Signaling

This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cost, receiver-dependent cost, and third party-dependent cost, along with multiple sources of cost and signals that cost nothing to honest signalers. It also takes a look at a number of applications for signaling theory and concludes with an assessment of the genealogy of the theory, from Thorstein Veblen and Marcel Mauss to Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Spence, and Alan Grafen.

Historical Sociology

This article examines the different methods employed in historical sociology through which historical macro social outcomes are investigated — comparative, institutional, relational, and cultural — as well as the enduring tension revealed by the meso-level structures that often shape outcomes. It begins with a discussion of two major categories of historical sociology: comparative historical analysis, characterized by historical sociologists and political scientists who seek an explanation for large-scale processes, and the focus on institutionalism and networks in historical studies. It then presents examples of work in historical social science that have come closest to the requirements of analytical sociology. It also considers ways of bringing historical institutionalism and network analysis together and argues that an emphasis on analytic historical sociology can help specify the causality behind processes that have not been clearly interpreted or have been misinterpreted in historical, sociological, and culturally oriented studies.

Emotions

This article explores the role of emotions in the explanation of behavior. It first provides an overview of complexities associated with the term ‘emotion’ before discussing the link between emotions and rationality. In particular, it considers the rational choice theory of action and the notion of emotional choice, along with the impact of emotion on substantive preferences, formal preferences, beliefs and belief formation, and information-gathering. The article argues that emotions governing action should not be deemed inaccessible to analytic social-science inquiry. Even if emotions trigger actions and reactions discontinuous with prior action streams, emotions do not make the rational-actor model fail. Emotions can determine belief and urgency-based emotions can determine outcomes.

Collective Action

This article examines collective action, focusing on the role of social interactions, conflict, and the dynamics of interpersonal influence in shaping collective identities and interests. The discussion is based on the co-occurrence of individuals’ interest and group identity through a consistent course of action and begins with an overview of analytical models used to investigate extraordinary forms of collective action. The article then describes formal models and the problem of cooperation between self-interested actors, along with the notion of free-riding and the origin of shared interests and collective identities, paying attention to the importance of conflict, social networks, and interpersonal influence. It also explores the role of multiple levels of decision-making and actors’ consciousness in collective action before proposing a formal approach to collective action that is simultaneously less and more rational than the one currently employed in analytical sociology.

Norms

This article explores the relationship between norms and action, making a distinction between social and moral norms, quasi-moral norms, legal norms, and conventions. It defines ‘social norm’ as a non-outcome-oriented injunction to act or to abstain from acting, sustained by the sanctions that others apply to norm violators. After explaining how social norms operate, the article considers some important or representative social norms, including work norms, tipping norms, queueing norms, fairness norms and political norms. It also compares social norms with other motivations to act and argues that social norms are ultimately sustained by the emotions of contempt (or indignation) and shame. Yet the influence of emotion on behavior is much larger than the impact mediated by social norms.

Analytic Ethnography

This article examines the unique contribution that analytic ethnography has made and can make to accomplishing two of the key principles of analytical sociology: developing theoretical explanations by identifying mechanisms that connect actors, action, and outcomes; bridging the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis in those explanations. It first distinguishes ‘analytic ethnography’ from other varieties of ethnography before showing how analytic ethnography has historically developed mechanism-based explanations that go beyond the micro level. It then compares analytic ethnography to analytical sociology in order to highlight the compatibility of the two. Finally, it demonstrates how theoretical integration can be achieved first within analytic ethnography, then between analytic ethnography and analytical sociology, using research on signaling and explanations of outcomes in which signals are the mechanism.

Time and Scheduling

This article examines time and scheduling dynamics, with particular emphasis on the potential consequences of scheduling constraints for social life. It asks why scheduling conflicts exist and why they are often enormously difficult to resolve, first by providing an overview of traditional approaches to the study of time in the social sciences. These include an extensive literature across a number of disciplines on how societies conceptualize time; research that has examined how the organization of time has changed over history; and studies on the female labor force, the household division of labor, and time budgets more generally. The discussion then turns to formal insights that explain why schedule coordination is such a problem and describes the macro-level social implications of scheduling conflicts, focusing on hierarchies, segregation, and boundary-maintenance dynamics.

Social Influence

This article examines the role of social influence in the puzzling nature of success in cultural markets: successful cultural products, such as hit songs, best-selling books, and blockbuster movies, are considerably more successful than average; yet which particular songs, books, and movies will become the next ‘big thing’ appears impossible to predict. The article investigates this paradox empirically by constructing a website where more than 27,000 participants were allowed to listen to, rate, and download new music, and where the information that these participants had about the behavior of others could be controlled. In the first three experiments, the popularity of the songs were allowed to emerge naturally, without any intervention. In the fourth experiment, the problem of self-fulfilling prophecies in cultural markets was addressed. The results show that social influence gives rise to unanticipated consequences at the collective level, including inequality and unpredictability of success.

Heuristics

This article examines the role of heuristics in driving social action, focusing on the simple heuristics that people use in their everyday lives: the Recognition Heuristic and the Take-the-best Heuristic. It first describes recognition-based inference and knowledge-based inference before discussing how fast-and-frugal heuristics are being employed as models of both individual and group decision-making. It then describes social heuristics, with particular emphasis on the role of recognition heuristic in groups, along with knowledge aggregation in groups. It also explores how cue orders are learned socially and provides examples of how simple heuristics might account for complex behavior, how they can serve as robust models, and how they can make counterintuitive predictions. The article concludes by identifying factors that determine whether a heuristic will be successful as well as the conditions that give rise to actors’ switching heuristics.

Opportunities

This article examines how the concept of opportunity is used in analyses of choices people make and in analyses of social inequality and civil rights. It first considers the distinction between choices made without attention to what other agents do versus choices made strategically taking into account the possible actions of others. It then explains how agents may act to shape the constraints and opportunities they face, as well as how available opportunities may shape preferences. These abstract ideas are applied to the substantive field of inequality, first in the context of civil-rights legislation and debates in theories of justice, and second in an analysis of differential labor market outcomes. More specifically, the article looks at career opportunities and opportunity hoarding in the professions. Finally, it evaluates opportunities for discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex in the current legal environment.