Symbols, positions, objects: Toward a new theory of revolutions and collective action

History and Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 358-373

  Emirbayer, Mustafa ^a   Goodwin, Jeff ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0000007154     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2505454     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. A review article of Debating Revolutions, edited by Nikki R. Keddie (New York and London, 1995)
2. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991
3. See Harrison White, "Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure," (unpublished manuscript, 1966)
4. World Politics 32 (1980), 425-453
5. The "first generation" of "natural historians" of revolution, according to Goldstone, was largely descriptive and atheoretical: "[U]sing this approach alone left many basic questions unanswered. Chief among these was the question of causes. Why did revolutions arise? What were the sources of opposition to the old regime?" Jack A. Goldstone, "The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions," in Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, ed. Jack A. Goldstone (New York, 1994), 4
6. John Foran, "Theories of Revolution Revisited: Toward a Fourth Generation?" Sociological Theory 11 (1993), 1. An abbreviated version of this essay appears in the volume under review
7. See, e. g. , Steven M. Buechler, "Beyond Resource Mobilization? Emerging Trends in Social Movement Theory," Sociological Quarterly 34 (1993), 217-235
8. Randall Collins, "Maturation of the State-Centered Theory of Revolution and Ideology," Sociological Theory 11 (1993), 127
9. Perhaps the most impressive recent work of theoretical synthesis in the collective-action field is Sidney Tarrow's Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge, Eng. , 1994). Tarrow's approach, however, says less about culture than we would like, and very little at all about agency or social psychology (see below)
10. Several other contributors to the volume intervene in this debate, notably Timur Kuran. See also the "Symposium on Prediction in the Social Sciences," American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995), 1520-1626 (with contributions by Michael Hechter, Kuran, Randall Collins, and Charles Tilly)
11. Goldstone, "Predicting Revolutions: Why We Could (and Should) Have Foreseen the Revolutions of 1989-1991 in the U. S. S. R. and Eastern Europe," in Debating Revolutions, 45
12. Tilly, "The Bourgeois Gentilshommes of Revolutionary Theory," in Debating Revolutions, 136-141
13. See Jeffrey C. Alexander, Action and Its Environments (New York, 1988), which follows upon the work of Parsons and Sorokin. We differ from Parsons, however, in not prioritizing these contexts in any sort of hierarchy, "cybernetic" or otherwise, and certainly in not regarding them as "action systems" per se
14. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, transi. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York, 1953), 36
15. Margaret R. Somers, "What's Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation," Sociological Theory 13 (1995), 135
16. Muriel Atkin, "The Islamic Revolution That Overthrew the Soviet State," in Debating Revolutions, 296-313
17. Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. , 1980)
18. Wasserstrom complains that Goldstone's approach "ends up dangerously close to being simply a new way of marginalizing cultural concerns. " Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Bringing Culture Back In and Other Caveats: A Critique of Jack Goldstone's Recent Essays on Revolution," in Debating Revolutions, 170
19. For a broader consideration of Durkheim's contemporary relevance, see Mustafa Emirbayer, "Useful Durkheim," forthcoming in Sociological Theory (1996)
20. Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, "Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency," American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994), 1411-1454
21. Harrison White, "Can Mathematics Be Social?," forthcoming in Sociological Forum (1996)
22. and Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass. , 1978)
23. Ronald Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge, Mass. , and London, 1992), 181
24. Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton, 1992)
25. Archer observes: "The intimacy of their interconnection denies even relative autonomy to the components involved. And in the absence of any degree of autonomy it becomes impossible to examine their interplay. " Archer, Culture and Agency (Cambridge, Eng. , 1988), 77, 80. Strictly speaking, Archer means by "central conflation" an elision of the "Cultural System" with that of "Socio-Cultural Interaction. "
26. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921] (New York, 1959), 26-27
27. On the concept of structural equivalence, see Emirbayer and Goodwin, "Network Analysis. "
28. See, respectively, Philip Slater, "On Social Regression," American Sociological Review 28 (1963), 339-364
29. and Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York, 1974)
30. See, e. g. , Jeff Goodwin, "The Libidinal Constitution of a High-Risk Social Movement: Affect and Solidarity in the Huk Rebellion," forthcoming in American Sociological Review (1997)
31. Slater, "On Social Regression," 348
32. "Descriptions of nationalist movements," Thomas J. Scheff points out, "note the passion, indeed the very pages crackle with it. But these descriptions do little to conceptualize, analyze, or interpret it. " Scheff, "Emotions and Identity: A Theory of Ethnic Nationalism," in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford, 1994), 282. Scheff calls for a closer examination of "the relational and emotional aspects of ethnic nationalism that most current theories leave out" (282)
33. Exceptions include Thomas J. Scheff, "Emotions and Identity"; Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War (Boulder, 1994)
34. and Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, "Analytical Approaches to Social Movement Culture: The Culture of the Women's Movement," in Social Movements and Culture, ed. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis, 1995), 163-187
35. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), xiii
36. "What Is Agency?," Working Paper No. 206 (1995), Center for Studies of Social Change (CSSC), New School for Social Research
37. Jeffrey C. Alexander, "Some Remarks on 'Agency' in Recent Sociological Theory," Perspectives (Theory Section Newsletter, American Sociological Association), 1-2
38. and Norbert Wiley, The Semiotic Self (Chicago, 1994), 15, 47, 210, 228
39. See Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review 51 (1986), 273-286
40. See Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1982)
41. Emirbayer and Mische, "What is Agency?," 20
42. Michael Walzer, "A Theory of Revolutions," in Radical Principles (New York, 1980), 202-203
43. see also Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass. , 1965)
44. In our view, however, Walzer emphasizes too one-sidedly the agentic nature of revolutionary transformations; for an effective criticism on this score, see Theda Skocpol, "Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell,"in Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge, Eng. , 1994), 201-202
45. See Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, transl. Max Eastman [1932] (New York, 1980)
46. and Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York, 1990)
47. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), xiii
48. See also Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985)
49. See, e. g. , the conjunctural analyses of Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America (Princeton, 1992)
50. and John Foran, "A Theory of Third World Social Revolutions: Iran, Nicaragua, and El Salvador Compared," Critical Sociology 19 (1992), 3-27
51. One of the key methodological texts in this regard is Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987)
52. Theda Skocpol, "Analyzing Causal Configurations in History: A Rejoinder to Nichols," Comparative Social Research 9 (1986), 190