Preface

Nowadays, references to social structure are common, a welcome change for sociologists. For years, we have argued that individuals’ actions cannot be viewed in isolation. People make choices in contexts that unfold in time. Their choices feed back onto those contexts, potentially reshaping them.1 Social life is not just the individuals who make it, but is a set of “things” that emerge from those individuals’ interactions. As one of our field’s founders taught us, “we must treat social facts as things”2 – even if it’s not always clear what kinds of things they are.

To invoke social structure, though, is not merely to acknowledge that interactions scale up to make social facts. Rather, the idea of social structure is used to argue that people face constraints.3 At root, this is often about responsibility.4 We deploy the concept of structure because we don’t want those who are disadvantaged to be blamed for their disadvantage. We put those two sets of ideas together: choices are conditioned by features of contexts and thus people are not fully responsible for their fates.

Relatedly, popular discussion reflects a growing awareness that our societies are characterized by pronounced inequalities.5 People from many walks of life have a new or renewed sense that such inequalities are rooted in structures and systems.6 These two terms – structures and systems – are often used interchangeably, though we have good reason to think of them as being distinct, but related (on which, more in the pages that follow). Sociology contributes to this in important ways. The field is a key source of ideas about social structures, and sociologists have done empirical work that illuminates the workings of social structures in particular contexts as well as structural sources of common kinds of inequality.7

On the other hand, sociology arguably has not yet put together a practical and accessible set of strategies for thinking about social structures. That’s not for lack of insight or effort. There are difficulties familiar to social scientists, challenges we face with respect to almost any subject upon which we focus. There is no periodic table of the sociological elements.8 We cannot just look at the social world and induce unambiguously from it the categories through which we think about it. Instead, we have to develop most of our concepts pragmatically, judging them by what they do and don’t allow us to see, the questions and potential answers they afford, and those they obscure.9 Different thinkers make different choices in these respects, leading to the potential for miscommunication. Many of the most insightful ideas presuppose different terminologies. Resulting from this, we have some distinctions, like structure versus culture, that on reflection make little sense. Polysemy is great for poetry but less useful for clear and consistent thinking about social life.10

The goal of this book is selectively to assemble some pieces of the strategies developed by sociologists and other social scientists into an accessible, and hopefully coherent, whole: a provisional set of strategies for thinking about social structures.11 It’s provisional because the work of understanding social structures is not done, and likely never will be.12 Since the structures humans build interdependently are constantly changing in form, sociology probably is a science that has “eternal youth.”13

What is presented here is also hardly the only possible framework.14 It may not be the best one, and it won’t be the last one, but at least it strives for clarity and intelligibility rather than trying to dazzle its readers.15 My hope is that students, general readers, scholars in adjacent fields, and even professional sociologists will find some of those strategies for thinking about social structures helpful. Helpful for what? First, for making sense of what we might mean when we say that something is social structural. Then, for trying to think about how complex structures are built, and might be changed, by focusing on their parts and how these parts fit together. The ways in which social structures are built need to be better understood if we wish to unmake or remake them. Finally, for clarifying how theories of structure are involved when we build new explanations, examine data, and evaluate policies: bread and butter tasks of social science.

The idea for this book emerged from working with students. I teach at a liberal arts college with very strong undergraduates. One of the things I like best about my job is that I get to think with smart, engaged young people who haven’t yet been fully professionalized into the role of the social scientist. Arguments about ideas are, for them, mostly just arguments about ideas. The stakes are not the same as those held by graduate students and professors who may already be publicly identified with, or otherwise personally invested in, particular theoretical commitments. It is easier to imagine something different with such students. They also seem less embarrassed than those others might be to (a) think simply and slowly and (b) acknowledge what we don’t understand. We should all try to be more like them.

Above all, my students seem readily to recognize that, however brilliant the theorists whom we have read together, our field has no clear and accessible consensus account of its central concept.16 The project began with my attempts to explain theories of social structure to my students. As I thought with them, I discovered that those theories didn’t fully make sense to me.17 Working with my students, I tried to get these ideas to make sense. This project is an attempt to work out further and express those attempts at sense-making, an incomplete task, but one that seems far enough along to put into print. My hope is that the results will be congenial for students and colleagues both. I beg the patience of colleagues when I explain for students’ sake things that colleagues may already know. I beg the patience of students with passages that might more directly address colleagues’ questions and concerns, and I encourage them to persist with and through those passages.

Social structures are complex and often hidden, thus poorly understood. Faced with their complexity and partial hiddenness, we may be tempted to mystify them, as others have done. But mystification is the opposite of scientific understanding.18 The most basic principle: we won’t understand social structures until we can break our accounts of them down into stories about things that are more easily grasped and that our conversational partners will recognize as real and intelligible. Because they are complex, we need to think about them in simple ways.

Notes

1. 1. This has been emphasized by many sociologists, one of the clearest being Robert Merton (1968), whose arguments were well summarized by Stinchcombe (1975).
2. 2. This is, as sociologists know, the fundamental maxim from Émile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1982 [1895]).
3. 3. See, for example, the discussion of “What Is Structural Inequality?” on the webpage of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy: https://www.impact.upenn.edu/what-is-structural-inequality/.
4. 4. This point is well made in, among other places, Iris Marion Young’s Responsibility for Justice (2011).
5. 5. Examples are many, and include the widespread coverage of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), the focused attention on protests against persistent racial inequality after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the #MeToo movement.
6. 6. For one of hundreds of possible examples, see Karen Zraick’s 2021 New York Times article, “Racism is Declared a Public Health Crisis in New York City.” For an example from recent sociology, see Homan et al., 2021.
7. 7. At the same time, as Shelby (2016) argues, ultimately such questions are about justice, and require intellectual tools beyond those of social science. Social science can contribute to those efforts by providing cogent concepts, empirical descriptions, and explanations.
8. 8. I take this to be an implication of Weber (1949).
9. 9. Collier and Adcock (1999).
10. 10. Merton (1975) saw the plurality of conceptions of structure as a virtue. Levine (1985) extolled the more general virtues of “ambiguity.” Clearly, ambiguity has its uses, and in the human sciences we may never fully escape it, but too much ambiguity about core concepts in social science makes it easy to talk past each other – or ourselves! I thank Xiangyu Ma for bringing Levine’s beautiful book to my attention.
11. 11. It’s not a systematic or historical study of those pieces, but instead a rather idiosyncratic selection based on what seems most useful to me. For an accessible and short history, see López and Scott (2000). For an alternative set of basic conceptual tools, see Crothers (1996: 82–125).
12. 12. For some reasons why, see Taylor (1971).
13. 13. This is how Weber describes it (1949: 104).
14. 14. For an excellent recent alternative, see Rawlings et al. (2023).
15. 15. A model in this regard is Rojas (2017), which I recommend to students interested in...