orgtheory.net

As many of you probably already know, Claude Levi-Strauss, the greath French anthropologist who advocated for the structuralist analysis of culture, passed away this week. I was surprised to hear this since I wasn’t even aware that Levi-Strauss was still alive. His version of anthropology, it seemed to me as a grad student reading his work, was outdated and no longer central to anthropological theories. But I’ve been thinking a little about Levi-Strauss lately while I’ve read John Levi Martin’s new book, Social Structures.  Perhaps structural theories of culture are alive again, but now this kind of work is taking place in sociology departments rather than in anthropology.

As Kieran and Teppo already discovered, Martin’s book is brimming with ideas. The basic premise of the book is that many sorts of individual and group action (and the subsequent meanings generated in that context) can be explained by basic principles of local structure. The premise is rooted in the work of Simmel, but it’s hard to miss Levi-Strauss’s influence throughout. Martin clarified in the beginning of the book how this local structural analysis differs from institutional analysis (he elsewhere distinguishes between structuralism and social network analysis):

The vision of Simmel’s dialectic of institutionalization that inspires this work implies that is is at such a local level that we may see social action being shaped by distinct principles that we would rightly call structural. When things have developed to the extent that regular equivalence guides action – that is, when one may interact with any of a set of for-all-purposes-equivalent actors – then we are looking at institutions, not structures as I here use the term. Thus a structure is a pattern of interaction that links a person to particular others, as opposed to classes of others.

The importance of such local or particular structures has been downgraded by a sociology that arose in the context of European political economy, which presupposed the division of persons into functionally equivalent classes. Sociology (exceptions such as Simmel aside), far from challenging the preexisting tendency of social though to ignore the particular elements of social life, associated itself with the strong theoretical claim that such particularism was doomed to extinction anyway (“modernization” theory). Certainly, from a functional perspective, great parsimony is gained by treating sets of persons and indeed whole social structures..as functionally equivalent. That is, it does not matter that one officer has a relationship over here with an enlisted man, and another officer has a relationship over there with a different enlisted man. All that matters is the overall relationship between officers and enlisted. But the parsimony of considering persons interchangeable representatives of categories comes at a cost: we are likely to be left with a misleading picture of the generation and stabilization of actually existing social structures and institutions by ignoring the importance of ties that connect specific persons (14).

Martin’s embrace of Simmel’s structuralist approach is refreshing in that he points to a real alternative to the institutional analysis (and I don’t mean just neoinstitutional theory from organizational research) that dominates much macro-social scholarship. He offers an intriguing way to link micro-macro without relinquishing all of the explanatory power to one level over the other. In a way, I suppose this is what Levi-Strauss was about as well. His agenda was to explain the particularities of local structures. Rather than jump right to institutions and history as an explanation, the origin of an explanation was to analyze how the interactions within that structure worked and how/why individuals continued to reproduce those relationships over time.

Martin’s book is really fascinating and sure to be a classic in sociological theory.