How Relational Methods Matter*
John Sonnett and
Ronald Breiger
forthcoming
in Culture vol.
18
[newsletter of the American Sociological Association Section
on the Sociology of Culture]
Andrew Perrin
(2004) argues that we should "privilege standard techniques of
quantitative sociology—generally, linear regression and its cousins—in our quest
to evaluate and demonstrate culture's empirical role." He claims
that the methodological innovations of Martin, Mische, Bearman, Mohr, and
Breiger are detrimental in achieving this purpose, because they might
"marginalize cultural analysis from the rest of sociology."
Our position is that sociologists
should use appropriate methods, whether narrative, essay, cultural-studies,
feminist, critical, relational, or those more conventionally discussed under
the rubrics of qualitative and/or quantitative, in pursuit of ideas, hypotheses
and vision that have as much breadth and excitement as their authors can
generate. We are admirers of Andrew
Perrin’s research. We would join him in
encouraging cultural sociologists to consider using standard quantitative
methods in many situations. A view less
parochial than Perrin’s, an essay encouraging the use of more relational,
less-standard formal methods for cultural analysis, has been argued with such
sparkle and verve by John Mohr in a recent issue of this newsletter (Mohr, 2003)
that we considered just letting the matter rest. But Perrin raises a number of concerns worthy
of further consideration, and we’d like to join in.
It is true that regression methods
are institutionalized in quantitative sociology, as Perrin points out.
Therefore using these methods may help studies by cultural sociologists get
past professional gatekeepers, and perhaps communicate to a wider sociological
audience. Also, regression methods are best suited for empirical modeling
when theoretical questions take the form of "Does X - - > Y?", as
they often do in quantitative sociology. Both of these aspects make
regression a useful device for communicating cultural sociology.
The form of questioning required by regression models
however is not the only way of looking at how culture matters. To the
extent that cultural processes are about meaning, this suggests that discursive
and semiotic processes are at work. Ever
since Saussure, such processes have been usefully understood on the basis of a
wide variety of relational models. We
would not want to discourage those sociologists of culture who embrace the
relationality on which interpretations build.
The use of relational methods does not require researchers to
"confuse empirical reality with its schematic representation" (as
Perrin charges), but instead to attempt a closer resemblance between empirical
models and theoretical understandings.
Moreover, if cultural sociology is to have wider influence in the
discipline, it must offer something that the discipline does not already
have. Demonstrating that cultural variables can affect non-cultural
outcomes is one kind of contribution, but it is not the only "value-added"
of cultural sociology.
A broader contribution of cultural
sociology is to emphasize the interweaving of so-called cultural and
non-cultural conditions. Qualitative and ethnographic work excels at
this, demonstrating the rich contexts within which cultural action takes place
and emphasizing combinations of factors and the embeddedness of cultural
action. If causal arguments are made, these often articulate with some
form of field theory--a holistic approach to causal interpretation which explicitly
rejects the Newtonian logic of regression's X - - > Y. John Levi Martin’s
(2003) 50-page inquiry into field theory substantially expands on these points.
And the appearance of that essay as the lead article in vol. 109 of AJS
suggests that the mainstream is perhaps less conservative than Perrin in its
willingness to consider the value of relational approaches to cultural
studies. It would be highly ironic
indeed if, just when mainstream research in economic sociology (Ruef, 2000) and
organizations (Lounsbury and Ventresca, 2002) and, yes, culture (Anheier et
al., 1995; Giuffre, 1999) is exhibiting increased interest in relational
approaches to culture, sociologists of culture themselves were to erect a
principled opposition to relationism—an opposition that we believe is
misguided, and based on little more than a fear of not being standard.
Relational methods attempt to
capture some of the contextual richness of more qualitative approaches through
their configurational and network-oriented frameworks. Martin's (2002) study of
constraints on belief, Mische and Pattison’s (2000) study of the joint
construction of organizational actors, protest events, and movement projects
within a civic arena, and Breiger and Mohr’s (2004) analysis of discourse roles
in a post-affirmative action university climate cannot easily be reduced to a
Newtonian causal argument. Rather it is the configuration of relations among
actors, actions, and ideas changing over time that is emphasized.
Configurational logic is the key to
these kinds of approaches, and metric scaling and lattices are only some of the
ways this can be approached. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Ragin, 2000) for
example, is a formal and systematic method that incorporates the logic of
case-based qualitative work. In this logic, empirical cases are described
by the complex configurations of conditions describing them, so that the linear
logic of X - - >Y is replaced with the configurational logic of X*Z*Q - -
> Y. This approach can help illuminate cultural topics, for example by
showing how relations between musical genres and symbolic boundaries do not
follow linear patterns (Sonnett 2004).
Our objection to privileging
regression methods, therefore, is explicitly not that they are just
"shallow numbers" accompanied by an "antiseptic rhetoric,"
although they are indeed sometimes just that (a point that statistician David
Freedman illuminates for sociological methodologists; Freedman, 1991).
Rather, the problem with privileging this framework is that it sometimes uses
numbers, and theory, in ways that disconnect it from the bulk of "cultural
sociology." Assuming the independence of observations, as one must
do in regression, explicitly does away with context, reducing it to the
assumption of ceteris paribus. Perrin is right that hierarchical linear models
can provide important insight into and analysis of cross-level cultural and
social processes, and we applaud the use of HLM along with other multivariate
techniques where such techniques are appropriate.
Sometimes, nonetheless, it is useful
to conceptualize culture as “so entirely situated and context dependent” (as
Perrin writes early in his essay) that techniques such as correspondence
analysis (think of Bourdieu’s “fields”) become very useful. Moreover, we see the boundaries between
“standard” methods and relational or fuzzy—we are tempted to say
“funky”—techniques to be very slippery, and worthy of analysis. Who would have thought that the quantitative
techniques of field theorist Pierre Bourdieu and those of rational-choice
theorist James Coleman are so similar and intimately intertwined? This is precisely a point argued in Breiger
(2000), along with an insistence that quantitative approaches themselves need
to be understood as cultural manifestations.
In conclusion, it is not our intent
to discredit or to throw over regression approaches to cultural sociology, but
only to challenge the claim that they should be privileged over alternative
approaches. Using regression methods may sometimes help cultural sociologists
to provide superb analyses, and perhaps also to publish their work in places
where more "non-cultural" sociologists can see it, although we
suspect that this latter argument is becoming increasingly less valid. Privileging regression methods would be detrimental
to the longer-term development of cultural sociology, because adhering to a
hierarchy of privileged methods established a
priori requires ignoring some of the more fundamental contributions that
methodological frameworks, broadly construed, can make to understanding the
complex interweavings of culture and social action.
*Thanks to John Mohr for helpful
comments on this essay.
REFERENCES
Anheier, Helmut
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859-903.
Breiger, Ronald L. 2000. “A Tool Kit for Practice Theory.” Poetics 27: 91-115.
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L., and John W. Mohr. 2004. “Institutional Logics from the Aggregation
of Organizational Networks: Operational Procedures for the Analysis of Counted
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Freedman, David. 1991. “Statistical
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Ruef, Martin. 2000. “The Emergence
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Sonnett,
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