One cannot discuss contemporary sociology without mentioning the work of Andrew Abbott. He has written on myriad subjects, including professions, methodology, temporality, the history and sociology of social science, and general social theory. Containing nine chapters—including previous articles, papers, and talks—that were recently prepared, Processual Sociology well represents his admirable intellectual diversity.
Because the book’s multifaceted nature makes difficult a simple recapitulation of its contents, I structure this review into two major sections. In the first, I provide a detailed summary of each chapter, and I then engage critically—although relatively abstractly nonetheless—with the contents. I do the latter not to denigrate the book; rather, I find the text so piquant and fecund that one cannot help but be spurred to thought.
The first section of three essays contains texts about social ontology; the reader encounters here ideas that serve as a foundation for subsequent developments.
The first chapter, “The Historicality of Individuals,” revisits the individual within social theory. People are central to the making and remaking of social entities because we are what connect past environments to the present and the future, and, as such, individual stability is frequently greater than that of social institutions. This temporal continuity—historicality—has four dimensions. First, individuals have biological continuity (at least in the sense that people have a discrete biological substrate associated with them throughout their lives). This fact distinguishes individuals from the majority of social entities, which lack such strict continuous physical substrata. Second is the memorial dimension: memories of individuals. Third, external records exist of individuals and social entities. Fourth, one confronts the substantive dimension, “the mass of personal attributes and experience carried forward through time” [12]. If one is interested in understanding the history of social structural phenomena, then one must add to individual historicality the internal history of things, such as professions. Finally, in order to understand social dynamics, one must investigate how the present becomes an embodied past that shapes future social structures.
The second chapter (“Human Nature in Processual Thinking”) addresses human nature within the context of processual ontology. In the introduction to this chapter, Abbott [17] notes that sociologists—as opposed to others such as psychologists and economists—generally interest themselves in differences among people and, as such, do not focus too much on human nature. Rather than engaging directly with the substance of what might (or should) be considered human nature, Abbott discusses the assumptions people make about human nature, and he distills four dimensions: “whether they [concepts of human nature] principally concern human individuals or social groups; whether they principally concern emotion, action, or meaning; whether they are formal or substantive; whether they admit change or insist on constancy” [23]. In processual ontology, lineages of events become recognized as personalities and social groups. Personalities, we are told, emerge from a host of internal and external factors: memories, identities, desires, feedback from others during interactions, etc.; traditions may be conceived as personalities for social groupings. Human nature becomes those aspects of the individual that constrain the construction and modification of lineages of events and their transmogrification into social entities and has two fundamental parts: the quality of historicality and the sequentiality of experience [27]. Contained within the assumptions upon which these ideas are elaborated are the assertions that lineages emerge locally and that each of the “zones of human experience” [30] (i.e., meaning, emotion, and action) creates its own criterion for internal judgement.
“Linked Ecologies” is the third chapter. Standing somewhere between individualism and social emergentism, the ecology concept—in its metaphorical or realist form—too frequently focuses on a singular social phenomenon without attending to relevant adjacent factors or domains. Linked ecologies is Abbott’s response to this neglect and a rethinking of his earlier ecological work vis-à-vis professions [36]. Ecologies have three principal components: actors, locations, and relationships linking these two. Abbott employs the term ligation to refer to the process of creating relationships, which contemporaneously defines the actors and their locations. Being relationally constituted as an internal upshot of ligation, locations vary in the extent to which they are unambiguously composed. Abbott denotes as arenas certain “zones of experience” [40] which have an uncertain relationship with other components of a particular ecology, and he employs “settlements” to identify locations that are relatively organized but fall within multiple purviews. “Bundles,” as sets of actions, decisions, and outcomes [44], constitute locations that blur would-be clear jurisdictional boundaries, for example in political ecologies. Jurisdictions, settlements, and bundles, Abbott demonstrates, vary in the extent to which (1) they are stable, and (2) the locations are separate from each other. He provides multiple conceptual tools to investigate the relationships between ecologies. The first consideration is ecological forms: the size, distribution, and exclusiveness of actors within an ecology; second, “patterns of created locations” [46] also vary vis-à-vis size, density, and exclusiveness. Finally, the “varieties of ligation” [47] require close attention. These three features of individual ecologies fundamentally influence the relationships between ecologies, yet they must be supplemented by attention to the temporalities by which linked ecologies operate. “Hinges,” issues that provide rewards within multiple ecologies, couple them, yet hinges do not have to be of the same type within two ecologies (e.g., locations versus ligation).
The second part of the book inverts two subjects which have received much attention in social thought: advocating lyrical accounts of social phenomena instead of narrative explanations and a focus on excess instead of scarcity, all the while developing such accounts constrained by premises expounded in the first section.
Lyrical sociology, the subject of chapter four, “is a sociology founded on particular moments, on particular locations, and on a particular, committed emotional stance of writer towards material. It is a sociology of transition” [78]. Lyrical sociological accounts of social phenomena consist of detailed engagements with and descriptions of “transitional present[s]” [78]; as such, they are not stories. Lyrical sociology seeks to awaken “the experience of social discovery” [82]. While lyrical sociology is built upon literary theory, and a subset thereof that is older than the theory undergirding narrative justification, Abbott nonetheless envisions lyrical sociology as a way of discovering social laws [85]. He identified two dimensions of lyrical sociology: stance and mechanics. Stance is characterized by engagement, personal and physical location, and temporal location. Sociological authors operating in the lyrical mode engage emotionally with the subject/object, remain mindful of her or his particular location within the field being researched, and privilege the momentary experience. The mechanics of lyrical sociology include imagistic portrayal, “concrete” emotions, naturalism, personification, and figurative language [97]. The stance and mechanics constitutive of lyrical sociology enable the researcher to capture the felt passing of time as well as the “‘disposition’ of a given location” [113] in space; lyrical sociology is driven by and evokes in the reader humane sympathy with the people and place—temporally, spatially, and socially—being examined.
The next chapter, “The Problem of Excess,” inverts a core assumption underlying the construction of many problems and research in the social sciences: Abbott argues that one may gain much analytical traction by focusing on the consequences of excess rather than scarcity. He begins by reviewing the history of excess as it has been treated in political economy, political theory, and other social sciences and philosophy. His next step consists in dismantling the “identity argument,” that is, distinguishing excess of one thing from the scarcity of something else. Abbott then discusses in length four types of excess, derived from two relevant characteristics of excess. One may have too much of one type of thing, what he calls “surfeit”, or too many types of things, what he calls “welter.” Both surfeit and welter can occur at the individual and social levels. Through these distinct genres, one may encounter problems of excess through five manners: overload, habituation, value contextuality, disruption, and misinheritance. The first three may occur at individual and social levels, while the latter two are unique to the social level. How might an actor cope with excess? Abbott does not leave the reader in the dark. One class of responses is called reduction strategies, which consists of defensive and reactive sub-strategies; this family, perhaps obviously enough, is characterized by the reduction of excess. The second class of responses is called rescaling strategies, and they seek rather to redefine a situation of excess such that the excess no longer poses a problem. Creativity and adaptation are the two types of rescaling strategies. Again, each of the strategies must be considered at each level of excess.
Chapter 6, entitled “The Idea of Outcome,” examines different types of outcomes to be investigated and explained. While sociology tends to focus on a singular end-point of a social process, the refined framework proposed by Abbott reveals several alternatives. A researcher’s chosen genre of outcome is characterized by multiple dimensions. First, one must decide the “location in time”: can one identify the outcome at a precise temporal point, or is the outcome characteristic of a period (constituted by multiple time points)? Second, one must identify the unit of analysis: is one talking of individual or social outcomes? Third, is the outcome tensed or untensed? Drawing upon McTaggart’s philosophy of temporality, Abbott identifies two broad temporal distinctions among outcomes. Tensed outcomes assume the concreteness of dates and impose a definite temporal order on social phenomena, while untensed outcomes rest upon a relational order anchored only by the current moment (connecting perfectly with the earlier chapter on lyrical sociology). Abbott concludes that there exists no necessarily superior choice along each of these dimensions.
In chapter 7, “Social Order and Process,” Abbott turns his attention to social order, or rather what social order can be when one recasts the assumptions underlying this classic problem within liberal philosophy. Any conception of social order must consider four fundamental issues. First, what is the role of substance in the order assumed? The classical liberal conceptualization assumes a formal definition without particular content, while a type of order built from processual premises must confront substance. Second, temporality must be considered. Far from a temporally universalized order, processual accounts of order must address from whose sets of values order (or the lack thereof) is being considered, and, given the volatility of such substance, one must not assume temporal stability of order once it has been established. Third, for whom is the social world ordered? Even within the same society, the relative “orderliness” may vary from one environment (or set of events) to the next. Fourth, in contradistinction to the classical conceptualization, freedom of the individual—as opposed to external, social constraints—must be conceived concretely over time and not at a singular abstract point. The next part of the chapter discusses four types of order within processual ontology: equilibrium concepts, which contain basic static equilibrium and evolution models; extensions of equilibrium models, including temporal (periods and cohorts) and spatial (regions and dominance) variation; empirical concepts, including habituation, reproduction, and tradition; and finally normative concepts (due process, conservatism, and progress).
Part four consists of a reflexive normative examination of sociology. In chapter 8, Abbott turns to inequality, noting that most treat this concept in a manner that is far from unambiguous. Two key problems are highlighted: that inequality cannot be non-arbitrarily located within a particular instant, and that many things to which sociologists are committed nonetheless serve to maintain inequality (e.g., the family). Abbott offers as a starting point in his rethinking of inequality the fact that the term is actually frequently a stand-in for injustice, and this latter concept again suffers from problematic assumptions. Not only is equality an atypical state of affairs, but we also have no reason to think that injustice can be satisfactorily measured (the “issue of metrizability”; p. 242). Worse yet, what is justice can vary between individuals. Any rigorous study of inequality and injustice must confront multiple ontological issues. At the individual level, injustice must exist in relation to a person’s entire life, have no clear outcome when considered in relation to a lifetime, and be able to change substantively over the course of a lifetime. At the social level, because the social changes more quickly than the individual, one must devise a conception of injustice that takes as its starting point a social environment replete with change, and, also related to the dynamic nature of society, one must address the often vast distinction between “social achievement” and “individual achievement” [249].
In the final chapter, “Professionalism Empirical and Moral,” Abbott argues that processual sociology necessarily entails normative concerns and that, alongside causal factors, normative concerns shape individual comportment within situations. He begins by taking as his case of study professionalism and notes that sociologists frequently encounter “knowledge alienation” [255], the disjuncture between discursive thought and behavior. In our discipline, this underlies the distinction between sociological practice and political engagement. After dismissing Weberian value-free science and critiquing attempts at empirical studies of professional normativity, Abbott offers a new pragmatist-inspired approach that takes seriously the felt normative imperative of many professional decisions, noting in passing that a causal emphasis contributes to the denigration of moral experience. However, phenomenological “oughtness” is not everything: professional (and all) behaviors originate in both causal and moral factors. Taking a cue from Dewey, professionalism becomes “an attempt consciously to shape the situation in light of idealized rules” [275]. The rules’ contents matter, but the key is to recognize professional moralizing as a way of comporting oneself.
Having summarized the nine chapters, I now would like to engage critically with the book as a whole. I choose to treat a few thematic areas within Processual Sociology rather than to attempt a comprehensive positioning within sociological literature because of space limitations and because the organization of the book as a set of essays belies a simple unity.
The issue of how to conceive social order within a processual world constitutes the first thematic unity. Where do ecologies, Abbott’s response, stand in relation to alternatives? Field theory is an obvious point of departure, as the ecology concept is in direct competition with that of field; is there reason to prefer Abbott’s elaboration of linked ecologies to field theory? I think so. First, his proposed conceptual framework is more sophisticated. The analytical decomposition of ecologies into actors, locations, and ligations, along with variable properties of ecologies upon which Abbott expounded and their links, necessarily focuses one’s attention in a manner more concrete than anything proposed by Bourdieu. Second, and likely as a function of the first point, it seems that it would be more difficult to reify ecologies (at least as conceived by Abbott) than fields, a tendency in which scholars of the latter promiscuously engage.
One might also situate this processual sociology relative to critical realism, although the two are much more distinct from one another than ecological and field theories. Seeking to justify through emergence the existence of social entities that are ontologically distinct from individuals, critical realism (at least sometimes) runs up against the problem of creating philosophical problems without truly aiding the empirical study of the emergence of social phenomena. Footnote 1 Abbott’s ecology built upon processualism avoids this type of issue by being grounded first and foremost in the explanation of empirical phenomena.
Another interesting contribution lies in the theory of action—or at least a few of its requirements—assumed by lyrical sociology. Abbott notes that an important part consists in acknowledging the felt demand for a particular response that situations make on individuals, and one may find similar points being made in the work of Martin Footnote 2 as well as the Spinozist social science proposed by Lordon. Footnote 3 Perhaps the most unique aspect of lyrical sociology vis-à-vis these alternatives is a more elaborated explanatory apparatus for navigating first versus third person accounts of social phenomena Footnote 4 and the communication of a sociological explanation.
One area that could be treated with more clarity is the necessary explanatory importance of phenomenological perception. For example, we are told in the professionalism chapter that moral experience should be included alongside causal explanations, but I wonder what set of philosophical assumptions would (or would not) justify this dual consideration without privileging one or the other. Is this simply a concatenation of issues raised by potentially opposed philosophies, or is there a unified set of presuppositions from which it follows? It is also not clear how this processual sociology fits with recent cognitive sociology, especially given that habituation is viewed as a problem (related to excess) and not as a psychological given.
Finally, the normative commitment seems to be in line with other work of late. Footnote 5 However, I would like to have seen a more detailed exposition about what “normative” signifies throughout the book. At some points, it seems to be coterminous with moral, while, at other times, something is treated as normative simply if it stems from the assumptions one makes in the course of an investigation. Additionally, I am not convinced of the necessary relationship of the “project of humane translation” [287] with processual sociology, nor am I convinced that its humanistic basis should suffuse sociology. Nonetheless, one continues reflecting on these issues after reading the text, which is a credit to Abbott and his arguments.
That my critical comments have remained at an abstract level, pertaining to general approaches to sociology, is no mistake. To be sure, there are many points throughout the book at which I felt the need to respond or to ponder further, and each of these merits extended consideration. The choice of which to include in this review however would be quite arbitrary. Field theory, new theories of action, and normativity have been taken up by many subfields of sociology. If the attempt to stimulate interest through an appeal to these general themes has missed its mark, the fault is mine; Processual Sociology merits attention from practitioners within all domains of the discipline.
