Why Clear Thinking About Social Structures Matters in Public Policy
How often have you found yourself attributing something to “social structure,” or heard others doing so? Did you know clearly what you or they meant? Or was the phrase more expressive of an intuition, perhaps that deeper forces were at work, somewhere under the surface? We often use such phrases with confidence, but should we? And are there ways in which we might improve our ability to know precisely what we mean when making reference to social structures?
- Why Clear Thinking About Social Structures Matters in Public Policy
- Clarifying a Core Sociological Concept
- Teaching as a Source of Theoretical Reflection
- The Problem of Vagueness and Why It Matters
- A Framework for Social Structures: Relationships, Representations, and Rules
- From Basic Acts to Complex Social Structures: A Layered Approach
- From Theory to Application: Rethinking Models and Policy Through Social Structures
- Bridging Sociology and Economics: A Structural Complementarity
- Sociological Insight in Policy Analysis: A Pragmatic Framework
These questions are not merely academic, because deliberation about policy and public life frequently involves assertions about social structures. How are we to understand health disparities, variation in educational attainment, differing levels of access to public services, and differing rates of civic participation (and so many other outcomes of moral importance) without clear thinking about social structures?
Clarifying a Core Sociological Concept
Social Structures: Relationships, Representations, and Rules considers what we might mean when we invoke the concept and argues that we must make some careful choices about how we should do so.
Given that the analysis of social structures is the central purpose of sociology, this implies that amidst the good and insightful work often done by sociologists there is often insufficient clarity about our most important concept.
I don’t promise a one-size-fits-all solution but instead offer a set of pragmatic strategies for achieving greater clarity. I invite students and colleagues to try a particular set of conceptual moves and to explore whether these work for them.
The moves themselves are my selection, distillation, organization, and synthesis of a number of partial moves that classical and contemporary sociologists have made (about which, please see references in the book itself).
The excellent students with whom I have worked, both those who played a part in the development of these ideas and those who have later read and used them, raise my hopes that others may find them useful too.
Teaching as a Source of Theoretical Reflection
Indeed, this book emerged from teaching. I work at a small liberal arts college with excellent students. During the pandemic, we met in person – outdoors, in a tent! – twice per week and I recorded a video lecture once per week to go over additional material.
We need to identify basic types of social structure, building blocks of more complex structures, to conceptually grasp those larger complexes.
Recording those video lectures in the absence of interactive feedback focused my attention on the ideas I was expressing in a way that made me realize that I had, in my own thinking, been glossing over ambiguities and contradictions that I hadn’t noticed before. Interestingly, some students with whom I spoke about these questions noticed the same thing about their own engagement with social scientific theory.
This book grew out of seeds planted in those initial conversations. Above all, I wanted to clarify my own thinking, because if one’s own thinking is unclear, how could one’s teaching or scholarship be any better? As a close second, I wanted to be a better teacher who could explain the central ideas of my field in a more satisfactory way, and to produce a text that others might find of use, for teaching or for their own thinking.
The Problem of Vagueness and Why It Matters
Perhaps the reader might think, this was just my problem: I didn’t know how to explain the concept in a clear and coherent way, but that others did and do. This may be so. But in the second chapter of the book, I review a number of things that scholars sometimes mean when they invoke social structure.
The social structures around us in the world seem intimidatingly complex.
It is easy to show that the term is often applied both vaguely and inconsistently. Is that a problem? Some may be tempted to say that if the vagueness doesn’t bother anyone, if it doesn’t generate cognitive dissonance, then perhaps not.
But it does bother at least some of us, and I’ve found that it bothers many students, serious ones who want to understand what they are talking about, and one wonders how many others might leave sociological theorizing behind upon discovering such vagueness about a core concept (not to mention the appearance of common unconcern about it).
Moreover, the inconsistent application of the term clearly should bother us, since it undoubtedly produces miscommunication and thereby likely reduces the rate at which we collectively generate knowledge.
Finally, and perhaps most important, if social structures are real and consequential (which most sociologists believe, and which I certainly do), then sociology has a responsibility to provide coherent and accessible accounts of how they work. Vague gesturing can produce the illusion of understanding but is no substitute for clear and careful thinking that is both rigorous and accessible. My hope is that some of these ideas, though abstract, or perhaps because usefully abstract, might prove helpful not only to scholars but to policymakers, activists, and members of the broader public who want to think about how social structures shape possibilities.
A Framework for Social Structures: Relationships, Representations, and Rules
Well, what are the strategies I’ve assembled? I suggest that we think of structures as things that are made, and of “social” as modifying structure by characterizing what a particular sort of structure is made of. Social structures are made of interdependent acts (this is what it means for something to be social). The social structures around us in the world seem intimidatingly complex. There are so many kinds of acts, and they are linked together in such complicated ways.
Complex structures are built up out of inter and intra-laced basic structures.
We need to identify basic types of social structure, building blocks of more complex structures, to conceptually grasp those larger complexes.
Ideally, any such conceptual scheme should be as simple as possible and should classify basic social structures in ways that are exhaustive and mutually exclusive. The concepts in the simple conceptual scheme should also put basic structures in categories that (a) most of us would recognize as real (in some sense) and, if possible, (b) most of us would find intelligible.
For thinking about complex societies, it’s extremely difficult to achieve all that. My approach doesn’t promise to do so perfectly, but I’ve not encountered anything else that seems to me to get any closer. I begin by suggesting that the basic types of structure are relationships, representations, and rules: the 3 R’s. Relationships are any kind of recurrent interaction (friendship, romantic ties, economic exchange, and many others) between two or more people. Representations are any kind of shared categorization across two or more people. Rules are any kinds of shared prescriptions for or proscriptions on conduct and can be either formal or informal.
From Basic Acts to Complex Social Structures: A Layered Approach
We can make each of these categories more concrete by specifying the basic acts of which they are composed. Relationships are constructed through – indeed, they are nothing more than – ongoing and interdependent acts of affiliation and disaffiliation (which, of course, take different forms depending upon relationship type).
Representations are shared or overlapping and interdependent acts of categorization (identification, meaning the placing of oneself into a category, and ascription, the placing of others or of things into a category – my contention is that established categories are “equilibria” in the many acts of identification and ascription for which a given category is used). Rules are jointly made of the interdependent acts of following or not following, and of enforcing or not enforcing. These sets of acts are, within this strategy for thinking about social structures, sociological rock bottom.
At the “top” we have complex structures, such as the pattern of racial residential segregation in a neighborhood, the informal and formal organizational patterns of a business or governmental unit, or the collaborative networks of people and ideas in a field of creative work. Complex structures are built up out of inter and intra-laced basic structures. Intralacing is the weaving together of structures of a common type (e.g., several types of relationships overlapping in a multiplex network; numerous shared representations linked together as a symbolic order; nested sets of rules that compose codes).
Interlacing is the weaving together of complex structures of different types. For example, relational networks carry clusters of shared representations. Rules about association shape relational patterns in ways that might generate feedback loops. In the book, I propose an initial typology of forms of interlacing, but this is a huge field where novel theory could easily grow.
From Theory to Application: Rethinking Models and Policy Through Social Structures
Notice how the strategies proposed here encourage open-ended theorizing. There is nothing like the “I’ve discerned the hidden internal logic of the system” mentality of the old grand theorists. But I also refuse to accept the conceptual fragmentation that has followed grand theory’s decline.
The strategies offered could help achieve coordination around a simple set of concepts that might facilitate communication, updating, and shared learning. In other words, it’s not a theory, but a framework for theorizing, and in the book, I offer readings of several excellent contemporary ethnographies to show how one might extract and pool some of their insights by using the 3 R’s.
Indeed, the second half of the book focuses on implications and applications. The fourth chapter is about what these conceptual strategies suggest for thinking about social scientific explanation, engaging with prominent philosophers who have written on structural explanations and showing how the best sociological work already builds novel theory about interlacings in ways that can be revealed if we read that work through the 3 R’s.
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The fifth chapter focuses on quantitative analysis in the social sciences, distinguishing “structure” from “context” and exploring how different types of conventional models do or don’t allow us to either study or otherwise account for structural variables. Certain types of models control structures away. Others model them directly. But there is relatively little attention in statistical social science to how our models do or don’t represent social structures (outside of sociological network analysis, where such thinking is better developed, but often only with respect to relational structures).
The final chapter focuses on policy analysis and program evaluation. Its overarching point is that a lot of conventional policy analysis uses a very thin theoretical framework derived from microeconomics. That framework is very useful for as far as it goes but has major blind spots about social structures.
Bridging Sociology and Economics: A Structural Complementarity
The strategies for thinking about social structures expressed in this book are less a competing alternative, however, but complementary.
They are reconcilable with and add onto contemporary microeconomics because the perspectives share an emphasis on methodological individualism. Both see the purposive acts of persons as the real basis of any complex context, market or otherwise. Both explain through the identification of mechanisms through which basic acts scale up into more complex patterns. The sociological perspective emphasizes how the resulting patterns take structural form that shape incentives for subsequent acts.
Accordingly, my hope is that economics-oriented policy thinkers (who predominate in policy analysis) and their students might find some of these ideas helpful. Indeed, some economists increasingly recognize the importance of the network structure of economic life, and the “institutions” studied for decades by institutional economists are clearly social structures in the sense used in this book (they are, indeed, bundles of intralaced rules).
Sociological Insight in Policy Analysis: A Pragmatic Framework
The sociological approach to policy analysis offered here is less an alternative than a set of corollary ideas that can be incorporated in the causal analysis of policy interventions, focusing especially on how careful thinking about social structures might help us to reason about, and thereby to evaluate, contextual variability in policy effects. There are implications for both policy implementation and policy evaluation.
The fact that the perspective is complementary, though, doesn’t make it unimportant. It is my contention that policy analysis needs sociology – including clear, accessible sociological theory – precisely because policies are implemented in social structural contexts, and our ability to take them into account depends on our ability to reason clearly about them.
As I hope the book itself makes clear, the justification I offer is pragmatic and provisional. The approach is not presented as a static solution to an enduring problem, or as the only one, but rather a series of thought steps that others might consider. Try them out! If you are well served by them, I hope you might adopt and build on them. If not, I hope you might move on. Indeed, if they ever stop being useful for me, I’ll move on too.
