How to theorize - 3.5 ECTS

Professor Gabriel Abend
Institute of Sociology, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Professor Monika Krause
Department of Sociology, the London School of Economics and Political Science

Associate Professor José Ossandón
Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School

Prerequisites

Participants must be active PhD students. Because of the perspective of the readings and the expertise of the faculty, this course will be more relevant to PhD students working with case-based and qualitative organization studies, anthropology, sociology, or science and technology studies.

Aim

As researchers we are expected to theorize. We must construct abstractions to express our empirical objects theoretically; we have to situate our findings among gaps in the literature; and our papers are meant to have theoretical contributions. Theorizing, however, has remained a mystified moment of personal genius we are supposed to do in private. We do this course because we believe theorizing is a practice we can train, exercise, and reflect upon collectively.

This course departs from an increasing scholarly interest in theorizing. Collectively, this work calls for a transition, from how we usually teach and think about theories, with an emphasis on the outcome -the concepts, models, and books we are supposed to learn in theory courses and textbooks-, to an emphasis on the process, the practices of making theories. Furthermore, the course is inspired by work that has started to pay investigate the co-existence of various “styles of scientific reasoning”, forms of conducting science with their own rules for what constitute evidence, proof, and theory. That to learn to theorize we have to be good at recognizing these different styles.

We offer this course, because we believe working with this literature will help participant PhD students be more aware of the possibilities and issues associated with different theorizing decisions and that will make them better equipped to elaborate their own theoretical contributions.

In short: this is not a theory course but a course on how we theorize. 

Learning objectives

The course has two learning objectives: 

(1) participant PhD students learn and reflect on recent debates on theorizing in social research, and

(2) participant PhD students rehearse how to make work on theorizing usable on their own theory elaboration work.

To pass the course participant PhD students must: 

• attend the course fully.
• read the suggested literature in advance
• submit a sample of their PhD work (It can be a monograph chapter, an article in progress, or a piece specially produced for the occasion, maximum length 8000 words excluding references) accompanied with a reflection of maximum three pages (or 1500 words) which uses the literature of the course to reflect on how theorizing work in the submitted piece
• to read and discuss in course workshops allocated texts submitted by other participating PhD students.

Student Workload

• Teaching: 24 hours
• Preparation / reading work: 20 hours
• Assignments: 20 hours

Pedagogical approach

The course will combine lectures, seminars, and workshops. The emphasis will be in opening-up concepts and activities in theorizing that more often remain taken for granted or black-boxed. Faculty will lecture on key issues in theorizing, share their own experience as researchers confronting theorizing problems, and provide feedback in the course workshops and seminars. The course will not offer a unique recipe or best practice. We will work from the belief that what we can do together is to create a richer vocabulary on how we theorize, which each will use in accordance with the constrains of their own research projects.

This course’s faculty have played an active part in shaping contemporary debates on theorizing.  

Gabriel Abend (Chair of Sociology, University of Göttingen, PhD Northwestern University) has investigated how often implicit understandings of what theory might be inform how social researchers judge each other work, a research agenda he unfolded in his monograph Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: practical reason in the logic of social science (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Monika Krause (Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics, PhD New York University) has investigated, in several publications including her monograph Model Cases: On canonical research objects and sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), what social researchers do when they do case research, and how, often, key research decisions rely on taken for granted practices on what counts as an exemplary case.

José Ossandón (Associate Professor, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, PhD Goldsmiths University of London) is currently working on a book titled Reading Cultural Economy with an emphasis on case-based inquiry as an approach to investigate the economy.

Content of the Course

The course is organized into five units.

Unit 1: Introduction to the course. From theory to theorizing

The course begins with an introduction to the main issues of the course, an overview on recent debates on theorizing[1], and an introduction to the discussion on “styles of scientific reasoning”. We will work on an exercise to try to situate our work withing these traditions.

Readings

Swedberg, R. (Ed.). (2014). Theorizing in social science: The context of discovery. Stanford University Press. Chapter 1: ‘From theory to theorizing’

Swedberg, R. (2016). Before theory comes theorizing or how to make social science more interesting. The British journal of sociology, 67(1), 5-22.

Hacking, I. (1992). ‘Style’for historians and philosophers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 23(1), 1-20.

Forrester, J. (1996). If p, then what? Thinking in cases. History of the Human Sciences, 9(3), 1-25.

Unit 2: What we talk about when we talk about theory?

The unit problematizes the concept of “theory” itself. We reflect on the various meaning different research traditions give to theory and how this has an impact on how researchers judge each other’s work. For example, when someone say our work is “undertheorized” or “too descriptive”, that person is probably mobilizing a particular and un-explicated understanding of what theory is and should be. We will work to make more explicit the underlying notion of theory in your PhD work.

Readings

Abend, G. (2008). The meaning of ‘theory’. Sociological theory, 26(2), 173-199.

Abend, G. (2023). Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: Practical Reason in the Logic of Social Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Chapters 1 and 2).

Further readings

Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT press. (Introduction)

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford university press. (Introduction and chapter 7).

Homans, G. (1964) Bringing Men Back In. American Sociological Review, 29(6), 809–18.

Unit 3: What do we do when we think with cases?

The unit focuses on how social science researchers work with cases. First, we will focus on how researchers often assume there are “model cases” (for example: the French Revolution for the study of revolutions, Ford for the study of industrial organizations, Über for the platform economy) that become a yardstick for their own studies, while, usually, not discussing on how a situation becomes a model case and how to work with them. Second, we will discuss how, when we work with case studies, we often keep switching between our “material research object” – our concrete site or object of analysis – and a “epistemic research object” – the concepts that our material research objects are supposed to be a case of. We will discuss the implicit “model cases” and the relationship between your material and epistemic research objects.

Readings

Krause, M. (2021). Model cases: On canonical research objects and sites. University of Chicago Press. (Introduction and Chapter 1).

Krause, M. (2024). Theorizing from neglected cases. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 25(2), 250-266.

Further readings

Krause, M. (2016). Comparative research: Beyond linear-casual explanation. In Deville, J., Guggenheim, M., & Hrdličková, Z. (Eds.) Practising Comparison: Logics. Relations, Collaborations. Mattering Press.

Ermakoff, I. (2014). Exceptional Cases: Epistemic Contributions and Normative Expectations. European Journal of Sociology 55(2), 223–43.

Giere, R.N. (1994). The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Theories. Philosophy of Science, 61(2): 276–96.

Wagenknecht, S. & Pflüger, J. (2018). Making Cases: On the Processuality of Casings in Social Research. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 47(5), 289–305.

Unit 4: How do we work with concepts?

Inspired by Stengers’s approach, this unit pays attention to different ways in which researchers use concepts, and how with their concepts we can learn different practical instructions for how to theorize. To do that, we analyse how influential organization scholars (Weber, Simon, Bittner, Callon) conceptualized differently. The argument is that for each of these examples we find a different style of conceptualization with very different rules for how to theorize. We will discuss how these different genres might have different consequences on your conceptual work.

Readings

Bittner, E. (1965). The concept of organization. Social Research, 32(3), 239-255.

Crowther-Heyck, H. (2005). Herbert A. Simon: The bounds of reason in modern America. JHU Press. (Selected pages)

Weber, M. (1949). “Objectivity” in social science and social policy. In The methodology of the social sciences, 49-112.

Further readings

Callon, M. (1998) Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics.” In The Laws of the Markets, 1–57.

Stengers, I. (2011). Cosmopolitics II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Unit 5: On explanation

In social research, theory is often tied to explanation: a theory is supposed to explain something: but what is to explain? In this unit, we discuss how different traditions of social research think explanation differently. We begin with historian Carlo Ginzburg and his evidential paradigm, to continue with anthropologist Clifford Geertz and his idea of thick description, to continue with organizational sociologist Diane Vaughan and her idea of analogical theorizing, to end with a discussion on the idea of social mechanisms as outlined by Hedström and Swedberg.

Readings

Ginzburg, C. (1979). Clues: Roots of a scientific paradigm. Theory and Society 7(3), 273-288.

Geertz, C. (1993) Thick description: toward and interpretative theory of culture. In The interpretation of Cultures, selected essays.

Vaughan, D. (2004). Theorizing disaster: Analogy, historical ethnography, and the Challenger accident. Ethnography, 5(3), 315-347.

Hedström, P., & Swedberg, R. (1996). Social mechanisms. Acta sociologica, 39(3), 281-308.

Further readings

Ginzburg, Selected essay.

Forrester, J. (2017) Thinking in cases. John Wiley & Sons.

Morgan, M. S. (2020). “‘If p? Then What?’ Thinking within, with, and from cases”. History of the Human Sciences, 33(3-4), 198-217.

Merton, R. (1949). ‘On sociological theories of the middle range’.

Course Plan:

Day 1:

8:30- 10:00 Introduction (Unit 1). José Ossandón

• Introducing the participants
• introducing the debate on Theorizing
• Exercise on Styles of Reasoning

10:30 – 12:30 Lecture on the concept of theory (Unit 2). Gabriel Abend

Lunch

13:00 – 15:00 Lecture on model cases (Unit 3). Monika Krause

18:00 Course dinner

Day 2:

Course Workshop 1

9:00 – 10:30 Gabriel Abend and Monika Krause present their recent research and class respond to their work with questions informed by the lectures in Day 1

10:30 – 15:00 Workshop. Students’ work reflected collectively with tools from Day 1.

Day 3:

9:00- 12:00 Lecture on concept work (Unit 4). José Ossandón

Lunch

13:00- 16:00 Lecture on explanation (Unit 5). José Ossandón

Day 4:

9:00 – 12:00 Final workshop. Students’ work reflected collectively with tools from discussions on Day 3.