Anprew Aszort is the Ralph Lewis Professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is author of Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (1999) and The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (1988), both published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2001 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2001 Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 0504030201 12345 ISBN: 0-226-00100-8 (cloth) ISBN: 0-226-00101-6 (paper) ‘An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as “Positivism and Interpretation in Sociology," Sociological Forum 5 (1990): 435-58; reprinted by permission of Sociological Forum. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” Social Science History 15 (1991): 201-38; reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abbott, Andrew Delano. Chaos of disciplines / Andrew Abbott. Pp. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-00100-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-226- 0101-6 (pbk. : alk. paper} 1. Sociology—Philosophy. 2. Social sciences— Philosophy. I. Title. HMS585.A23 2000 301'.01—de21 00-055182 @ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.Contents Preface Prologue Part 1 Self-Similarity in Social Science 1 The Chaos of Disciplines The Duality of Stress 3 The Fraction of Construction. Appendix: A History of “Social Construction” to 1990 89 4 The Unity of History 5 The Context of Disciplines Part 2 Two Essays on Self-Similarity 6 Self-Similar Social Structures Appendix: Fractal Scales 186 7 The Selfishness of Men Epilogue References Index vii xv 34 91 121 157 197 233 237 253Preface WHEN I went to college, I majored in something called “History and Lit,” with a special focus on England in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries. Supposedly there was a History and Lit method, but I never figured it out. In my first year, I would go to tutorial with another student, named Jay. We would be talking about Fielding or Pitt or Walpole and he would say something insightfully psychologi- cal. So when our tutor Harold would turn to me with the next ques- tion, I would make some psychological remark. Harold’s face would fall and he would turn to Jay, who would at once make some deft economic argument. Harold’s face would light up. I would try eco- nomics on the next go-round, evoke the same resigned reaction, and watch Jay glide successfully on to a subtle political analysis. By the time I tried politics, he was back with psychology. I was always out of fashion, unable to see which analysis was right for which question. I have always been a little too eclectic. Unable to make up my mind whether to be a scientist or a humanist, I learned what I could about both. I took most of my college courses outside my major (maybe that’s why I never figured it out), drifting toward graduate school with no idea of what field to enter. I chose sociology because more than any other social science sociology would let me do what I pleased. If I went into sociology, I wouldn't have to make up my mind what to do. An accident helped. My one graduate school appli- cation outside sociology—to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought—was rejected because I misunderstood the appli- cation instructions and sent some of the materials to sociology in- stead. As a result, I got admitted to (and attended and eventually be- came chairman of} the Chicago sociology department, a department ixx Preface to which, according to my own understanding of the admissions process, I had never applied. An eclectic is always losing arguments. One lacks the closed- mindedness necessary to treat others’ positions with the contempt they so easily display for one’s own. Of course in interaction I fake this contempt as well as the next academic. But I usually rush off to bone up on what I have just been denying. And I have never man- aged that happy disregard of whole areas of intellectual life—mathe- matics, say, or history—that so simplifies the lives of some of my colleagues. In pursuit of eclecticism, I have for the last fifteen years tried to eradicate some obnoxious intellectual boundaries, in particular that between interpretive and positivistic work in sociology and kindred fields. I girded myself in some theory and some methods and went a-tilting at this windmill in the name of a Dulcinea I called “narra- tive positivism.” There resulted a lot of ill will from narrativists and positivists who, although deeply interested in interdisciplinarity, didn’t want to be mentioned in the same breath. For each, I was the vanguard of the hated other. Indeed an eclectic is always being attacked for ignoring what he in fact takes for granted. Once after I had given a paper at Rutgers’s interdisciplinary center about ten years ago, a graduate student in history pulled me aside and told me, with quiet confidence, “You know, you really ought to read this guy Goffman.” It was in fact an earlier paper presented at this center, in Septem- ber of 1986, that contained my first discussion of the ideas under- girding this book. The book originated in my attempt to understand people's reactions to my eclecticism. Over the years that I have mulled over these questions, the chief institutional support for my work on them has been the Social Science History Association. My original reflections were presented at SSHA meetings, with the en- couragement and support of people like Daniel Scott Smith and Eric Monkkonen. Two of the book’s chapters—those on constructionism. and historical sociology—had their first appearances at SSHA meet- ings (in 1991 and 1990 respectively). The chapter on historical soci- ology was published in an earlier version by the association's jour- nal, Social Science History, in 1991. The construction chapter has circulated fairly widely in a photocopied version, under the more zingy (or more offensive, depending on how you look at it) title of “So Reality Is Socially Constructed: So What?” In any case, SSHA has been the only association in my experience where true eclecti- cism reigns amid intense personal commitments to particular para- digms and subject matters.Preface xi The two other chapters on “fractal distinctions,” although shar- ing the intellectual program of the SSHA papers, first appeared else- where. Chapter 2 (on stress) was first presented to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Hispanic Research Center at Fordham University in 1987, an invitation for which I have to thank Doyle McCarthy and John Huckle. It was in this empirical investiga- tion of a single substantive scientific literature that I first began to imagine a general theoretical analysis for scholarly disagreements. An earlier version of this paper appeared in print, after much stress indeed, in Sociological Forum in 1990. The general essay on fractal distinctions (chapter 1) came later. It was my inaugural lecture in the Social Science Division at Chicago in 1993. This was a great occasion, complete with friendly hecklers and frowning doubters—a rowdy but more or less receptive crowd. I have tamed the platform style a little (only a little) for this pub- lished version. While I was elaborating this cultural analysis of disciplines and their antics, however, I had a related insight about social structures. It was an insight many others had had before, the first of them (as far as I can figure out) being the great anthropologist Evans- Pritchard. This insight was that many social structures look the same in large scale and in small scale. | first ran into a clear example of this phenomenon in the work of a Rutgers colleague, anthropolo- gist Michael Moffatt. After a sufficient number of other examples built up in my files, I wrote (in 1988) the original draft of chapter 6, which has enjoyed a decade-long life in photocopy circulation under the title of “Self-Similar Social Structures.” That draft contained a short speculation about fractal distinctions, derived from the 1987 stress paper, which gradually blew up into the four chapters that begin this book. Chapters 5 and 7 were written for this book in 1997-99. All the earlier papers had long existed in draft or even published form by that point, but had been set aside during the grinding years (1993- 96) that I held the Mastership of the Social Science Collegiate Divi- sion at Chicago. Chapter 5 aims to place the four preceding chapters in social structural and historical context. It obviously owes much to my earlier work on the professions. Less evidently but no less strongly, it is indebted to the practical experience I gained as a dean trying to facilitate (ameliorate?) the intellectual gyrations of one of the world’s great collections of social scientists. Chapter 7 emerged out of a long, friendly, and slightly tipsy argu- ment with Paula England and others at a dinner after an ASA Publi- cations Committee meeting in December 1994. I lost the argument,