Introduction to special issue: The sociology of Randall Collins

Introduction

Randall Collins is arguably one of the world’s leading social theorists and probably the most prominent American sociologist. He has made an enormous contribution to sociological theory, the study of state formation, power, violence, sociology of the family, social stratification, sociology of emotions, historical and political sociology, the sociology of education, and the sociology of intellectuals. He also developed an analytical framework that proved highly successful in predicting the fall of the Soviet Union long before anybody could have contemplated this possibility. His work has been highly influential within and outside sociology. For example, his novel concepts and ideas, such as the interaction ritual chains, forward panic, credential society, and the micro-foundations of macro-sociology, among many others, have had a wide application across many disciplines including political science, international relations, security studies, anthropology, history, geography, criminology, psychology, nationalism studies and sociology. However, despite this wide intellectual and cross-disciplinary appeal there has not been much critical assessment of Collins’s contribution to sociology. Several scholars have written individual contributions on some aspects of Collins’s work but there has been only one publication so far that systematically analyses Collins’s scholarly achievements – Weininger, Lareau and Lizardo (2019). Nevertheless, even this comprehensive edited volume focuses only on the micro-sociological aspects of Collins’s work while largely ignoring much of his more numerous macro-sociological contributions. Hence this special issue aims to go further in order to explore different aspects of Collins’s work, including his theories of violence, interaction ritual chains, credential society, conflict sociology, nationalism, geo-political change and his sociology of emotions among others. The eight papers in this volume address both the macro and micro-sociology of Randall Collins.

The main contributions

Randall Collins is best-known for his path-breaking books that have defined several fields of sociology, including Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science (1975), The Credential Society (1979), Weberian Sociological Theory (1986), Theoretical Sociology (1988), The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (2008), and Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy (2015) (with Maren McConnell).

In his early work Collins attempted to overcome the deep polarities that underpinned 1960s and early 1970s sociological thought – the epistemological splits between conflict and consensus focused theories of social order and the methodological ruptures between the positivists and the interpretivists. Hence in Conflict Sociology (1975) Collins rejects structural-functionalist explanations and Parsons’s one-dimensional reading of Weber while also being critical of the conventional Marxist accounts of social conflict. Instead, Collins develops a wider theory of conflict that incorporates Weber, Marx, Durkheim and Goffman. In methodological terms Conflict Sociology challenges hard positivism and relativist interpretivism, arguing that sociological research can still generate cumulative knowledge without adopting the science-driven paradigm. Although sociology does not possess the cognitive consensus or the rapid discovery model, both of which characterise the natural sciences, sociologists can build predictive theories that can be tested empirically. Thus, Collins demonstrates how empirical studies on state formation and social stratification have fostered development of sociological knowledge over time.

Collins’s next highly influential book, The Credential Society: A Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979), advanced further the argument about the conflictual nature of social relations. The book attempted to question the conventional understandings of education as a fair and successful vehicle of social mobility as well as the functionalist idea that increases in the number of highly educated graduates reflected greater demand from the expanding social system. In contrast Collins shows persuasively that education has very limited impact on the existing patterns of social stratification and that the continuous increase in educational credentials is not related to job requirements. Collins argues that the educational system is not built to teach specific skills but to inculcate specific middle-class values that favour the status quo, thus providing popular justification for the existing economic and political monopolies within US society: ‘the rise of a competitive system for producing abstract cultural currency in the form of educational credentials has been the major new force shaping stratification in twentieth-century America’ (Collins, 1979: 94).

During the 1980s and 1990s Collins shifted his attention towards macro-sociological themes exploring the impact of geopolitical change, nation-state formation, wars, revolutions and ethnic conflicts. Drawing on the more political and materialist readings of Weber, Collins identified power politics, state prestige and status struggle as shaping much of social and political life on the macro level. Thus, in Max Weber: A Skeleton Key (1985), the Weberian Sociological Theory (1986), and Macro-History: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (1999), and many articles and book chapters published in this period, Collins advances a conflict and status-centred analysis of social relations. This approach conceptualises human beings as social and conflict-driven creatures focused on maximising their social status positions. Consequently, the institutions and organisations that coordinate actions of large numbers of individuals tend to be shaped by similar incentives – to enhance their status and prestige. Hence the nation-state, as the dominant form of organisational power in modernity and the only institution capable of monopolising the legitimate use of violence over a specific territory, becomes the key power player in the geopolitical arena. In Weberian Sociological Theory (1986) and Macro-History (1999) Collins explores how nation-states attain legitimacy, prestige and resources through symbolic, political, economic and military victories in the wider international contexts.

In this period Collins also published several influential books focusing on the wider theoretical developments within sociology, including Sociology since Mid-century: Essays in Theory Cumulation (1981), Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-obvious Sociology (1982), Three Sociological Traditions (1985) and Theoretical Sociology (1988). These books demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge, his ability to creatively incorporate the classical and contemporary theoretical approaches into a novel framework for analysis and his capacity to apply these theoretical insights to a variety of empirical contexts. These theoretical books have also played a significant role in helping Collins articulate a powerful analytical model to explain large-scale social change. Hence by zooming in on the different intellectual traditions and on the ways new interpretative frameworks are generated, Collins devised a unique theory of intellectual change that explores not only how new knowledge is created but also how and why some theories gain influence while others remain invisible. This theory was fully developed in his magnum opus The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998). This enormous book, based on over 30 years of painstaking research, traces the rise and decline of different intellectual traditions throughout the world over the thousands of years of human history. Collins compares and contrasts the patterns of intellectual networks from ancient China, India, Japan, and Greece, to medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian scholastic traditions, to more recent intellectual development within the schools of philosophy in Europe. The book challenges the conventional views that identify great discoveries and novel ideas with unique talents and experiences of brilliant individuals and shows that new interpretative horizons are inevitably collective processes involving relatively small networks of socially interdependent scholars. Collins argues that global intellectual change advances according to a very similar pattern with a handful of philosophical schools (no more than six at the time) dominating public attention. These intellectual networks tend to rely on intergenerational chains and their influence is dependent on profound disagreements with competing schools of thought. For Collins the vibrancy of a particular intellectual network entails external debates, dialogues and disagreement but also internal social dynamics with shifting patterns of stratification and solidarity. The most successful networks combine effective and relatively centralised organisational structures with clearly articulated and active intellectual positions involved in continuous debates with competing intellectual networks, as was the case with the ancient Greek and Chinese schools of thought or the networks of scholars in the Islamic world between the 8th and 13th centuries.

In the last two decades Collins has focused much of his attention on micro-sociology. Although his early work was also centred on micro-interactional issues, it is only more recently that this research programme, highly influenced by Durkheim and Goffman, has come to the fore. The focal point of the two central books published in this period, Interaction Ritual Chains (2004) and Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (2008), is the micro world of everyday interactions. These studies emphasise the role emotions, rituals and routine encounters play in social life. More specifically, Collins argues that ‘interaction ritual chains’ underpin much of human micro-level relations. In his view, social actions are shaped by the emotional energies displayed in face-to-face encounters where high energy individuals tend to direct much of these collective interfaces. The interaction ritual chains involve social mechanisms through which individuals and groups generate symbols of group membership that increase their individual and collective emotional energies. For Collins these chains are critical for the production and maintenance of group solidarity, and as such they can be measured empirically: the degree of intergroup solidarity can be determined in part by exploring the intensity of collective attachments to specific group symbols. The situations where interactional ritual chains attain high emotional intensity generate the state of collective effervescence, a concept Durkheim coined to describe the focused group attention characterised by synchronic rhythms of bodies and minds. This novel analytical framework is deployed to explain very different forms of social action ranging from smoking rituals and social stratification patterns to sexual practices and formal political institutions. However, it is in Collins’s book on violence that this theory has received the most comprehensive application. In Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (2008) Collins shows how even the most individualist forms of violence, such as assassinations, suicide bombings or sniper shootings, entail a substantive degree of ritualism and collective interaction. The book challenges the conventional views that associate violence with morally flawed individuals by conceptualising violent acts as situational responses. As Collins (2008: 2) emphasises:

not violent individuals, but violent situations – this is what micro-sociolegal theory is about. We seek the contours of situations, which shape the emotions and acts of the individuals who step inside them. It is a false lead to look for types of violent individuals, constant across situations.

This micro-sociological research is balanced with Collins’s continuous interest in the macro-sociology of organised violence, including a number of recent journal articles and chapters on war, revolutions, time-dynamics of crowd violence, forward panic, geopolitics and fighting efficacy. Some of these macro-sociological issues will receive more extensive attention in Collins’s forthcoming book on the time dynamics of violent conflicts. In addition, the ideas that underpin Collins’s macro-sociology of violence have also found their more popularised application in his recently published two volume novel Civil War 2 (2018).

The structure of the special issue

This special issue consists of seven articles dealing with different aspects of Collins’s work and his response. We begin with Michal Mann. In ‘Fear, Loathing and Moral Qualms on the Battlefield?’ he questions Collins’s claim contained in his sociology of violence that people are generally averse to violence, hardwired to interactional entertainment and solidarity, and that moral qualms prevent soldiers from killing. This assertion, he argues, draws on S.L.A. Marshall’s flawed empirical fieldwork in which soldiers refrained from firing on their enemies. For Mann, Collins’s work is problematical in that it focuses on the emotional states of soldiers, diminishing the organisational bases of military efficiency or the ‘frictions of battle’, and because he sees violence as morally repugnant to human beings. Examining the experiences of American and British soldiers in wars from the 1860s onwards, Mann points instead to the role of coercive military organisation and fear and loathing in explaining the persistence of military non-fire, rather than moral qualms. He concludes by arguing that humans are not necessarily pacific.

In his paper ‘Statuses and Status Groups’, Barry Barnes acknowledges the explanatory importance that Collins attributes to Weberian status groups. According to Barnes, Weber’s shift from focusing on status groups to class analysis in order to explain social processes that took place in the last two centuries was both unnecessary and mistaken: rather, class conflict should be reconceived as status group struggle. Not only was Collins at the forefront of emphasising status groups in his macro-sociology, he was also a pioneer in combining the work of Weber with Durkheim, Goffman and Garfinkel. Goffman’s discussion of maintaining honour and face in a social setting is fundamentally important for understanding the production and reproduction of the social order. It also provides an important corrective to individualistic and rational choice inspired sociologies.

In his paper ‘Emotion, Interaction and the Structure-Agency Problem: Building on the Sociology of Randall Collins’, Anthony King argues that sociology is in a state of crisis. It is under attack from individualism, behaviourism, and actor-network theory, which focuses on material objects. Collins’s micro focus on emotional energy in face-to-face interactions, drawn from Durkheim and Goffman’s foregrounding of rituals and the existence of Weberian status groups on a macro level, however, allows the discipline to fend off such unwarranted attacks. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental lacuna in his analysis in that it overstates the importance of emotional energy in (re)producing a hierarchical social order since many interactions involve individuals lacking charisma and emotional energy, and the link between these micro processes and the macro status groups struggling over collective goods is missing. Instead, King draws on another aspect of Goffman’s work: his emphasis on maintaining face and honour in interactions, which has been generalised in Scheff’s micro-sociological approach.

In her ‘Reflections on Collin’s Sociology of Credentialism’, Su-Ming Khoo interrogates Collins’s ‘credential society’, examining its contemporary relevance and updating it with reference to fundamental changes that have taken place in higher education, especially in terms of the latter’s focus on producing ever-increasing numbers of students, despite declining funding from the state, and in equipping students with technological skills within the context of a greater diversity in student composition. Many black and female students are now enrolled in ‘Lower Ed’ profit-oriented institutions with high tuition costs but low levels of symbolic prestige. Some of the major failures in Collins’s approach constitute part of a sociology of absences characterising his work.

Lea David in ‘Human Rights, Memory and Micro-solidarity’ shifts the focus from Collins’s macro to micro analyses by engaging with Collin’s work on ritual and emotional energy, developed in his book Interaction Ritual Chains, to examine the relation between human rights, micro-solidarity and social action. Rather than producing a shared sense of solidarity centred on human rights, organised workshops with face-to-face interactions between Israelis and Palestinians created and entrenched feelings of ethnic solidarity, polarising the groups further.

Steven Loyal in ‘Bourdieu and Collins on the Reproduction of Elites’ returns to analysing macro processes, again focusing on Collins’s credential society, but this time comparing it with Bourdieu’s work in the sociology of education, and especially his book The State Nobility. He does this in order to discuss the similarities and differences between the two with respect to explaining the reproduction of elite social strata, and in order to demonstrate their respective explanatory strengths and weaknesses.

In Contemporary Populist Politics through the Macroscopic Lens of Collins’ Conflict Theory, Ralph Schroeder argues that although Collins is a leading historical sociologist, especially evident in his early macro-oriented work focusing on conflict, he fails to tie together and explain the interplay between the various strands of his thinking centred on economic change, the role of geo-politics and social movements. This absence is especially evident in his failure to account for contemporary macro changes entailing the rise of populism. He examines the rise of populism in four countries: the US, Sweden, India, and China. The first two represent extremes in terms of the varieties of capitalism while the latter two represent developing societies.

In the final paper, ‘Grounding Nationalism: Randall Collins and the Sociology of Nationhood’, Siniša Malešević examines the relative, though by no means absolute, neglect of nationalism in the work of the classical sociologists. Such a sociological absence, he argues, was reinforced by scholars of nationalism who were for the most part non-sociologists. Even those sociologists who analysed its underpinning and mechanisms tended to focus on its derivation from state-formation. Collins represents the exception here. His Durkheimian focus on symbols and rituals as well as Weberian foregrounding of geo-politics integrates a macro and micro focus, which examines nationalism in terms of effervescent time-bubbles and has been of tremendous significance for the study of nationalism. Nevertheless, his theory fails to address the importance of nationalism, especially as it operates in small states or those with an absence of geo-political dominance. This requires a more rigorous understanding of nationalism as an organisationally, ideologically and micro-interactionally grounded phenomenon.

In the last paper Randall Collins thoughtfully reflects and responds to the ideas and arguments of all these papers, pointing to developments and misunderstandings in his impressive oeuvre.