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Contexts and Temporalities in Andrew Abbott's Processual Sociology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 July 2018
Abstract
Since the 1970s, Andrew Abbott has promoted an original and ambitious project for the social sciences. In particular, he has argued for the development of a “processual sociology” based on precepts first articulated by the Chicago tradition of sociology and in his view somewhat forgotten. Against functionalism, against the “variables paradigm,” he has emphasized the Chicago tradition's focus on patterns of interaction and their contexts, and has deepened our analysis of the local and ever-particular dimensions of social entities by considering their inscription in successive sequences. As well as seeking to formalize these sequences, this vision aims to link processes playing out at different rhythms and levels. As a project it is based on a conception of social life as a “world of events,” where “change is the normal nature of things” and “not something that happens occasionally to stable social actors.” This makes it possible to explain the emergence and durability of social entities (for example, professions and disciplines) in the flow of events. The originality of this approach consists in founding a new institutionalist analysis of social realities on this ontology of perpetual movement.
Marked by American pragmatism but also traversed by the question of order and social structures, Abbott's oeuvre offers an original approach to the diversity of contexts and temporalities in processes that, through the intermingling of various “lineages,” constitute social traditions and entities. This article presents Abbott's contextualist theses and the intellectual background against which they emerged. It also considers the place that the processual approach accords to contingency and personhood, factors that enable Abbot to work toward a synthesis of history and sociology.
- Type
- Social Sciences, Norms, and Temporality
- Information
- Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 361 - 392
- Copyright
- Copyright © Éditions EHESS 2018
References
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2. Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xii and 331, n. 1.
3. Ibid., xi.
4. Ibid., xi – xiii.
5. Abbott, “La description face à la temporalité,” in Pratiques de la description, ed. Giorgio Blundo and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (Paris, Éd. de l'Ehess, 2003), 41 – 53, here p. 47.
6. Chapoulie, Jean-Michel, La tradition sociologique de Chicago, 1892 – 1961 (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2001), 108Google Scholar, considers that “this conception of social reality marked by permanent change corresponds to a perception and formulation that were commonplace at the beginning of the [twentieth] century,” when Park was finishing his studies.
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17. Fabiani, “Pour en finir avec la réalité unilinéaire.”
18. With this “turn,” he aims to overcome the opposition between “the empirical and the normative,” which he considers to have become untenable in social sciences. See Abbott, “The Future of the Social Sciences: Between Empiricism and Normativity,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 71, no. 3 (2016): 343 – 60, as well as the final chapters of Abbott, Processual Sociology, in particular pp. 229, 258, and 283, where this evolution is presented as the logical prolongation of processual sociology: “All the ‘empirical realities’ of social life” (for example, “institutions of democracy,” “laws of economics,” or professional ethics) appear to be “congealed values,” “the hardened remains of some past value judgement.”
19. Abbott, The System of Professions, xiii.
20. Ibid., chapter 10.
21. Ibid., 281.
22. Ibid., 319 – 23.
23. Ibid., 3 and 9 sq.
24. Ibid., 320.
25. Ibid., xv, 1 – 2, and 19 – 20. See also Abbott, “The Order of Professionalization: An Empirical Analysis,” Work and Occupations 18, no. 4 (1991): 355 – 84.
26. Abbott, The System of Professions, 34 – 35, 55, 64, 86, 143 – 44, 208 – 9, and 279.
27. Abbott, “Écologies liées : à propos du système des professions,” in Les professions et leurs sociologies. Modèles théoriques, catégorisations, évolutions, ed. Pierre-Michel Menger (Paris: Éd. de la Msh, 2003), 29 – 50; Abbott, “Linked Ecologies: States and Universities as Environments for Professions,” Sociological Theory 23, no. 3 (2005): 245 – 74. However, the model of “linked ecologies” does not cover the whole of the social world. For Abbott, the ecology is simply one form among others that allow us to account for its dynamism, and the reasons for its emergence at a particular time remain an “empirical question” (ibid., 269 – 71).
28. Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” 254. The immobility of “thick description” in the style of Clifford Geertz is therefore only superficial, based on the ignorance (feigned or not) of the observer in relation to social dynamics (Abbott, “La description face à la temporalité,” 42 – 46).
29. Abbott, “The Concept of Order in Processual Sociology,” Cahiers parisiens 2 (2006): 315 – 45, here p. 318. On this point, he opposes Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, and Montesquieu. The theories of these last three thinkers “discuss order and disorder empirically, locally, within an actual flow of historical events” (ibid., 317).
30. Abbott, “Process and Temporality in Sociology: The Idea of Outcome in U.S. Sociology,” in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 393 – 426, here pp. 393 and 421.
31. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 220 – 22.
32. Abbott, “What Do Cases Do? Some Notes on Activity in Sociological Analysis,” in What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, ed. Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 53 – 82, here p. 61.
33. Abbott, “From Causes to Events” [1992], in Time Matters, 183 – 205, here pp. 186 and 189.
34. Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?” 60.
35. Abbott, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Theory and Society 26, no. 2/3 (1997): 357 – 99.
36. Abbott, “Positivism and Interpretation in Sociology: Lessons for Sociologists from the History of Stress Research,” Sociological Forum 5 (1990): 435 – 58. On his critique of the variables paradigm see also Fabiani, “Pour en finir avec la réalité unilinéaire,” and Ivan Ermakoff, “La causalité linéaire. Avatars et critiques,” in Demazière and Jouvenet, Andrew Abbott et l'héritage de l’école de Chicago, 1:397 – 417.
37. Abbott, “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” Social Science History 15, no. 2 (1991): 201 – 38, here p. 228.
38. Burawoy, Michael, “Two Methods in Search of Science: Skocpol versus Trotsky,” Theory and Society 18 (1989): 759 – 805, here pp. 765 – 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; William H. Sewell, “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology,” in McDonald, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, 245 – 80.
39. Abbott, “The Causal Devolution” [1998], in Time Matters, 97 – 125, here p. 122.
40. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 3 and 199, n. 9.
41. Ibid., 199 – 200 and 209.
42. Abbott, “The Causal Devolution,” 123 – 24 (Abbott's emphasis).
43. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 201.
44. Abbott, The System of Professions, 3.
45. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 200 (Abbott's emphasis). See also the outline of a “methodology for a contextualist sociology,” on p. 217.
46. Abbott, “Life Cycles in Social Science History,” Social Science History 23, no. 4 (1999): 481 – 89, here p. 487: “We don't theorize contingency by writing haphazardly; we don't theorize narrative by telling stories; we don't represent diversity by merely mixing voices.”
47. Abbott, “History and Sociology,” 223 – 24; Abbott, “The Causal Devolution,” 124. Goffman's processualism is however less structuralist than that of many others within the Chicago school. Indeed, according to Abbott's distinction it is more focused on the “rules” of interactions than the “structural constraints” they are subject to. See Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?” 74.
48. On these methods, see MacIndoe, Heather and Abbott, Andrew, “Sequence Analysis and Optimal Matching Techniques for Social Science Data,” in Handbook of Data Analysis, ed. Hardy, Melissa and Bryman, Alan (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 387 – 406Google Scholar. See also the history presented by Nicolas Robette, “Du prosélytisme à la sécularisation. Le processus de diffusion de l’ ‘optimal matching analysis,’” and Philippe Blanchard, “Les vicissitudes de l'innovation méthodologique. ‘Validité, falsifiabilité, parcimonie, consistance, précision, etc.,’” both in Demazière and Jouvenet, Andrew Abbott et l'héritage de l’école de Chicago, respectively 2:173 – 94 and 2:151 – 71. An overview of the literature is provided in in Philippe Blanchard, Felix Bühlmann, and Jacques-Antoine Gauthier, eds., Advances in Sequence Analysis: Theory, Method, Applications (New York: Springer, 2014).
49. Abbott, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” 358.
50. Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, 10 – 12.
51. Ibid., 30 – 32, 59, and 153; Abbott, Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
52. Abbott, “Positivism and Interpretation in Sociology,” 436 and 451.
53. See above, 365 – 70.
54. Abbott, “La description face à la temporalité,” 48. Daniel Cefaï, “Comment généralise-t-on ? Chronique d'une ethnographie de l'urgence sociale,” in Faire des sciences sociales, vol. 3, Généraliser, ed. Emmanuel Désveaux and Michel de Fornel (Paris: Éd. de l'Ehess, 2012), 31 – 57, emphasizes that ethnology has often been considered as “irremediably confined within a kind of indexical reference” (p. 31).
55. Fabiani, Jean-Louis, “La généralisation dans les sciences historiques. Obstacle épistémologique ou ambition légitime ?” Annales HSS 62, no. 1 (2007): 9 – 28Google Scholar, here p. 21: “In the everyday activity of the social sciences . . . today, the interactionist model seems to trump the structural model: a limited consensus awards the former with the great virtues of flexibility and adaptability to the allegedly less stable configurations of contemporary social life. A sort of ‘soft’ interactionism seems to have invaded the routine practices of the social sciences. Yet structuralist conceptualizations are regularly mobilized when it comes to identifying explanatory factors or making generalizations.”
56. From this perspective, social science professionals are constantly re-performing the same repertoire, as at the opera: “we are not discoverers, we are performers” of great problems discovered long ago (Abbott, Time Matters, 33). “The ancients stole all our great ideas,” Mark Twain supposedly wrote. Abbott however adds that if “most of sociology is rediscovered, . . . that does not mean that all subsequent versions are worthless. . . . The great truths are worth reformulating, rediscovering, again and again.” See Abbott, Andrew and COFSS, “‘Le monde est un monde d’événements’. Entretien avec Andrew Abbott,” Raisons politiques 60, no. 4 (2015): 45 – 64, here pp. 58 – 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57. Abbott “History and Sociology,” 229.
58. Abbott, Time Matters, 4 – 5.
59. Barthes, Roland, S/Z: An Essay, trans Miller, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)Google Scholar.
60. Abbott, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” 358; Abbott, “Transcending General Linear Reality,” 62; Abbott, “Conceptions of Time and Events in Social Science Methods” [1990], in Time Matters, 161 – 82, here p. 164 and n. 7.
61. Abbott, Processual Sociology, 286 sq.
62. Abbott, “Transcending General Linear Reality,” 39 – 40; Abbott, “La description face à la temporalité,” citation p. 48.
63. Goudsblom, Johan, “Penser avec Elias,” in Norbert Elias, la politique et l'histoire, ed. Garrigou, Alain and Lacroix, Bernard (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 302 – 10Google Scholar, here p. 303; Chartier, Roger, “Elias : une pensée des relations,” Espaces Temps 53/54 (1993): 43 – 60Google Scholar, here pp. 49 and 56.
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66. This model does not refer to a “continued, uniform, linear progression” (Heinich, La sociologie de Norbert Elias, 24) but nevertheless postulates a “global coherence in the evolution of humanity over the long term,” with a “general orientation and direction” (Catherine Colliot-Thélène, quoted in ibid., 25). Elias also relies on culturalist psychology to analyze “the formation of regimes of behavior,” “ways of doing things” (Goudsblom, “Penser avec Elias,” 304 and 405). On Elias's project and its development, see Joly, Marc, Devenir Norbert Elias. Histoire croisée d'un processus de reconnaissance scientifique: la réception française (Paris: Fayard, 2012)Google Scholar.
67. Abbott, Methods of Discovery, 145.
68. Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?” 71. For Abbott this is a crucial problem in social sciences today, when researchers have access to vast repertoires of digital data. Abbott, “Reflections on the Future of Sociology,” Contemporary Sociology 29, no. 2 (2000): 296 – 300, here p. 298.
69. Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?” 71 – 72.
70. Abbott, The System of Professions, 3.
71. Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?” 76 – 79. We may also think of studies that describe collective action as the product of sequences of typical interactions rather than of shared motivation. See, for example, Granovetter, Mark, “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 6 (1978): 1420 – 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72. Abbott, “Conceptions of Time and Events,” 182. On history as belonging to the “class of narrative,” see Chartier, Roger, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Languages, and Practices, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 7 – 9Google Scholar.
73. Abbott, “History and Sociology,” 226 – 27.
74. Except in a few specific niches centered on particular methods or subjects, such as science and technology studies (ibid., 201 – 8, quotation p. 201).
75. Lachman, Richard, What Is Historical Sociology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 10 – 13Google Scholar.
76. Prost, Antoine, Douze leçons sur l'histoire (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1996), 115 – 16Google Scholar.
77. Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point.”
78. Abbott, “Temporality and Process in Social Life” [1998], in Time Matters, 209 – 39, here pp. 211 – 12.
79. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 226.
80. On the uses of the concept of culture in historical sociology and in history, see Lachmann, What Is Historical Sociology? 115 – 27; Bonnell, Victoria E. and Hunt, Lynn, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
81. Abbott, Time Matters, 20 and 28; Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” 257 – 58.
82. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 32.
83. Ibid., 81, 103 – 4, 120 – 21, 137, 178, 180 – 83, and 223 – 25.
84. Ibid., 203.
85. Abbott, “Things of Boundaries,” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995): 857 – 82, here p. 864.
86. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 232.
87. Abbott, “Things of Boundaries,” 872 – 73.
88. Ibid., 877 – 78. Abbott associates this argument with descriptions of power as “robust action,” as set out in Padgett, John and Ansell, Christopher, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400 – 1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (1993): 1259 – 1319CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or as the ability to avoid “rational choice,” citing Leifer, Eric M., Actors as Observers: A Theory of Skill in Social Relationships (New York: Garland, 1991)Google Scholar. We could also mention Michel Callon and Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, in which the macro actor is the one to which the longest chains of action can be attributed. See, for example, Callon and Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So,” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, ed. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron V. Cicourel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981; repr. 2015), 277 – 303.
89. Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” 256.
90. Guenée, Bernard, La folie de Charles VI. Roi Bien-Aimé (Paris: Perrin, 2004)Google Scholar.
91. Abbott, “The Problem of Excess,” Sociological Theory 32, no. 1 (2014): 1 – 26, here p. 24, n. 10.
92. Abbott, “The Historicality of Individuals,” Social Science History 29, no. 1 (2005): 1 – 13, here p. 1.
93. Sahlins, Marshall, Islands of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 34, 41, and 153Google Scholar.
94. Guenée, La folie de Charles VI, back cover.
95. On this division, see Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.
96. Abbott, Processual Sociology, 1.
97. Abbott and COFSS, “Le monde est un monde d’événements,” 52. See also the demonstration by Goff, Jacques Le, concerning the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, in Must We Divide History Into Periods? trans. DeBevoise, Malcolm (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “The question for the historian, then, becomes this: in the enlargement brought about in 1492, which is more important, that which ends or that which continues?”
98. Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point”; Abbott, “The Concept of Order in Processual Sociology.”
99. Quentin Deluermoz, “Andrew Abbott et la question du temps. Configurations, temporalités, historicités,” in Demazière and Jouvenet, Andrew Abbott et l'héritage de l’école de Chicago, 2:127 – 48, here p. 137.
100. Ibid., 138.
101. This perspective can be compared with Elias's approach, which notably included the integration of processes observed on different levels (hence his eclecticism, lauded in passing by Abbott, see above p. 373). Elias also identified “lines of change” that evolve together, “distinct but not separate,” such as those that concern “ethics, etiquette, [and] economics” within the “civilizing process.” See Goudsblom, “Penser avec Elias,” 309.
102. Sewell, “Three Temporalities,” 275, n. 3. This assessment is presented identically fourteen years later in the French translation: “Trois temporalités : vers une sociologie événementielle,” in Bifurcations. Les sciences sociales face aux ruptures et à l’événement, ed. Marc Bessin, Claire Bidart and Michel Grossetti (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), 109 – 46, here p. 111, n. 4.
103. Abbott, Processual Sociology, 24.
104. Abbott, Time Matters, 298.
105. Abbott, “Things of Boundaries,” 858 – 59.
106. Abbott, “History and Sociology,” 225. Here Abbott confesses a musical influence. His “knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings of classical music” has always been his “secret way [of] theorizing about multilevel social process” (Abbott, Time Matters, 26).
107. Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II [1949], trans. Reynolds, Sîan (London: HarperCollins, 1972)Google Scholar.
108. Delacroix, Christian, “Échelle,” in Historiographies, vol. 2, Concepts et débats, ed. Delacroix, Christian et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 725 – 30Google Scholar, here p. 726.
109. Jacques Revel, introduction to Fernand Braudel et l'histoire, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Hachette, 1999), 9 – 26, here p. 18; Delacroix, Christian, Dosse, François, and Garcia, Patrick, Les courants historiques en France, xixe – xxe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 340 – 41Google Scholar. See also Braudel, Fernand, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History, trans. Matthews, Sarah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25 – 54Google Scholar.
110. Cited in Revel, introduction to Fernand Braudel et l'histoire, 20.
111. Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 31.
112. Prost, Douze leçons sur l'histoire, 122; Revel, introduction to Fernand Braudel et l'histoire, 13; Delacroix, Dosse, and Garcia, Les courants historiques en France, 340 – 41 and 345. By looking at the role of the Annales in the evolution of the border between sociology and history, Jérôme Lamy and Arnaud Saint-Martin situate Braudel's project for the social sciences in a dynamic that is both institutional and intellectual, seen from an Abbottian perspective: Lamy and Saint-Martin, “Jeu de frontières. Les Annales et la sociologie,” Revue de synthèse 131, no. 1 (2010): 99 – 127.
113. Lemercier, Claire, “A History Without the Social Sciences?” Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): 271 – 83Google Scholar, here pp. 282 – 83.
114. Abbott, “From Causes to Events,” 194.
115. “But do economic and social options not become inevitabilities when they are too closely correlated together? Think of that knot in which the three-year crop rotation system, open fields, the use of horses and carts, cereal crops, strong community identities, and the feudal regime all worked together to maintain, to naturalize, in the strong sense of the word, a division of labor and a model of production. . . . Societies thus came together in clusters of unequally viable and compatible habits.” Jean-Claude Perrot, “Le présent et la durée dans l’œuvre de Braudel,” in Revel, Fernand Braudel et l'histoire, 165 – 85, here p. 176 (my emphasis).
116. Abbott, “History and Sociology,” 224 – 25; Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, 116. In this perspective we might consider as “pure sociology” those experiments that concentrate historical narrative on a specific year, such as James Shapiro's detailed demonstrations of the links between William Shakespeare's trajectory and his historical context: Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2006); Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015). Yet these experiments contrast with narratives that describe a longer period, but in which the analysis is largely based on personal interpretation, the data on the playwright's trajectory being notoriously incomplete. If we share Abbott's interest in contextuality, we can therefore see that there is no paradox in considering that it is Shapiro's studies, although focused on a short sequence, that “reanimate Shakespeare's world” (to borrow an expression from the review by Neill, Michael, “Glimpsed in the Glare,” London Review of Books 37, no. 24, December 17, 2015, 39 – 41)Google Scholar and better identify the contextual foundations of his career. The definition of the levels and time-span relevant to processual analysis is an operation of the researcher, and is not set in a hierarchy that necessarily prioritizes the macro level or biographical time.
117. Abbott, “History and Sociology,” 224 – 25 and 230. The challenge is also a methodological one, because this type of study involves collecting data on several levels: Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?” 59 – 60.
118. Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, 122 – 23, 128, 148, and 152.
119. Ibid., 122 – 23. Abbott's recent considerations on the evolution of working conditions in research systems confirm that these influences constitute a significant source of ecological change (now well documented by numerous studies on “managerialization” in universities and research organizations). See Abbott, Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Abbott, “Dans les yeux des autres,” 437 – 62.
120. Abbott, Andrew and Sparrow, James T., “Hot War, Cold War: Structures of Sociological Action, 1940 – 1955,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Calhoun, Craig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 281 – 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
121. Abbott, “Linked Ecologies,” 254.
122. Abbott, The System of Professions, 176.
123. Abbott, “Dans les yeux des autres,” 447.
124. Abbott, “From Causes to Events,” 191.
125. Abbott, The System of Professions, 113.
126. Abbott, “Life Cycles in Social Science History.”
127. Abbott, “Organizations and the Chicago School,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations, ed. Paul S. Adler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 399 – 420, here p. 419.
128. Abbott, “The Historicality of Individuals,” 3, 5, and 7.
129. Abbott, Time Matters, 20 – 23 and 296; Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” 257; Abbott, “From Causes to Events,” 194; Abbott, “Temporality and Process in Social Life,” 235.
130. Abbott, “Things of Boundaries,” 864.
131. Abbott, Time Matters, 22 (my emphasis).
132. Deluermoz, “Abbott et la question du temps,” 139.
133. Sewell, “Three Temporalities.”
134. Abbott, “Conceptions of Time and Events,” 179, n. 28.
135. “What has the most duration is what is best at starting itself up all over again” wrote Bachelard, who also considered “the past as empty as the future, the future as dead as the past.” Quoted in Perrot, “Le présent et la durée dans l’œuvre de Braudel,” 174 – 75.
136. Sewell, “Three Temporalities.”
137. “The sense of contingency specific to pragmatism is undoubtedly the best remedy against the contrary propensity that leads us to give the encrusted habits and forms of social and individual life the mark of necessity.” Quoted in Jean-Pierre Cometti, Qu'est-ce que le pragmatisme ? (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 282.
138. Abbott, “What Do Cases Do?” 60.
139. Ibid., 68.
140. The international press ran articles with titles such as “How Scalia's Death Will Change the Supreme Court, America, and the Planet,” “How Antonin Scalia's Death Could Save the Planet,” “Scalia's Death May Have Saved the Planet,” etc.
141. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Amy Mandelker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 841.
142. Abbott, Time Matters, 5, n. 1.
143. To use Braudel's expression, quoted in Revel, introduction to Fernand Braudel et l'histoire, 25. On counterfactual history see Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou, Pour une histoire des possibles. Analyses contrefactuelles et futurs non advenus (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2016).
144. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 225.
145. Abbott, Time Matters, 297; Abbott, “On the Concept of Turning Point,” 257 – 59. See also Abbott and COFSS, “Le monde est un monde d’événements,” 53.
146. Ermakoff, Ivan, Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ermakoff, “The Structure of Contingency,” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 1 (2015): 64 – 125.
147. See below, 388 – 89.
148. Abbott, “Temporality and Process in Social Life,” 232 – 34.
149. Ibid., 234.
150. Abbott, Department and Discipline, 226.
151. André Burguière, “Le changement social : brève histoire d'un concept,” in Les formes de l'expérience. Une autre histoire sociale, ed. Bernard Lepetit (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 253 – 72.
152. Abbott, “The Historicality of Individuals.”
153. Deluermoz, “Abbott et la question du temps.”
154. Pierre-Michel Menger, “Temporalité, action et interaction,” in Demazière and Jouvenet, Andrew Abbott et l'héritage de l’école de Chicago, 1:145 – 70.
155. Abbott, “Temporality and Process in Social Life,” 214 – 24. These remarks shed additional light on the dialogue reproduced in “Process and Temporality in Sociology,” 393. Abbott illustrates his invitation to concentrate on the operations of actors, rather than the variables “causing” their accession to different social statuses (see above, p. 367), by relating a scene from Saturday Night Fever in which Travolta's character argues with his boss about his way of projecting himself in time: “Fuck the future” Tony says, thinking above all of the shirt that he will wear out the following night; “No, Tony” replies his boss, “The future . . . fucks you.”
156. Pierre François, “L'action chez Andrew Abbott. Pierre de touche ou chaînon manquant ?” in Demazière and Jouvenet, Andrew Abbott et l'héritage de l’école de Chicago, 1:171 – 90.
157. Ermakoff, “La causalité linéaire,” 412. Contextualising this orientation, Ermakoff concedes that it is probably partly explained by the “state of the field of sociological research at the time Abbott began his work: the description of sequential structures was then the most uncharted of terrains and thus the one requiring the most methodological investment” (p. 414).
158. Abbott, Processual Sociology. See the initial attempt in Abbott, “Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology,” Sociological Theory 25, no. 1 (2007): 67 – 99.
159. Abbott, “Dans les yeux des autres,” 454 – 56.
160. This perspective further increases the interest of the affinities between Abbott's project and microhistory. See Claire Lemercier, “Abbott et la micro-histoire. Lecture croisée,” in Demazière and Jouvenet, Andrew Abbott et l'héritage de l’école de Chicago, 2:105 – 25.
161. Abbott and COFSS, “Le monde est un monde d’événements,” 51.
162. “Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large part of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements.” Tolstoy, War and Peace, 881.
163. Abbott, “Things of Boundaries.”
164. Abbott, “The Problem of Excess.” This heuristic of inversion leads Abbott to take on well-known mountain peaks of sociology, but via alternative routes that are often exposed to adverse winds. Approaching the “problem of abundance” by its north face, he considers for example that the way in which our modern societies deal with excess (of population, pollution, information, consumer goods, and so on) deserves conceptual theorization. From this perspective, rarity appears more the product of normative frameworks for managing abundance (which would otherwise paralyze all action by spreading “the malady of the infinite” targeted by Durkheim) than the negation of it.
165. See the contributions assembled in the two volumes of Demazière and Jouvenet, Andrew Abbott et l'héritage de l’école de Chicago.
166. Abbott, “Reflections on the Future of Sociology,” 299.
167. Gieryn, Thomas F., “Boundaries of Science,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Jasanoff, Sheila et al. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995), 393 – 443Google Scholar; Shinn, Terry and Ragouet, Pascal, Controverses sur la science. Pour une sociologie transversaliste de l'activité scientifique (Paris: Raisons d'Agir, 2005)Google Scholar; Romano, Antonella, “Making the History of Early Modern Science: Reflections on a Discipline in the Era of Globalization,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): 307 – 34Google Scholar, here p. 322 – 23. For a case study dedicated to scientists of the “nanoworld,” see Jouvenet, Morgan, “Boundary Work between Research Communities: Culture and Power in a French Nanosciences and Nanotechnology Hub,” Social Science Information 52, no. 1 (2013): 134 – 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
168. As I recently tried to demonstrate in Jouvenet, Morgan, “From the Poles to the Laboratories: Stages of International Cooperation in Palaeoclimatology (1955 – 2015),” Revue Française de Sociologie (English Edition) 57, no. 3 (2018, to be published)Google Scholar.
169. Several historians have underlined the dearth of reflection on the context and historicity of science in this literature: Galison, Peter, “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science,” Isis 99 (2008): 111 – 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapin, Steven, “Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen through the Externalism-Internalism Debate,” History of Science 30 (1992): 333 – 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. If the STS of the 1970s opened up the “era of science in context,” they also encouraged a break with the “grand narratives” (such as that of the scientific revolution: see Romano, “Making the History of Early Modern Science”) which limited efforts toward temporal contextualization.
170. Deluermoz, “Abbott et la question du temps.”
171. Romano, “Making the History of Modern Science,” 316. See the usages of this term in Pestre, Dominique, ed., Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, 3 vols. (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2015)Google Scholar.
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This is a translation of: Contextes et temporalités dans la sociologie processuelle d’Andrew Abbott