In the past two weeks, the “new Twitter,” Bluesky, has received a huge influx of new arrivals. People who still sat out the whole U.S. election on X/Twitter/whatever started migrating to Bluesky after November 5. This has led to many people being a bit lost trying to find their old network on the new platform. One way in which Bluesky tries to mitigate the issue of not knowing where your tribe is are so-called “Starter Packs.” Starter packs are essentially just lists of accounts that users can create, which enable people to follow a set of accounts with the click of a button. I saw that there was no “starter pack” for the discipline I write my PhD thesis in, Analytical Sociology (AS for short), so I decided to create one. And it has been received well; many new arrivals commented that they enjoyed being able to follow colleagues this easily.
But a few were less optimistic. Specifically, I received a few quote-posts (or, “Drükos” for the German Twitter veterans) of people claiming that it’s nonsense to call something “analytical” sociology, because all sociology is analytical. One such comment did a great job explaining their reasoning:
Sociology is a scientific discipline so it is inherently analytical! It seeks to explore social phenomena via systematic observation. Labeling a specific branch “Analytical” is redundant. Every sociological inquiry, whether qualitative or quantitative, involves analytical conclusions. #Sociology
Is it, though? *cue ominous music*
Of course not! And that’s how this article exists. I take this opportunity to explain what “analytical” sociology means specifically to me, and why I think it’s absolutely not redundant to call some types of sociology analytical, but not others.
As usual, a few caveats. First, I don’t get to define “Analytical Sociology.” The term and what it describes is constantly (re)defined through both interpretation and action by people who align with the school of analytical sociology, and those who don’t. As Andrew Abbott (1995) would have called it, it’s a “boundary.” What I can offer here is merely my personal take on it, shaped by four years of interaction with colleagues from the field, and my very own stance on various issues within sociology. Second, what I am about to say here will change over time. I have already written about analytical sociology, and what I think it is, various times on this blog (see here, here, and here). My viewpoint has always shifted a bit, and what I think about analytical sociology today is different from these earlier takes. Indeed, a colleague has once told me that one of the main tasks while doing a PhD in analytical sociology was to figure out what “analytical sociology” means. So see this as a momentary perspective on the field from a single person at a specific point in time. I try to make a somewhat broader argument, though, so I do expect a few things to stick around for longer.
Is Calling Analytical Sociology “Analytical” Redundant?
First, to address the question of the comment, is calling AS “analytical” redundant? The author says that sociology is a scientific discipline, and as such is already inherently analytical. From the outset, I agree! We do something “sciency,” and analysis is science, so sociology is always analytical! The problem, however, is that this is a non-sequitur. Let’s pry this argument apart:
- A scientific discipline is inherently analytical (this is the implied assertion)
- Sociology is a scientific discipline (I agree)
- Therefore, sociology is inherently analytical (this is the non-sequitur)
My main issue with this argument is the implied assertion that a scientific discipline is inherently analytical. This applies a very folklorist understanding of the concept of analysis. Initially, I thought “well, this makes sense.” But, after thinking about the issue, it stopped making sense. See, science describes a way of doing things. We are scientists not because of who we are, but because of what we do. You’re not a scientist just because you hold a PhD. In fact, many of my friends from our graduate program who hold the same degree as I now work at NGOs. They are still sociologists, but they are not scientists. They do work analytical, but not necessarily scientifically so. Science means to pose questions in a way to make them testable, by creating hypotheses, and then collecting the necessary data and choosing the appropriate methods to test them. Science also involves the ability to falsify assumptions, and create work that is reproducible. In a sense, science is not that different from the profession of carpenters, or politicians. There is a certain modus to the work. But that doesn’t involve analysis. At least, not “inherently.”
The scientific term “analysis” has a very specific meaning. This Greek term, literally translated, means “to break something up.” But I don’t think most scientific disciplines are breaking up things (even I don’t do that most of the time). Indeed, if you are merely testing hypotheses, you are not analytical, because there is nothing you break up. If you create a theory, you are not analytical, because you usually do the exact opposite – moving from the concrete to the abstract. Another example: You may remember that one part of the math curriculum in school was literally called “analysis.” We had matrices, vectors, we had calculus, and then we had analysis. And I think that math does a great job at showing what exactly analysis is. The core part of analysis is the art of literally chopping up hard math problems so that they suddenly become manageable.
So what does analysis refer to in a sociological context? Well, it means to “break up” societal processes into their constituent parts. It means that your work does a very specific thing: You take something that seems like a single “thing,” break it up into its “atoms,” so to speak, and analyze those instead to make statements about the bigger thing. “But doesn’t all sociology do this?” I don’t think so. First, you have a lot of qualitative research that doesn’t want to break things up, but rather understand existing things better. A lot of great work in this realm starts – and ends – with wanting to understand people. See for example Diane Vaughan’s great piece on the challenger disaster (2004). Then, there is macro-sociology that never digs into the constituent parts of bigger organizations. A great example here is John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s seminal piece of institutionalism (1977). Of course, institutions are made up of people, but they show a lot of great insight without “breaking up” institutions into their constituent parts.
Analytical sociology, therefore, means to take something at either the meso- or macro-level, but actually analyze something on the micro-level in order to explain why this happens. Doing analytical sociology, thus, means to be interested in macro-sociological processes but only analyze them by means of micro-sociological properties. It is this duality, this breaking-up of the big things, that makes sociology analytical. This is why calling any sociological discipline analytical is a non-sequitur. It is not trivially implied to be analytical just because you are either a scientist or sociologist.
Do We Need An Explicit Discipline For Analytical Sociology?
However, naturally there are also critics of creating some discipline called “analytical sociology” out of thin air. I just introduced one critic above. But there are more substantive criticisms. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, puts it very apt (albeit in the context of philosophy):
Perhaps, in its broadest sense, [analysis] might be defined as a process of identifying or working back to what is more fundamental by means of which something, initially taken as given, can be derived, explained or reconstructed. […] This allows great variation in specific method, however. The aim may be to get back to basics and elucidate connections, but there may be all sorts of ways of doing this, each of which might be called ‘analysis’. […] Analytic philosophy is thriving precisely because of the range of conceptions and techniques of analysis that it involves. It may have fragmented into various interlocking subtraditions […], but those subtraditions and related traditions are held together by their shared history and methodological interconnections.
Analogously, sociologists have also always been doing analysis as part of their work. James Coleman, Robert K. Merton, or Thomas Schelling, for example, never thought of themselves as analytical sociologists, since that term – at least in its modern interpretation (Manzo, 2010) – originates after their time (Hedström and Swedberg, 1998). But what they did was precisely analytical sociology. The Coleman boat, Merton’s “middle range theories”, and the Schelling model all occupy central places in the canon of analytical sociology, because they provide the necessary tools and foundations for us to do our work. This is also what I believe to be the central point of Omar Lizardo’s “Analytical Sociology’s Superfluous Revolution” (2012). We didn’t really need an AS revolution, as analytical sociology has not reinvented any wheels.
However, the other position asserts that the founding of analytical sociology as a distinctive discipline was necessary. Not to reinvent any wheels, but to get rid of a lot of the intellectual ballast that has amassed over a hundred years of sociologists doing sociology. As disciplines mature, new divisions of labor open up. People start doing very similar things in increasingly distinguishable fashions. This leads me back to Andrew Abbott’s “Things of Boundaries” (1995). The central point of his article is that we see the world not by describing certain, independent spheres of social action, but rather by identifying boundaries between them. Peter Hedström and colleagues created one such boundary, and the result was the emergence of a new discipline. And the identification of boundaries and the subsequent emergence of new fields didn’t stop there. Already six years ago, my colleagues Keuschnigg et al. (2018) argued that there are a lot of synergies to be exploited between the emerging field of computational social science and analytical sociology that, by now, has led to the increasing stabilization of yet another term in the discourse: computational sociology. Almost to the day four years ago, I wrote about computational sociology. And just a few weeks ago, I met up with sociologists in Bremen for a workshop titled precisely that.
Do we need all of these disciplines? Do we really need analytical sociology, computational social sciences, or computational sociology? Strictly speaking, no. But these demarcations all serve a few important purposes. By having a concept for analytical sociology, we have a word to describe sociology that works by explaining macro-phenomena using micro-level processes. By having a concept for computational social science we have a word to describe social scientific research that utilizes large scale datasets and high-performance computing clusters (HPC). And by having a concept for computational sociology, we have a word to describe the merging of both. Such conceptual demarcations help distinguish various approaches to science and the world, and they serve to gather like-minded researchers which improves science in multiple ways.
Final Thoughts
In the end, I believe that the comments I received on creating a list for analytical sociology follow from a tribal bite reflex that is common in social science. I’ve talked with many people over the years, and from what I could gather, there are hints that the biggest cleavage in sociology to date – between qualitative and quantitative scholars –, seems to be primarily driven by feelings of being ill-represented among various groupings of the discipline. It almost seems as if sociologists have perfected the dream of “creative destruction.”
There seems to be a feeling of insufficiency, with any new subdivision in the field instilling fear in other fields of growing less relevant. However, as the field of area studies has shown since the 1990s, it always remains possible to redefine your work (from “understanding the enemy” culturally during the Cold War, to exploring the developmental divide between Global North and Global South today). In the end, analytical sociology is indeed a form of rebranding of a specific type of rigorous quantitative sociology. Maybe the world really did not need it, but the cat is out of the bag now, so we can just stick with having a distinct field for analytical sociology.
In the end, I believe that the discussion on what field of sociology one belongs to is similarly moot as discussing rock music genres. “Is Kvelertak more black metal or Rock’n’Roll?” I don’t care, but it has groove. “Are pg.lost progressive rock or post rock?” Why don’t you just enjoy the ride? “What genre is Steven Wilson currently vibing?” Probably just your typical British depression, but why don’t you just give one of the greatest guitar solos of all time a listen? You see, you can make an argument out of almost every classification under the sun. But what it comes down to is what sociologists are doing. If it’s great research, and relevant to you – does the classification really matter that much?
To return to the starting point of this article: Neither I nor others get to define which disciplines survive the battle of meaning-making, and we will see which subdivisions remain relevant. It is a constant battle over boundaries that are constantly shifting. The important part is: Not all sociology is analytical. And this is great news.
References
- Abbott, A., 1995. Things of Boundaries. Social Research 62, 857–882.
- Hedström, P., Swedberg, R., 1998. Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, Studies in rationality and social change. Cambridge University Press, New York.
- Keuschnigg, M., Lovsjö, N., Hedström, P., 2018. Analytical Sociology and Computational Social Science. J Comput Soc Sc 1, 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-017-0006-5
- Lizardo, O., 2012. Analytical Sociology’s Superfluous Revolution. SO. https://doi.org/10.2383/36902
- Manzo, G., 2010. Analytical Sociology and Its Critics. Arch. eur. sociol. 51, 129–170. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975610000056
- Meyer, J.W., Rowan, B., 1977. Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83, 340–363.
- Vaughan, D., 2004. Theorizing Disaster: Analogy, historical ethnography, and the Challenger accident. Ethnography 5, 315–347. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138104045659
