Processual Sociology. By Andrew Abbott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xvi+311. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewProcessual Sociology. By Andrew Abbott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xvi+311. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).Alan SicaAlan SicaPennsylvania State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhat is a sociological “process”? Herbert Spencer in First Principles (1864) wrote of “processes” regarding “creation,” “manufacture,” “general aggregation,” and “local concentration.” In Principles of Sociology (1874) he treated “direct” and “indirect processes,” plus “evolutionary process,” his favorite. Lester Ward chased the “process of evolution,” adding the “reasoning process” and “the process of aggregation” in Dynamic Sociology (1883). Another quasi-Spencerian, Franklin Giddings at Columbia, obligingly addressed the “process of evolution,” plus the “socializing process” and “reasoning processes” (Principles of Sociology [1896]): “Society is a process of collective behavior … built up by a process in which the successive steps have been those of integration, differentiation, segregation, and an increase of definiteness and of coherence … [and] a process of association” (Clarence Northcott, “The Sociological Theories of Franklin H. Giddings” [AJS 24:1–23, at 2–3]). The herculean Pitirim Sorokin published in 1927 “A Survey of the Cyclical Conceptions of Social and Historical Process” in Social Forces, and further systematized it in Contemporary Sociological Theories (Harper and Brothers, 1928, pp. 730ff). Talcott Parsons used “process” frequently, for example, process of “rationalization,” of “differentiation,” and in “the relations of structure and process” (Essays in Sociological Theory [Free Press, 1954, pp. 118, 316, 387, 217]). His later essay book, Structure and Process in Modern Societies (Free Press, 1960), merges structure and process into seamless functionalist imagery. In 1961 Charles Loomis edited a large book built entirely around “Elements and Elemental Processes,” as probed by himself and nine famous functionalist colleagues (Modern Social Theories [Van Nostrand 1961/1965]). Finally, in 1996, Norbert Elias’s 1977 essay appeared in English as “Towards a Theory of Social Processes” (British Journal of Sociology 48:355–83).Unsurprisingly given the nature of innovators, Andrew Abbott refers to none of these predecessors in his latest book, except for Parsons. In “Social Order and Process” (chap. 7) he mentions Parsons, along with Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Vico, and Montesquieu, then Durkheim and Plato—a reading list well known in the Quad at the University of Chicago, where Abbott took his doctorate, and where he has worked for 25 years, reviving its “ecological” tradition. Yet far more important for Abbott is a book few sociologists, nor today’s philosophers, have read, Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929/1977), which Abbott studied each dawn in 1993, 10 pages per day, thereby absorbing a fresh approach to “ontology” and “process” (“Autobiographical Introduction,” Andrew Abbott, Time Matters [University of Chicago Press, 2001]). To Whitehead he then conjoined briefer works by Henri Bergson and George Herbert Mead, arriving finally at what he calls “a processual ontology … with its insistence on viewing the world of entities as in perpetual flux” (Abbott 2001, p. 27).To interpret correctly the remarkable mind of this author, one must first attend to his self-revelations, as entertainingly frank as any composed by a famous sociologist prior to the logorrheic blogging era that colonized the public sphere a few years ago. To wit: “Just as my knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings of classical music had always been my secret way of theorizing about multilevel social processes (a fact I more or less confessed in the footnotes of my 1983 sequence paper), go [the Japanese game featured in The Tale of Genji and The Master of Go] would be my secret way of thinking about things of boundaries. I had taken up go in the early 1990s, for the worst of all possible reasons. … I decided that somebody like me simply had to be a player of some unusual game. … I was at forty-five taking up a board game because it was profound and unusual and therefore fit a persona I was still trying to manufacture” (Abbott 2001, p. 26).Reading Abbott brings to mind a red-cheeked New England boarding school youth propelled by a ravenous brain, charming shyness, and the associated need to proselytize in a language of his own making, a “secret” lingo which he hopefully invites his auditors to learn so that he can lead them to New Lands of Scientific Enchantment. This sparkling sphere is filled with history, literature (Wordsworth is a favorite, as is Murasaki Shikibu), philosophy, and classical Western music, to which his Sputnik-era passion for science duly added advanced math, the latest wrinkles in quantitative methods, and an intentionally quirky way of reconceptualizing basic sociological notions, smilingly nudging his readers out of their comfort zones.This latest collection (nine essays from 2001 through 2014) includes three articles published in Sociological Theory, “Linked Ecologies,” “The Problem of Excess,” and “Lyrical Sociology” (pp. 33–159). Each is intriguing and important in its own ways, clearly announcing to the “theory community” that Abbott had formally shifted from the sociology of work and professions to the more rarefied atmosphere of “social ontology”—a feat partially accomplished in 2001 with his Chaos of Disciplines. The price of admission to Abbott’s heterodox theory-world is to toss aside standard terminology and accept his new lexicon with the same enthusiasm with which he offers it. The list is long and revolves around the fundamental idea that “structure” does not exist as such: “By a processual approach, I mean an approach that presumes that everything in the social world is continuously in the process of making, remaking, and unmaking itself (and other things), instant by instant” (p. x). This idea, as Abbott realizes, is neither easy to sell, nor wholly novel, for example: “Our ideas to-day of things about us are neither particular nor static. Rather we conceive a ceaseless movement to pervade the world; and we imagine that a like unbroken movement has brought all things to the present state of heterogeneous correlation as parts of a prodigiously variegated whole” (H. O. Taylor, “A Layman’s View of History” [AHA Presidential Address], American Historical Review 33:248).To penetrate this social world “continuously in process,” Abbott “regret[s] what may seem like an arbitrary multiplication of terminology … The following terms have specific senses in this chapter: arena, audience, avatar, bundle, ecology, hinge, jurisdiction, linkage, ligation, location, position, setting, and settlement” (p. 41, n. 7). He also puts to special use commentative voice, contingency, discounting, diaphony, ecology’s temporality, emergentism, encoding, engagement, endogeny, excess via algorithms, fractals, funnel of causality, levels, linked ecologies, lyricism, momentaneity, optativity, passage, process order, sequentiality, serialism, and welter. To experience the full Abbottsian imagination requires immersion in his language, and the creative speculation enabled by it.Walter Jackson Bate’s nonpareil John Keats (1963) appeared while its author was the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, a few years before our Abbott matriculated there. After studying “Lyrical Sociology”—the most enchanting chapter in Processual Sociology—which includes a famously brilliant passage from Wordsworth (pp. 84–85), one must wonder if young Abbott did not wander into one of Professor Bate’s lectures, dreamily falling into a lasting trance dictated by the rhythms of Romantic Poetry. If so, this would explain Abbott’s love of language, his apparent belief that renaming sociological concepts will reinvigorate modes of analysis that he believes are moribund, wrong-headed, or ill-equipped to handle the phenomena they seek to explain. His essays demand the full attention of their readers because, unlike almost any other current theorist, Abbott’s passionate attachment to the humanities, in conjunction with vigorous attention to slick methods, gives his voice the unique authority it has on the current intellectual scene. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 123, Number 1July 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692464 For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.