The Historicality of Individuals

I wish to argue this afternoon that we should reinstate individuals as an important force in history. By this I do not mean a return to great-man history, or great-woman history for that matter. To be sure, social structure can and sometimes does confer on particular individuals extraordinary power to shape the future. But the crucial explanatory question in such cases is not the quality or actions of that individual, interesting as these might be. Rather it is the conditions under which such social structures emerge and stabilize. The real question, for example, is not why it was that Elizabeth Tudor chose not to marry, but rather how it came to be that there was a social structure in which her refusal to marry could have such enduring political consequences. In this sense, great-person history is merely an empirically defined subbranch of the history of social structures in general. It is not really about individuals qua individuals or even about individuals taken as a group or type, but rather about the conditions that make particular individuals particularly important. So it is not to the great-person mode of thinking about individuals that I urge our return today.

Nor will I urge us to turn to what we usually call the life course perspective, although some of my own past work on careers (e.g., Abbott and Hrycak 1990) is certainly cognate with that perspective, at least in methodological terms. In life course approaches, as is well known, we seek the meaning of events not by looking across cases, as we do in variables-based social science. Rather, we look along the cases, along the trajectories, finding the meaning of this or that event by its relation to the unfolding of an individual's experience. This is the same whether we take a narrative view and study the story of an individual life with textual methods or an analytic view and study an ordered sequence of some variable's values over an individual life using time series methods, sequence analysis, or some other such formal approach. Either way we are interested in the sequential unfolding of the outcomes of a person's life.

This relatively strong focus on outcomes seriously limits the life course approach. The social process doesn't have outcomes. It just keeps on going. Individuals don't have outcomes either, except the invariant one that we must all expect in Keynes's long run. So the implicit analytic focus of life course studies on individual outcomes creates important problems, which we can see by looking at the concept of careers—the central life course concept of my own substantive field, the study of work and occupations. In our study of careers, we often see the individual as a kind of analytically final slate on which the outcomes of social processes are written. Analytically, that is, most studies of careers presuppose a world in which large social forces push little individuals around, placing successive marks on individuals' work experience, which is then taken as the final explanandum. Translating this presupposition into more substantive language, we might say that big exogenous changes in technology, division of labor, markets, and legal institutions dictate the successive experience of the working individuals caught within them.

But of course the individuals who experience the various intermediate outcomes that make up a career take action in the meantime, while their careers are still in process. And these actions constitute further outcomes of those experiences. One way out of the analytical cul de sac implicit in the life course approach is therefore to focus our attention on those further outcomes—the interpretations and actions through which workers come to respond (usually collectively) to the larger social forces pressing on them. There is of course a literature that does this, our long and distinguished inquiry into the social movements through which workers respond to the larger changes of capitalism. These social movements are precisely the larger social structures that have emerged...