European Societies Book Reviews

This article was downloaded by: [Red de Bibliotecas del CSIC] On: 04 March 2015, At: 02:34 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK European Societies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reus20 Book Reviews Richard Breena, Joe Baileyb, Geoff Paynec, Jacques Coenen-Hutherd, Olaf Strucke, Bo Rothsteinf, Klaus Rasborgg, John Scotth, Richard Jenkinsi, Luis Morenoj, Celia Valientek, Jacques Coenen-Hutherl & Göran Ahrnem a Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence. b Kingston University, UK. c University of Plymouth, UK. d University of Geneva, Department of Sociology. e University of Bremen, Germany. f Department of Political Science, Göteborg University. g Department of Social Science and Economics Roskilde University, Denmark. h University of Essex, UK. i University of Sheffield, UK. j European University Institute, Italy. k Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain l Department of Sociology, University of Geneva. m Department of Sociology, Stockholm University. Published online: 21 Oct 2013. To cite this article: Richard Breen, Joe Bailey, Geoff Payne, Jacques Coenen-Huther, Olaf Struck, Bo Rothstein, Klaus Rasborg, John Scott, Richard Jenkins, Luis Moreno, Celia Valiente, Jacques Coenen-Huther & Göran Ahrne (1999) Book Reviews, European Societies, 1:2, 289-318, DOI: 10.1080/14616696.1999.10749935 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616696.1999.10749935 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions Downloaded by [Red de Bibliotecas del CSIC] at 02:34 04 March 2015 European Societies 1(2) 1999: 289-318 © 1999 laylor & Francis• Ltd BOOK REVIEWS Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg (eds), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-521-59319-0 Hardback £50.00, 0-521-59687-0 Paperback £16.95, 327pp. In this book, Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg have assembled a set of papers contributed to a seminar on social mechanisms held in Stock holm in 1996. The editors' aim is to seek to advance a 'third way' in sociological theory. This at once tries to avoid the kind of grand explanatory theory which has, by and large, fallen into sociological disrepute; and the equally grandiose claims of what we might call non explanatory theory - that is to say, theory whose goal is to provide a conceptual scheme with which to understand social phenomena. In contrast to the latter, the social mechanisms approach takes explanation to be the goal of theory, but, unlike the former, makes no claim to uncover law-like generalizations. The social mechanisms approach is perhaps most closely associated with the ideas of Jon Elster, who contributes a charac teristic chapter to the collection, but the authors find examples and inspiration in the work of Merton, Coleman, Granovetter, Schelling (who also contributes) and others. The approach thus grows out of contemporary rational choice theory: it is both analytical and formal. The idea is to isolate a set of fairly elementary social mechanisms in the sense of causal models that link sets of given conditions with certain actions. A famous example is dissonance reduction. Such a mechanism implies that, when faced with potentially dissonant information, agents will act in such a way as to avoid this Downloaded by [Red de Bibliotecas del CSIC] at 02:34 04 March 2015 information. But matters are more complicated than this, because it is seldom the case that only one mechanism is potentially operative in a given set of circumstances. Then the approach might be formalized by thinking of a 'mechanism space' in a given circumstance, each element of which has a probability of being employed. But then we need to ask: Is the mechanism space well defined; and, if it is, how can we assign probabilities to the individual mechanisms? The point is not merely technical. If mechanisms are to be used as part of a proper explanation of action, it is important that the explanation also tells us something about which mechanism will be used in which circumstances. Put another way, a 289 EUROPEAN SOCIETIES mechanism can ex-post explain behaviour because we know that 'absence makes the heart grow fonder'. But it could ex-post explain the opposite outcome from the same set of circumstances because we also know that 'out of sight is out of mind'. A serious programme of social mechanisms analysis would thus seek both to assemble a listing of elementary mechanisms, and to say something about how the probability distri butions over mechanisms in given situations are formed. Many of the contributors to the volume recognize the need for the former, but less is said about the latter, though Elster has a typically insightful but under developed discussion of this in his contribution. But there is a paradox here. Can an explanation of the probability distribution over mechanisms (in other words, why some mechanisms are more salient to some people in a given situation) itself be an explanation in social mechanism terms? Furthermore, any such explanation will need to rely on statistical theory at some point. It is a little puzzling to me why some of the contributors see quantitative analysis as a natural target against which to tilt with the social mechanisms approach. Of course, all approaches must define themselves by criticizing their rivals, and 'variable sociology', as it is termed here, is pretty much a sitting duck. But as these things go, it is clear that, at least in terms of their common intention to explain, variable sociology and social mechanisms have a great deal more in common than either does with those approaches which seek to deny the possibility of sociological explanation of human action (and which are ably discussed in Colin Campbell's The Myth of Social Action). On the one hand, this tendency leads to futile statements such as Gambetta's 'Give me a good speculative mechanism any day rather than a batch of useless survey data' (p. 120). One might reasonably ask whether the same conclusion would hold if the adjectives were swapped. On the other hand, the papers neglect the partial rapprochement between survey analysis and rational choice which has been a feature of recent work (such as Blossfeld and Prein's Rational Choice Theory and Large Scale Data Analysis) and the papers by Goldthorpe and others in the European Sociological Review, September 1996. Nowadays I open edited volumes in the expectation (born of experi Downloaded by [Red de Bibliotecas del CSIC] at 02:34 04 March 2015 ence) that the papers will be very diverse and of variable quality: happily this is not the case here. Most of the papers address the social mechanisms issue, though there are one or two exceptions, and, as it turns out, this is no bad thing. Axel van den Berg contributes a wonderfully entertaining critique of contemporary social 'theory' as practised by Giddens, Haber mas, Bourdieu and Alexander, and Aage Sorensen has an important chapter on the all-too-common absence of any sort of developed theor etical mechanism in empirical research. Almost all the chapters have something useful and interesting to say and some of them have a great deal. As an introduction to the potential of social mechanisms to provide a 290 BOOK REVIEWS theoretical third way, the book is excellent. But, as I tried to indicate above, whether the approach will go further now depends on whether good answers can be found to the difficult questions that the authors raise. Richard Breen, Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence. Wolfgang Beck, Laurent van der Maesen and Alan Walker (eds), The Social Quality o/Europe. Bristol: The Policy Press, 1998. ISBN: 1-86-34- 086-9 Paperback £17.99, 370pp. This book is more than a collection of papers from an international conference; it is an early statement in the deliberate attempt to create a new discourse. The concept of 'social quality', which has had a desultory existence until now, is here targeted at nothing less than the European Union project. The statements in this book of the intellectual ancestry, the practicality, the sociological acuity and the political possibility of the idea of social quality are the beginning of a project to counterbalance the overwhelming emphasis on European union as fundamentally and un avoidably an economic process with a necessary political articulation. The 'social dimension' of European integration has hitherto been treated, in rhetoric and in policy, as those measures necessary to ease the pains of economic life.

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