Where does theory come from?

Part II: Burning questions, context, evaluation and testing, concepts

Sociologist George Ritzer defines theory as a ‘set of interrelated ideas that allow for the systematization of knowledge of the social world, the explanation of that world, and predictions about the future of the social world.’

More simply put: Knowledge, generated by structured inquiry, that attempts to explain and/or predict social phenomena. Each discipline in the social sciences (e.g., sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, political science) has its own ever-evolving rules and conventions about what constitutes accepted practice in terms of doing research, collecting and analyzing data, drawing conclusions, and trying to tell a story in terms of cause and effect relationships.

Theory generally involves some level of abstraction. For instance, an attempt to predict the variables [cause] affecting the price of gasoline [effect] is pretty specific, not a theoretical question (supply, demand, cost to produce, transport, conflict in producing regions, etc.). A more theoretical question might ask about the basic forces affecting demand, price, etc. Or how petroleum affects the foreign and domestic policies of governments. In the real world, you would need both questions to try to explain how petroleum influences both prices and politics. Another example: Trying to explain or predict peasant uprisings or revolts would be a theoretical question (addressed by the likes of political scientists James Scott and Joel Migdal, and sociologist Charles Tilly, among others). On the other hand, assessing public opinion or attitudes about government is informational, concrete (though such data could be used in a formulation of more abstract theorizing). It describes, but doesn’t really seek to explain much other than maybe why people voted the way they did, how they feel about a politician this week, or why certain policies may succeed or fail. Theory might examine elections over decades for patterns that explain underlying voting behavior.

Issues that have captured sociologists’ imaginations:

Oh my. No end to this. That’s one aspect of what makes Sociology so broad, but so interesting.

• Rise of individualism (theoretical perspectives include rational choice theory, symbolic interactionism) – and you might have thought that all societies throughout history encouraged self-expression (notable theorists include Adam Smith, George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman). The notion of the ‘self,’ which we in Western industrialized societies may think is as fundamental as being human, has been argued to be an artifact of modernity, and of microeconomic theory that argues people engage in self-interested decision ‘calculus’, but at a collective level everyone pursuing their own self-interests leads to markets and supply/demand relationships, even structures, but through the ‘invisible hand’ of self-interest.
• The rise of nation-states (theorists include Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Joel Migdal)– how is it that we have all of these ‘states’ with similar governing bodies? This is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. What happened to duchies, city-states, manors, clans and tribes, etc.?
• How did markets, capitalism, and industry come about (theorists include Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, Emile Durkheim)? Have societies always been characterized by a minority ruling class employing or in the extreme enslaving a majority laboring class?
• Where did democracy originate (theorists include Max Weber, Barrington Moore, Alexis de Tocqueville)? What about dictatorships? Can we predict or explain the rise of one or the other?
• From where do inequalities emerge (Marx, Immanuel Wallerstein, WEB Du Bois, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler)?
• Power (C. Wright Mills, Michael Mann, Steven Lukes, William Domhoff, Michel Foucault, Patricia Hill Collins). What is it, how is it exercised, distributed, is it a ‘zero-sum’ competition for scarce resources, can power be so structural that a society merely perceives inequality as part of the natural social order?
• Is modernity fundamentally different from traditional social arrangements (Anthony Giddens, Michelle Foucault)? What does surveillance (for instance via algorithms on your smart phone, or the Internet, or via video) affect people and the relationship between the ruling class and everyone else? What about risk (Ulrich Beck)?
• How do cultures socialize their youth and prepare them for adulthood (George Herbert Mead, Charles Cooley, Sigmund Freud, Albert Bandura, Dorothy Smith), and how does that change from one kind of society to another?
• How do people navigate every day social life (theorists include Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann)?

How to communicate theories?

• Sets of hypotheses, statements about the social world
• Often expressed as relationships between variables – cause and effect
• These relationships are probabilistic – in other words, the best we can do is explain tendencies and likelihoods – Do race and gender affect average lifetime income earnings (yes)? Do race and gender affect likelihood of incarceration (yes)? Does this mean all people of color will be incarcerated (no)?
• Use of language – terms and concepts are important, and social scientists develop and use them carefully. These can change over time. For instance, what Durkheim once called ‘social facts,’ sociologists now often refer to as persistent ‘structures.’
• Supporting evidence/research
• Publication venues (books, journals)—less ‘mainstream’ theories may be less likely to achieve mainstream notoriety (there’s an hypothesis in there somewhere …). However, fast food enterprises (well-described by Ritzer’s concept of McDonaldization) lay out the dangers of conferring privileged status on mainstream or ‘received’ views to the exclusion of alternative and marginalized explanations. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, ‘All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.‘

How to evaluate theories?

• Test them (examine logic, evidence, sampling issues)—by theorists themselves, or by their other theorists, researchers
• Test of time (do predictions pan out? Do explanations become clearer?)
• Peer review, criticism, comparison with competing theories (global warming deniers like to claim that sun spots are the primary cause of climate change, but they have no theory, whereas prevailing theory and a 40% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration since the dawn of industrialization seems to have produced consistent trends and increases in average global temperatures)
• Parsimony (this means explaining the most with the least)–so given competing theories, the one that seems to explain the most variation in some phenomenon, with the least number of variables that seem to be causing variation, is usually favored. (to take a trivial case) How to predict which baseball team will win the World Series? Coaching? Hitting? Defense? Pitching? Strategy? Support of fans? Speed on the bases? Team chemistry? Injuries? Experienced players? Fitness? That’s a lot of variables. But if one or two seem to explain most of the winners, that’s usually considered a more elegant explanation. But new evidence and ideas can change all that (consider sabermetrics).

In any case, a theory, to be of some value to social science, must demonstrate that it has some explanatory power. One way to do that is to show a theory’s precepts can be tested. For instance, critics of Marxian theory might claim that societies have not developed from capitalism to socialism to communism (where workers govern themselves) as he predicted. Marx would likely say ‘Well, capitalists are clever and they inject little doses of socialism to stay in power. Just wait.’

But that’s not a testable proposition.Yet neither does it render Marx’s ‘meta’ theory about historical materialism meaningless.

Politics (some other questions theorists ask)

• Why might theories be threatening (e.g., Galileo, sexual orientation, evolution)?
• Can we predict what conditions (in the world) will create dictatorships or democracies?
• Do out-of-wedlock births and lack of marriage cause poverty?
• Can we predict who will become the next president in the U.S?
• Where will the U.S. engage militarily? What country will become the next superpower?
• What will happen to global inequalities and poverty?
• What will happen to EOU in the next 10 years?
• Who will win the Super Bowl?
• What will be the most profitable investments in the next 5 years?
• Will globalization lead to a clash of civilizations (and WWIII)?
• How will smart phones and social media change political discourse?
• How will surveillance society affect individual civil liberties?

Some basic concepts related to theory

• Epistemology—study of knowledge, ways of ‘knowing’
• Deterministic versus probabilistic
• Role of logic and evidence—disciplined inquiry, research
• Testability – if you can’t test it, it may be a great set of ideas, but how can you go about disproving them or comparing them against competing theoretical formulations?
• Accumulative, incremental (with occasional ‘revolutions’)—deductive approach (working from theory to observation, testing theory)—A lot of research begins with an existing theory, and seeks to test some part of it, so it moves from the more abstract ideas to more concrete specifics that may or may not support a theory.
• Grounded theory—inductive (working from observation to generalization—developing theory)—some researchers start with some questions, engage in research, begin to identify patterns in their data, leading to the development of categories and generalizations, and if they’re persistent, maybe . . . theoretical propositions. Which may then be subject to more deductive approaches to theory testing.
• Relationship between inductive and deductive research (they tend to complement each other)
• Micro versus macrosociological approaches, different levels of theorizing–are you trying to explain how societies change over long stretches of time (macro), or how bullying can manifest itself in elementary school-aged children (micro)?
• Orientation or perspective (e.g., multicultural theories, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory)—in other words, theorizing from different groups’ perspectives produces different kinds of knowledge
• Positivism—an ontological view that theory is derived from empirical observation, and is universal in nature
• Social constructionism—the idea that what is studied by theorists is itself a product of social forces, not some objective phenomenon. So for instance theorists and their ideas are shaped by their own social locations, and the historical eras in which they live and engage in inquiry.
• Emic and etic perspectives—Emic stresses the importance of understanding the lived perspective of the researched, the on the ground accounts; an etic perspective stresses the way things may seem from the point of view of the researcher, generally more of that bird’s eye view.

Do we hafta spend so much time on those white men from the 19th century?

We will start with the famous white men from the 19th century, the canon, so to speak. Durkheim, Marx and Weber. Not because white European men had any monopoly on theory or insight into society – but consider 19th century Europe, and how white, educated men might have had privileges that afforded them the luxury of a life of scholarship and thinking. And think they did, about the sweeping and massive changes that took place in the first century of industrialization.

And others with insights into society may have had wildly different perspectives. Would a black man born in the US just after the end of the Civil War (W.E.B. Du Bois) tell a story of society that ignored race and skin color? Would a woman born slightly before (Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Martineau) ignore how social life could be structured by gender? In a word . . . no. Were they afforded the same opportunities to write, engage in scholarship, and rise to the heights of their profession? No.

But in the imperfect world where Sociology sprouted and grew, the ideas of Durkheim, Marx and Weber took hold. We include them, along with other early theorists, because their ideas and theories still resonate today. And they show us much about how societies grow, how they develop and change as they grow larger and more complex, and how there is no one Theory of Society. We look through different lenses, and we see different phenomena. If you were born in Central Oregon and had never visited a city larger than Bend, your ability to describe life in Manhattan, Rio di Janeiro, or Mumbai would be limited and based on accounts you had read or heard or seen, but not experienced firsthand. Your sources might further constrain it, whether they be books, newspapers, youtube videos, your family, social media, or emails or texts from friends.

As for change? Imagine being born in 1800 and living until 1900. Or born in 1900 and living until 2000. Or 1930, and living through the first decade of the ‘smart’ phone. Or 1990 and living through the first decade of the smart phone and social media. How to make sense of those changes, how people live, how they organize their lives, their work, their relationships, their spiritual beliefs, meet their basic needs (and then some)? How indeed. There is a reason that we study social theory much more than, for instance, conspiracy theory. Because conspiracy theory isn’t built on conclusions based on logic and evidence and inquiry. It doesn’t teach us much about understanding reality (however understanding conspiracism can teach us much about contemporary politics, for instance, and even how a deadly pandemic becomes politicized). If conspiracy theorists were the ones who we listened to when it comes to understanding societies, we might think they were all secretly run by ‘Deep States’ where a small cabal of mysterious, cult-like, satan-worshiping communist pedophiles pulled the puppet strings and oppressed the masses, or saved humanity from asteroids hurtling towards Earth, or lasers of possible Jewish provenance causing wildfires in California. And yet conspiracy theories may be more popular, not because there is much truth to them, but because people so desperately want there to be (sorry, Q). And that is yet another fertile terrain for theorizing . . .

George Ritzer. 2007. Contemporary Sociological Theory and its Classical Roots (2nd edition). NY: McGraw-Hill.