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Tillly How Do Relations 2002
Tillly How Do Relations 2002
Tillly How Do Relations 2002
June 9, 2000
9:36
AR105
Chap-36
For most of us, alas, crucial moments in a lifetime of inquiry involve discoveries that we have been asking the wrong questions. Any effort to lay the burden of
our ignorance on the next generation of researcherswhich is, after all, the point
of the present exercisewill therefore serve chiefly to make members of that generation feel superior. Visibly violating the interest of my future reputation, let me
ask out loud a deeply bothersome question: how do relations store histories? How
does interaction among social locations both constrain subsequent interactions and
alter the relations involved?
My question concerns relations among social locationsnot just persons but
also jobs, organizations, communities, networks, and other such sites, just so long
as they include some distinguishing properties and coordinating structure. It rests
on the assumption that individuals as such do not constitute the bedrock of social
life, but emerge from interaction as other social locations do.
The question has two parts. First, how does the history of a social relation
impinge on subsequent activations of that relation? Second, how does interaction
within a given relation transform that relation? Examples of relevant processes include changes in contentious repertoires, shifts in the content and form of conversation, alterations of rights or obligations, and moves of a pair between war and peace:
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Bad answers beckon. The first bad answer, quite popular these days, declares
that experience of interaction alters individual consciousness, either by changing
means-end calculations or by adjusting the link between feeling and memory. The
answer is bad because it begs the question: How do pairs or larger sets of actors
actually create and change shared understandings in the form of recognizable
claim-making performances, dialects, bodies of law, and diplomacy?
A second bad answer used to be much more popular, but has lost much of
its appeal in recent decades. The answer: Society does it. The answer is doubly
bad because it invokes a dubious agent and fails to state how or why that agent
accomplishes its transformative work.
A third bad answer declares that culture, as the repository of collective experience, embeds histories in relations. The answer is even worse than the first two
because it combines their defects. It begs the question of how culturethat is,
shared understandings and their representationschanges as it invokes a dubious
agent and fails to specify how that agent creates effects in social life.
Astonished by my ignorance, students of conversation, strong interaction, symbolic interaction, collective memory, and cultural evolution will no doubt claim
that they have already provided superior accounts of how relations store histories.
To them I reply in advance: show us. My own attempts to adapt accounts in those
fields to contentious repertoires, rights, and war have so far yielded tantalizing
suggestions, but no persuasive answers. Most of them incorporate one version or
another of the three bad answers.
Good answers? If I really knew, I wouldnt be writing this essay. For the sake
of stimulating argument, let me nevertheless identify two paths that seem worth
exploring. We might call them creative interaction and cultural ecology.
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June 9, 2000
9:36
AR105
Chap-36
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Creative interaction appears most visibly in such activities as jazz and soccer. In these cases, participants work within rough agreements on procedures and
outcomes, arbiters set limits on performances, individual dexterity, knowledge,
and disciplined preparation generally yield superior play, yet the rigid equivalent
of military drill destroys the enterprise. Both jazz and soccer, when well executed, proceed through improvised interaction, surprise, incessant error and errorcorrection, alternation between solo and ensemble action, and repeated responses
to understandings shared by at least pairs of players. After the fact, participants
and spectators create shared stories of what happened, and striking improvisations shape future performances. If we could explain how human beings bring off
such improvisatory adventures, we could be well on our way to accounting for
how relations store histories in contentious repertoires, conversation, rights and
obligations, war and peace, and similar phenomena.
Cultural ecology? Social life consists of transactions among social sites, some
of them occupied by individual persons, but most of them occupied by shifting
aspects or clusters of persons. None of the sites, goes the reasoning, contains all
the cultureall the shared understandingson which transactions in its vicinity
draw. But transactions among sites produce interdependence among extensively
connected sites, deposit related cultural material in those sites, transform shared
understandings in the process, and thus make large stores of culture available to
any particular site through its connections with other sites. Relations store histories
in this dispersed way.
Neither the creative interaction nor the cultural ecology path is necessarily
inconsistent with the genetic, evolutionary, and neurophysiological accounts of
human social life that will surely loom much larger in sociologists thinking during
the next few decades than they have during the twentieth century. In fact, if genetic,
evolutionary, or neurophysiological theorists would take the storage of histories
by relations seriously, they might supply the breakthrough that has so far eluded
workaday sociologists.
CONTENTS
COHABITATION IN THE UNITED STATES: An Appraisal of
Research Themes, Findings, and Implications, Pamela J. Smock
DOUBLE STANDARDS FOR COMPETENCE: Theory and Research,
Martha Foschi
THE CHANGING NATURE OF DEATH PENALTY DEBATES,
Michael L. Radelet, Marian J. Borg
WEALTH INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, Lisa A. Keister,
Stephanie Moller
CRIME AND DEMOGRAPHY: Multiple Linkages, Reciprocal Relations,
Scott J. South, Steven F. Messner
ETHNICITY AND SEXUALITY, Joane Nagel
PREJUDICE, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC OPINION: Understanding the
Sources of Racial Policy Attitudes, Maria Krysan
RACE AND RACE THEORY, Howard Winant
STATES AND MARKETS IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, Sen
Riain
VOLUNTEERING, John Wilson
HOW WELFARE REFORM IS AFFECTING WOMEN''S WORK, Mary
Corcoran, Sandra K. Danziger, Ariel Kalil, Kristin S. Seefeldt
FERTILITY AND WOMEN''S EMPLOYMENT IN INDUSTRIALIZED
NATIONS, Karin L. Brewster, Ronald R. Rindfuss
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGICAL MODELS OF THE U.S. NEW DEAL,
Jeff Manza
THE TREND IN BETWEEN-NATION INCOME INEQUALITY, Glenn
Firebaugh
NONSTANDARD EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS: Part-time, Temporary
and Contract Work, Arne L. Kalleberg
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF IDENTITIES, Judith A. Howard
SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES: Ecological and Institutional
Dimensions, Richard Arum
RACIAL AND ETHNIC VARIATIONS IN GENDER-RELATED
ATTITUDES, Emily W. Kane
MULTILEVEL MODELING FOR BINARY DATA, Guang Guo,
Hongxin Zhao
A SPACE FOR PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY, Thomas F. Gieryn
WEALTH AND STRATIFICATION PROCESSES, Seymour Spilerman
THE CHOICE-WITHIN-CONSTRAINTS NEW INSTITUTIONALISM
AND IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIOLOGY, Paul Ingram, Karen Clay
POVERTY RESEARCH AND POLICY FOR THE POST-WELFARE
ERA, Alice O'Connor
CLOSING THE ""GREAT DIVIDE"": New Social Theory on Society
and Nature, Michael Goldman, Rachel A. Schurman
SOCIALISM AND THE TRANSITION IN EAST AND CENTRAL
EUROPE: The Homogeneity Paradigm, Class, and Economic , Linda
Fuller
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