes ofecological upheaval that trigger relatively rapid clusters of extinctions, followed by relatively rapid periodsof evolutionary differentiation until the full house of the ecology again tips the balance into relativestasis (Gould 1989:283, 1995, 1997).



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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 groupsof 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 (Bourdieu1990c: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 ofsocial 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,

7This develops Nicos Mouzeliss distinction between the paradigmatic level of institutions and thesyntagmatic level of actual relationships of cooperation/conflict (1995:78) as explained below.

8P. 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 tononconscious neural patterns (Montague and Berns 2002:281).



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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 typesof 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 seenas 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 andin 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 andget along in the absence of strong convictions of the rightness or justness of

said institutional order.11

9Emergent 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, andthe understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature asany other (Anderson 1972:393).

10The above develops comments made on an earlier draft of this article by Robert N. Bellah regardingthe problematic aspects of Webers concept of traditional action.

11

Weber distinguished these types in terms of pure and expedient variants of legitimacy (Weber1978:3133). By replacing the term pure with solidaristic, we can differentiate more precisely betweenconvergence 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 adaptedfrom Durkheim, who conceptualized solidarity as a moral disposition: The functions of assistance aresuch that . . .they demand feelings of solidarity . . .a certain intellectual and moral homogeneity such asthe same occupation produces (Durkheim 1964:26).



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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

12A 75 percent disparity between men and women aged 1859 in reporting number of heterosexualacts in the five years prior to the question marred the results of a series of surveys on sexual behaviordesigned as the most rigorous taken on the subject prior to 1994. In presenting this discrepancy in thesurvey 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).



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IOt0 IOt1 IOt2 IOt3 IOt4

IPt0 IPt1 IPt2 IPt3 IPt4

IO = institutional order

IP = institutional paradigms, aspects of a larger habitust = 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 andfield. 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, Ivan Szelenyi, 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 economicinterest. 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 sometimeslead 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 patternsof 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



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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 SovietUnion. 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 currentUnited 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 interorganizationalnetwork in terms of arrows between members of different organizational cliques. Such commonworking definitions are compatible with the formalization introduced here. An influential early articleemphasizing the need to conceptualize relations between networks and institutions (Mitchell 1973) uses ageneric conception of networks as linkages between individuals (1973:22, 3233), though at one pointmentions a network as an action set (1973:31) without clarifying what this entails.



12/29


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 inthe 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 aslegal 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 toengage 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 sociologicalconceptions 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 prioriassumes agency as always an effect, not a cause.



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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 theability 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 suchinstitutional 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

14The chemist James Lovelock and the microbiologist Lynn Margulis used the term tightly coupled tomap 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 processfrom which self-regulation of the environment at ahabitable state, appears as an emergent phenomenon(Lovelock 2001:1).



14/29


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 economicgrowth; 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 capacityof 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 levelshere, 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

15See 52 Girls Are Taken from Polygamist Sects Ranch in Texas, The New York Times, April5 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.



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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. TakeHedstrom, 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 (Hedstrom 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.

16For elaborations of this argument, see Mouzelis (1995:1527, 12324) and Garcelon (2006:26567).17This remains a Weberian conception of status and class (Weber 1978:30207). For a more Marxian

alternative, see Eyal et al. (1998:6670).



16/29


= 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 detats, 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 linkedto 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. Forinstance, once we have specified institutional orders as the cores of fields, we

18See, for instance, Armando Razos finely detailed maps of both Overlapping Protection of PublicOfficials (Fig. 6.4) and Pimentel y Fagoagas Political Connections (Fig. 6.6) in the study of networksand political power in Porfirio Dazs prerevolutionary Mexico (Razo 2008:146, 148).

http://stx.sagepub.com/http://stx.sagepub.com/http://stx.sagepub.com/http://stx.sagepub.com/http://stx.sagepub.com/


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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 fieldsthat 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 creationof 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 thecontemporary 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

19Caution is used here with the concept of world-system introduced by Wallerstein (1976). So long assystem simply designates causal interrelations, this term remains compatible with the argument developedhere. But locating causal priority at the world-system as a whole is problematic from a perspective thatboth recognizes a multiplicity of regional capitalisms, as well as insists on the historical contingencyof global-scale development as a whole. Moreover, Wallersteins perspective excludes a range of potentialcausal factors such as meanings.

20The concept of transnational demonstration effect slightly modifies Bendix (1984) and Janos (1986:8495) by substituting transnational for international in order to capture such effects as emergent properties



18/29


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 isomorphicpatterns 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 highlyopaque 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 orhis 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 Jurgen 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 economicconcept of international demonstration effect in more sociologically diverse ways.

21An exchange with Robert N. Bellah inspired the synthesis of Bourdieu and Habermas proposed here.



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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 establishwhether 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 figurationsas 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 withinand 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 byU.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

22The 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, andhence in the recognition granted to such an order (Bourdieu 1996b:375).



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TI t4

IOt1 IOt2 IOt3 OSt4 IOt5

INt4

IP t1 IPt2 IPt3 IPt4 IPt5

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 failedattempt 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 alternativeinstitutions, 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 generatealgorithmic 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



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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 consolidatingtheoretical 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, Szelenyi, 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 oppositionfrom 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



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modification of what he earlier called a paradigm 23persisted, 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 patter

Sociological Theory 2010 Garcelon 326 53

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