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Time Matters: On Theory and Method (review)
- Social Forces
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 81, Number 2, December 2002
- pp. 681-683
- 10.1353/sof.2003.0009
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Social Forces 81.2 (2002) 681-683
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Time Matters: On Theory and Method. By Andrew Abbott. University of Chicago Press, 2001. 296 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $25.00.
In this collection of papers, Abbott interrogates contemporary sociology's standard operating procedures, underscoring their limitations and calling attention to alternatives. Much of what Abbott highlights is familiar, receiving at least passing notice in graduate methods courses. But if familiarity breeds contempt, then it is precisely that which gives Abbott's explorations their greatest value. We are so often inured to our standard procedures that we forget to remember that they are problematic, or at least limited, and forget to contemplate other ways of doing sociology.
According to Abbott, the troubles with sociology's "general linear reality" (i.e., linear regression) are many, including several very basic assumptions: that [End Page 681] the social world consists of fixed entities with variable attributes, that the relations between variable attributes consist of monotonic causal flows, that attributes are univocal in meaning, that cases and variables are independent, and that the meaning of an attribute does not depend on its context. Abbott gives each of these issues some attention. But his target above all is time independence, the notion that the order of things does not influence the way they turn out. Sociology's standard operating procedures seek out general causal relations between decontextualized variables (e.g., wealth and social status) — variables abstracted from actors, variables detached from time.
The central difficulty with the nonsequential view of the social world is that it disregards critical information. Sequence, after all, often does matter. For instance, women's rights almost always precede lesbian and gay rights. The reconstitution of gender, in other words, almost always comes before the reconstitution of sexuality, the sociological implications of which are widespread, and difficult to realize without attention to sequence. Another difficulty with the nonsequential view of the social world is that it distances sociological understandings from public ones. In everyday explanations (and also historical ones), actors do things step by step. In the causal analyses prevalent in sociology, variables do things outside of time.
In Abbott's view, we need not be satisfied with this situation. The challenge is to develop a methodology that retains what the standard operating procedures of contemporary sociology do most effectively in terms of generalization but then also to add the choicest element from history — a central place for timing and order. Abbott proposes that we do exactly this with his sequence analysis, which uses clustering strategies to find typicality in whole sequences of events. The core question of sequence analysis is whether a step in a sequence is a general event and to what extent. With sequence analysis, we can construct population-level studies that retain some of the case-activity and case-complexity so enticing in the single-case narrative. In sequence analysis, we can formalize the contextualized narrative.
All this, as suggested at the outset, is quite useful. The analysis and critique of sociological practice — especially when conducted by one as brilliant and restless as Abbott — benefits us all. But that is not to say the book or its arguments are flawless. In book terms, there is much repetition, as is nearly inevitable in a collection of previously published papers. And there is a long-winded, self-indulgent introduction, with uncertain intellectual merit. In argument terms, Abbott overstates his case on at least two dimensions. First, he caricatures his opposition, ignoring methodological innovations and even longstanding practices that lessen some of the problems with sociology's so-called general linear reality. Second, he overemphasizes the primacy of sequence. There is, after all, much that is important in social life that is not contingent on the particularities of sequential time. It may be fruitful, for instance, to note that Great Britain founded an environmental ministry before, [End Page 682] say, Bhutan. But it may be just as fruitful to note that a whole raft of countries founded environmental ministries in the early 1970s. Sequence is not everything.
That said, there remains much to be...