Macrosociological Theory Research Articles

Etatization of the Latvian song festival

ABSTRACT Based on Szymon Chodak’s macro-sociological theory of etatization, the article explores the dynamics of the etatization of the Latvian Song Festival across four historiographical periods: Russian Empire, the Republic of Latvia, the USSR, and the restored Republic of Latvia. The findings confirm Chodak’s argument that the increasing intervention of the state in a wide range of socio-economic processes is a general trend in Western civilization, showing that the most complete etatization of the Song Festival is taking place now, under democratic regimes, rather than under totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. For the descriptive analysis, a model of the three production fields (symbolic, practical, economic) of the Song Festival was created, which could be used to conduct more detailed empirical research in the future.

Individual Empowerment, Institutional Confidence, and Vaccination Rates in Cross-National Perspective, 1995 to 2018

In the past decade, before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, rates of childhood vaccination against diseases such as measles, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus declined worldwide. An extensive literature examines the correlates and motives of vaccine hesitancy—the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines—among individuals, but little macrosociological theory or research seeks to explain changes in country-level vaccine uptake in global and comparative perspective. Drawing on existing research on vaccine hesitancy and recent developments in world society theory, we link cross-national variation in vaccination rates to two global cultural processes: the dramatic empowerment of individuals and declining confidence in liberal institutions. Both processes, we argue, emerged endogenously in liberal world culture, instigated by the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Fixed- and random-effects panel regression analyses of data for 80 countries between 1995 and 2018 support our claim that individualism and lack of institutional confidence contributed to the global decline in vaccination rates. We also find that individualism is itself partly responsible for declining institutional confidence. Our framework of world-cultural change might be extended to help make sense of recent post-liberal challenges in other domains.

Тысячелетия скрепляющие своды: история собора Святой Софии Константинопольской сквозь призму интегральной методологии Питирима Сорокина

Historic decision to return to Hagia Sophia the status of a mosque once again proved that its history cycle has reached a new stage: from Byzantine temple — to the Ottoman mosque — through the UNESCO World Heritage Site — to the great Hagia Sophia mosque. In case of studying the historical dynamics of status, cultural significance and social functions of Hagia Sophia, the integral macrosociological theory of P.A. Sorokin is the most relevant and has got sufficient heuristic potential. The history of Hagia Sophia has been influenced and is still being affected by rhythmic sequence of three super-systems: ideational, idealistic and sensual. It's on the one hand. On the other hand, Hagia Sophia is not only an architectural object, which in its historical dynamics has passed a difficult way from a Christian temple to a mosque, but above all — one of the main means for expressing the set of values of the ideational cultural supersystem.

Marketization and anti-immigrant attitudes in cross-national perspective

This study builds upon an evolving research agenda by assessing the utility of three predictors of anti-immigrant attitudes: a “marketized mentality,” its aggregated level analogue – a “marketized anomic culture,” and an institutional imbalance characterized by the dominance of the economy over other social institutions. Drawing upon Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), a macro-sociological theory originally advanced to explain crime, previous research has reported that persons who strongly embrace market-based values are prone to be prejudiced to legitimize the exclusion of groups that do not conform to the priorities of market society. Moreover, IAT identifies economic dominance in the institutional order as a macro-structural property that is also potentially relevant to understanding anti-immigrant attitudes. This study extends prior efforts by examining the relationships between the theorized predictors and anti-immigrant attitudes in a multilevel framework with data collected from the World Values Survey and international organizations.

Institutional Imbalance, Marketized Mentality, and the Justification of Instrumental Offenses: A Cross-National Application of Institutional Anomie Theory

The present study builds upon prior research that has suggested that the social psychological concept of “marketized mentality” (MM) can serve as a conceptual lynchpin to facilitate multilevel analyses informed by Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), a macro-sociological theory of crime. We examine the connection between a societal indicator of institutional imbalance – a key IAT concept – and a measure of the prevalence of MM with a much larger sample of nations than analyzed previously (58 countries). In addition, we broaden the domain of “outcomes” related to MM to include an attitudinal variable relevant to crime – the willingness to justify instrumental offenses. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the results reveal significant relations between MM, the degree of institutional imbalance, and the willingness to justify instrumental offenses. These findings indicate the potential promise of developing an integrated, micro-macro approach to understanding criminological phenomena by incorporating MM within the IAT-analytic framework.

The Societalization of Social Problems: Church Pedophilia, Phone Hacking, and the Financial Crisis

This article develops a theory of “societalization,” demonstrating its plausibility through empirical analyses of church pedophilia, media phone-hacking, and the financial crisis. Although these strains were endemic for decades, they had failed to generate broad crises. Reactions were confined inside institutional boundaries and handled by intra-institutional elites according to the cultural logics of their particular spheres. The theory proposes that boundaries between spheres can be breached only if there is code switching. When strains become subject to the cultural logics of the civil sphere, widespread anguish emerges about social justice and concern for the future of democratic society. Once admired institutional elites come to be depicted as perpetrators, and the civil sphere becomes intrusive legally and organizationally, leading to repairs that aim for civil purification. Institutional elites soon engage in backlash efforts to resist reform, and a war of the spheres ensues. After developing this macro-institutional model, I conceptualize civil sphere agents, the journalists and legal investigators upon whose successful performances the actual unfolding of societalization depends. I also explore “limit conditions,” the structures that block societalization. I conclude by examining societalization, not in society but in social theory, contrasting the model with social constructionism, on the one hand, and broad traditions of macro-sociological theory, on the other.

Institutional imbalance, integration into Non-economic institutions, and a marketized mentality in Europe: A multilevel, partial elaboration of Institutional Anomie Theory

This research builds upon prior efforts to transport insights from a macro-sociological theory of crime – Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT) – to enhance understanding of an important individual-level phenomenon in advanced capitalist societies – a ‘marketized mentality’. Such a mentality entails a strong commitment to the utilitarian, instrumental values of the market at the expense of more altruistic, expressive values. Drawing upon IAT, we hypothesize that at the individual level, integration into selected non-economic institutions will tend to inhibit the adoption of a marketized mentality, but the strength of this inhibiting effect will vary depending on the degree to which economic institutions and non-economic institutions in society are ‘balanced’ or ‘unbalanced’. Our theoretical arguments imply that observed levels of acceptance of a marketized mentality will vary significantly across societies and that this variation will be related to the degree of imbalance in the institutional order: We expect to observe a cross-level interaction such that the inhibiting effect of integration into non-economic institutions is attenuated as institutional imbalance increases. These hypotheses are assessed in multilevel analyses with data from 25 European countries using the European Social Survey. The results are generally in accordance with theoretical expectations, revealing how an institutional imbalance helps shape people’s value orientations by promoting marketized mentalities and by weakening the socialization effects of non-economic institutions.

Randall Collins and the macrohistory of social changes as a return to the classical theoretical heritage in sociology

This paper analyzes the macrohistory of social change in the work of Randall Collins, with a special focus on the phenomena of revolution and the sociogenesis of ethnicity, or nationalism, americanization and balkanization. This aspect of his work is of particular importance because Collins is primarily known as a theorist of radical microsociology and social interaction. However, it is argued that his work on macrohistory and his usage of comparative historical analysis generates a specific macrosociological theory of social change, or a macrosociology of revolutions and the macrosociology of ethnicity. In this sense, this paper also deals with the (inter)relationship between history and sociology, together with the issues such as the future of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as the origins of ethnically motivated violence after the collapse of socialist states (like Yugoslavia). Finally, it is claimed that Collins' macrohistory of social change, i.e. his structural theories of revolutions and nationalism, call for a new reading and a return to a classical theoretical heritage in sociology, in the first place to theories of Weber and Durkheim.

Networks in context: the concept of network in Manuel Castells’ theory of the network society

This article discusses the conceptualization of network in Manuel Castells’ theory of network society.
 Networks appeared in Castells’ works in the late 1980s, when he became interested in the configuration of the
 relationships between technology, economy, and society. The culmination of this phase was his opus magnum,
 The Information Age trilogy, which introduced network as a key concept of his macro theory, even though he
 remained laconic about the concept itself. This is paradoxical, for Castells became possibly the most prominent
 figure globally in adopting network terminology in macro sociological theory, but at the same time made hardly
 any empirical, theoretical or methodological contribution to social network analysis or network theory in general.
 This implies that ‘network’ in Castells’ social theory is based on institutional network analysis. Moreover, it is not
 an analytical concept but rather a powerful metaphor that served to capture his idea of the new social
 morphology of informational capitalism.

China and Russia: Institutional Coherence between the Banking Systems

We use statistical data from 2000 to 2013 to compare the macro-level structure and the core institutions of the banking systems in China and Russia. Our main hypothesis is that, differences in the absolute size and socio-cultural features notwithstanding, these two systems are typologically similar. We consider the institutional structure, the market structure and concentration, the industrial policy of the government, and the banks’ involvement in the financing of the non-financial economy. We find both similarities and differences, however in dynamics the trend towards convergence prevails. In both countries, we see a hierarchical multi-tier banking system headed by a few core state-controlled banks. These combine commercial activities with the activity of a development institution. Regardless of the nominal form of bank ownership, the government exerts influence on the lending decisions and market behavior of banks. We argue that the case of banking in China and Russia provides empirical proof to the macrosociological theory of institutional matrices. We refer in particular to the needed proportion between the dominant and complementary institutions. Whereas China has been carefully seeking a sustainable balance, Russia in the 1990s grossly overshot with liberalization and now reverts to the underlying long-term trend. China has currently become Russia's donor for institutional innovations in the credit system design.

A ‘world culture’ of institutional ambiguity? Comparing the reorganization of hospital care in Germany and Mexico

According to widespread perceptions, health care provision is becoming more universalistic internationally – but also more business-like. The article examines this dual movement through the lens of the (neo-institutionalist) world polity model and by exploring regulatory change in the hospital sectors of Mexico and Germany. These – highly disparate – countries have both seen attempts to make the access to inpatient care more comprehensive, quantitatively or qualitatively; at the same time, reforms have led to the marketization and managerialist transformation of their health care infrastructures. Hence there is similar regulatory change being driven by two expansive institutional logics, although its implementation faces contingencies, due to country-specific bottlenecks in the reform process. In this configuration, hospital care undergoes a process of ‘fuzzy’ reorganization with paradoxical consequences. The overall development bears witness to a cross-national diffusion of institutional ambiguity to which macro-sociological theory concerned with globalization should pay greater attention.

Inviting the Leviathan: external forces, war, and state-building in Afghanistan

This article examines the role of intervening forces in state-building efforts after state-collapse and civil wars. Based upon a case study from the 30 years of war in Afghanistan, it develops an explanation for failure of state-building attempts drawing upon bargaining theory, macrosociological state-building theory, and strategic thought. The explanation suggests that international state-building attempts condition and shapes a new strategic environment for the local actors. In doing so, the mode of state-building can create incentives for continuing the war or, carried out differently, create incentives for the parties to contribute in building a legitimate state from the rubble of the old state.

Against Reduction: Jeffrey Alexander and the Constructive Tasks of Social Theory

The practice of social theory is too often given to celebrity hunting, the polemical vulgarizing of one’s putative enemies, or the precocious production of totalizing and redemptive theories purporting to rescue social theory from its perennial crises of meaning, naming and explanation. The constructive task of social theory, however, can be both more modest and productive when attention is given to its substantive concern to provide codes, narratives and explanations of modernity, in all its pluralist and democratic dimensions. This is in effect the self-description of Jeffrey Alexander’s own work. This paper provides an empathetic account of Alexander’s approach to the practice of social theory via a synopsis of his collected essays in Fin de Siècle Social Theory (1995). In particular, it claims that Alexander’s critique of the reductionist propensities of Pierre Bourdieu’s macro-sociological theory is exemplary in its constructive cast as a systematic analysis of the universalizing contents of the conceptual and methodological claims themselves. Herein lies the use of reason itself.

The individual and the collective

Most empirical studies of social stratification and inequality remain confined to the micrological level, while their very aim is to construct and to test macrological statements. The first part of this paper discusses the main hypotheses that are implicit in this research tradition and that do not allow the transition from micro to macro. Based on recent findings in this field, the second part outlines a macrosociological theory of stratification, which allows the possibility of deducing micro as well as macro propositions that remain unexplainable by micrological theories.

The Context of Educational Opportunity: States and the Legislative Organization of Community College Systems

Students' abilities to transfer from community colleges to baccalaureate-granting colleges and universities is an area that has produced considerable discourse during the twentieth century. Recent scholarship suggests that opportunities to transfer depend on the organization and curricular direction of community colleges, an outcome predominately influenced by educational administrators and elected state representatives. This article employs a macrosociological theory of education to explain the legitimation of a contextual framework within which opportunities to transfer become available to students who attend two-year colleges. By examining legislative enactments in the 48 contiguous states, this article finds that the structure of community college systems is not uniform across states. Only a small proportion of states have carefully coordinated local community colleges into statewide systems and incorporated them into their higher-educational systems. Although two factors associated with the creation of state community college systems are identified in this article, they are not found to influence the subsequent coordination of the system with higher education. Instead, the type of governance authority established (public education or higher education) is found to be an important factor in the coordination of community colleges with other higher-educational institutions. Because legislative histories provide a framework with which to identify states' commitments to community college systems and their incorporation into higher education, the article concludes that studies of student opportunities and outcomes must be examined in the context of the state educational systems.

Goffman and Interactional Citizenship

Goffman's analysis of the interaction order and his investigation of deference and demeanor are used to extend and revise the macrosociological theory of citizenship. Goffman's theorizing intimates that individuals claim and are typically accorded a complex of interactional rights and are simultaneously obliged to honor a complementary set of obligations. Taken together, these rights and obligations comprise what we call interactional citizenship. In principle alterations in the interaction order over time can be described and explained, and in this vein we propose that there has been a general, albeit incomplete and unevenly realized, expansion of interactional citizenship to virtually every category of social actor. There are limits to this expansion, however, and little reason to believe that interactional citizenship can ever be fully realized.

Vague Theory and Model Uncertainty in Macrosociology

Vague macrosociological theory generates uncertainty about statistical models. As a result, statistical inferences in macrosociology-where data sets are small and collinear-may carry considerably more error than is indicated by the conventional estimation and testing methods. I describe a Bayesian approach that propagates uncertainty about statistical models through to the final results. This approach is illustrated in a model of cross-national welfare state development and a pooled cross-sectional analysis of strike activity. These examples show that classical inferences can be seriously misleading when vague theory weakly guides the model specification. These ideas are considered in relation to recent methodological debates in macrosociology.

The Nature of Gender

I explain a biosocial model of women's gendered behavior (behavior on which the sexes differ). This model integrates a macro sociological theory with a biological theory derived from primate behavior. The sociological model is designed to explain changes in the relationship between sex and behavior over time or between groups. The biological model is designed to explain individual within-sex variance and between-sex variance in gendered behavior in a cohort. Results from an original study are presented to demonstrate that within-sex variance in women's gendered behavior is explained well by the primate model. I conclude that human nature is gendered. The implications of this conclusion are explored for demographic and other social science research.

Toward a Neo-Darwinian Sociology: Its Nomological Principles and Some Illustrative Applications

In a thought-provoking appraisal of the state of macrosociological theory, Gerhard Lenski argues that its shortcomings can be rectified, in part, by reference to nomological reasoning. Moreover, developments in behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, and population genetics offer interesting insights into analyses of social behavior across time and space and, in the process, reveal some useful hints about the manner in which sociocultural theorists might proceed in developing more elegant theoretical statements. With these considerations in mind, the argument elaborated in this essay suggests: (1) that contemporary sociocultural science has much to contribute to the development of a general theory of social behavior, (2) that theory refinement in the sociocultural sciences can be enhanced significantly by reference to general principles (specifically, an amended version of the “maximization principle”) developed in recent years in the evolutionary behavioral sciences; and (3) that reliance on such general analytical principles is enormously helpful in clarifying some seemingly troublesome theoretical problems in, for example, studies of social demography and human ecology and of social stratification and mobility.

Teori och typologi: Om förhållandet mellan makrosociologi, institutionella sfärer och social handling

Theory and typology. Macrosociology, institutional spheres and social actionThe conceptual triad ’state-market-civil society’ is taken as point of departure for a discussion of the broader issue of the uses of typologies in sociology. It is argued that in order to avoid being subordinated to politically loaded notions pervading public discourse, a genuine sociological typology should meet two demands; its dimensions should be derived from a macro-sociological theory, and it should be underpinned by a micro-sociological theory of action. In this way, a typology will serve as a pipeline between micro and macro theories, and also as a checking point for estimating the coherence between these two levels of analysis. As an illustration, Mary Douglas’ grid-group model is introduced. This typology is derivable from Durkheim’s macro-sociology, but it has a weak microfoundation. Two theories of action are discussed and compared; the theory of rational choice and the theory of interaction rituals. After demonstrating that the theory of rational choice is incommensurable with the ”multi-rational” premises of the grid-group model, itis indicated that an elaboration of the Goffmanian theory of interaction rituals would constitute a viable micro-foundation for the grid-group model. Finally, it is concluded that from the point of view of grid-group, ’civil society’ is a highly ambiguous category that should be replaced by the categories of ’community’ and ’isolate’.