Sociological Theory 32(4)

Sociological Theory, December 2014: Volume 32, Issue 4

Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology
Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Ariail Reed

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

Enduring Illusions: The Social Organization of Secrecy and Deception
David R. Gibson

Sociologists theorize that people comply with the dictates of states and other organizations out of self-interest or because of the perceived legitimacy of those in authority. Some organizations, however, are based on lies, or secrets, and it would seem that these should be very short-lived, given how easy it is for the truth to escape. This article lays the foundations of a sociology of deception, focusing on lies and secrets successfully maintained for years or even decades. The ideas of Goffman and Simmel provide a theoretical starting point. Then Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme is considered as a case study. Drawing on that and other examples, the article culminates in a theory that distinguishes between barriers to knowing, barriers to asking, barriers to telling, barriers to perceiving, barriers to believing, and barriers to acting. Together, these may counter the natural entropic tendency for information to leak and diffuse, in part because the effectiveness of one sort of barrier may offset imperfections in others.

The High of Cultural Experience: Toward a Microsociology of Cultural Consumption
Claudio Benzecry and Randall Collins

Does the experience of cultural consumption have its own sui generis attraction and value in itself, or is it an index of external social ranking? Four criteria are proposed that are observable in microsociological detail: (1) bodily self-absorption in the cultural experience, creating an intense internal interaction ritual; (2) collective effervescence among the audience; (3) Goffmanian front-stage self-presentation in settings of cultural consumption; and (4) verbal discourse during and around the cultural experience. Data from highly committed opera fanatics in Buenos Aires are used to document the extreme pole of cultural consumption that rejects external social hierarchies in favor of pure musical experience. This individualized and internal style of music consumption resembles religious mysticism, and what Weber in his typology of orientations to religious experience called virtuoso religiosity, as distinct from typical social class orientations to religion and to music.

The Socioemotional Foundations of Suicide: A Microsociological View of Durkheim’s Suicide
Seth Abrutyn and Anna S. Mueller

Durkheim’s theory of suicide remains one of the quintessential “classic” theories in sociology. Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, it has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. Rather than defend Durkheim’s theory on its own terms, this paper elaborates his typology of suicide by sketching suicide’s socioemotional structure. We integrate social psychological, psychological, and psychiatric advances in emotion research and argue that (1) egoistic, or attachment-based suicides, are driven primarily by sadness/hopelessness; (2) anomic/fatalistic, or regulative suicides, are driven by shame; and (3) mixed-types exist and are useful for developing a more robust and complex multilevel model.

The Birth of the Gods: Robertson Smith and Durkheim’s Turn to Religion as the Basis of Social Integration
Alexandra Maryanski

Emile Durkheim’s ideas on religion have long served as foundational blocks for sociological theories. Yet, a mystery remains over where Durkheim’s insights into religion came from and especially the event that opened his eyes to religion’s importance in social life. Durkheim never supplied details on this conversion, but he did credit Robertson Smith for his new understanding. Did Smith really play the key role in Durkheim’s turn to religion? This essay examines Durkheim’s revelation in 1895 by starting from a novel angle—the first edition of The Division of Labor and his original stage model with the “cult of nature” as the starting point for religion. Tracing the implications of his initial choice of naturism as the elementary religion, a choice he would later soundly reject as “the product of [a] delirious interpretation,” offers new insights into why Durkheim found Smith’s ideas so inspirational. It also sheds light on why Durkheim overhauled his theory of solidarity, discarding his famous distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. In Robertson Smith’s work, Durkheim discovered a more inclusive and enduring basis of solidarity in the social universe.