Micro-macro and other pairings in sociological theory

To understand the issue of the micro-macro problem in sociological theory, it is necessary to start from looking at it in the context of other so-called pairings in sociological theory� Sociologists tackle pairs of concepts which cause tensions and often paradoxes� Next to the problem of micro and macro, the central so-ciological parings are individual-society and agency-structure� By a similar to-ken, debates in sociological theory are organized also by other dualisms such as objectivism-subjectivism, dynamics-statics, materialism-idealism, and rational-ism-empiricism which, in turn, lead to the formation of opposing camps and paradigms, thus revealing huge divides in the general understanding of what sociology is� I am not going to reconstruct all the possible dualisms in socio-logical theory, and in this section my focus is on understanding the basics of the micro-macro problem� I am sure that a better understanding of this problem is possible when it is presented in relation to the issue of individual-society and agency-structure� In the last paragraphs of this section I will also try to recon-struct how the notion of meso is understood in the theory�

1.2.1 Other pairings: individual-society and agency-structure

The individual-society pairing certainly has some overlap with the micro-macro pairing, as the individual is a phenomenon of a micro-scale, and society, as some-thing large, obviously seems to be somesome-thing of macro-scale� Yet, the individual is not the only entity placed on the micro-level, and there are also many other phenomena, which are to be regarded as occurring on the macro-level� Quite many theoretical approaches deal with macro-processes and macro-phenomena but reject the concept of society� The individual-society pairing is the oldest among the three and has been seriously considered in the works of social philos-ophers for a very long time before the establishment of sociology as a legitimate mode of theorizing about social processes� In the next section, where I am going to discuss how the classics of sociology perceived the micro-macro problem in the theory, I will demonstrate that they were rather tackling with the individual-society problem� What is now anachronically concluded about their stances on micro-macro is based, to a large extent, on their statements about individuals, society, and relations between the two� On this subject I will say more in Section 1�3 of this chapter� Here, however, I will focus only on the conception of the in-dividual, and the way in which the individual and society mutually defining each other, as analyzed by Norbert Elias�

The reason I choose here Elias’ work is because it serves as an illustration of the mutual defining of individual and society, but also because the author pro-vided a convincing history of the concept of the individual in Western culture�

Although the word “individual,” which is used in English to denote an entity (usually bringing to mind a human individual), comes from Latin, it was not used in the classical Latin of Roman empire� The word appears for the first time in me-dieval theological treaties about discussing the indivisibility of the Holy Trinity�

“Individual” originally denoted an entity, which could not be divided (Elias 1991) and it was only later that the term was also attached to the concept of a human individual� As Elias claims, the concept of the individual and our self-perception as individuals is a product of the Western culture and the processes that started in Medieval period and then flourished in Renaissance� Elias (1969; 1982) calls this a “civilizational process�” In Elias’ interpretation of Western culture, the concep-tion of the individual dominated our thinking (Layder 2006: 153)� This obsession with our own individuality is for him also present in sociological theories which focus excessively on social roles and the individual-society relation� His way of breaking with this, as he perceived, ill-thought dilemma was the figurational the-ory, which highlighted that society and individual are mutually creating, which means that it is not possible to think of one them without referring to the other�

The discussion of the pairing of individual-society requires having the concept of the individual rooted in one’s conceptual toolkit� The second concept – society – demands some explanation as well� It is commonly believed that sociology as a science was created when thinkers started to problematize society as a population of a modern state� Later, the concept was either rejected, or made more complex�

The fact that society is made-up of individuals (but is not always understood as a simple aggregation of individuals), and that humans are at the same time social animals unable to function without their social environment, is a kind of quibble requiring explanation from sociologists� Another issue is the double meaning of the term “society” which does not only denote a population of a large size, but also a company, an association, or a club, which is yet another reminder of the fact that the existence of an isolated individual is impossible� For the sociologically trained, it is a banal statement, but as Derek Layder (2006: 3) noticed, there are still peo-ple who speak about individuals as if they were outside of social forces� For this reason, it is important to recall the individual-society pairing, even though as a theoretical problem it is no longer particularly interesting for sociologists�

I will now turn to the agency-structure pairing, which is now at the center of the sociological debate� Although it was also not directly described by the classics, its strong traces can be found in their works� According to the agency paradox, people are able to act while simultaneously being constrained by struc-ture, and through acting, they are capable of influencing this very structure� To understand this pairing, it is necessary to understand both notions, which, of course, have many definitions in sociological theory� To simplify things, I will assume after Layder (2006: 4–5) that structure can be defined as “the social re-lationships which provide the social context or conditions under which people act�” The tradition of sociological studies of the social structure is a very long one, and it includes classical analyses of social classes, as well as recent works on social networks� What is common in this thinking is the understanding that a structure which contains elements and the relations between these elements is, in a way, stable or durable, and constrains social actors (individual and collective)�

Agency is a capability of acting, the state of being a subject not an object� As it was understood by Anthony Giddens (1984), it is the ability to make a difference in the world� Agency is connected with the key sociological notion of social ac-tion since Max Weber (1978) recognized it as a crucial subject of sociological inquiry� The tension in the agency-structure pairing is therefore connected with more classical tensions, such as voluntarism-determinism or change-stability� It is a pairing which is strictly a product of the sociological way of theorizing and has occupied the minds of sociologists in the recent decades� A good example of

this sociological focus on agency-structure pairing is the monumental collection of readings edited by Mike O’Donnell (2010a)� This collection of four volumes in-cludes the works of classics and current theorists tackling the problem of agency and structure� The most influential contributions in late 20^th century sociological theory by Bourdieu (1977), Giddens (1984), and Habermas (1984) are recognized as valuable because of their attempts to solve the agency-structure paradoxes� In the introduction to the above-mentioned collection of readings discussing the agency and structure issue, Mike O’Donnell (2010b: xxvii) stated that the proper understanding of individual-society and micro-macro pairings is necessary for dealing with the crucial for social theory pairing of agency and structure�

What is thus the difference between micro-macro pairing and agency-structure pairing? George Ritzer (1990: 363) defines it in the following way: “Agency is usually micro, but may be macro� Structure is usually macro, but may be micro�

Micro usually indicates agency, but may include mindless behavior� Macro usual-ly means structure, but may refer to culture�” Agency is the ability of a social actor, which as a point of departure denotes a human individual (which is connected to the earlier discussion of individual-society pairing)� There are, however, also large collective actors, whose agency is performed on macro-level� A canonic example of this is the state, but some authors treat as collective actors (of obviously macro-scale) also nations or social classes�

Many – usually the ones closely attached to methodological individualism – would reject treatment of such large objects as actors (Hindess 1986: 115)� Accord-ing to Hindess, actAccord-ing requires two capabilities: the capability to make a decision, and then to act on this decision� A nation or social class cannot be treated as an actor because it does not have a mechanism of decision taking, and calling either of them an actor cane be done only in an allegorical sense (Hindess 1986: 115)�

The state, however, with its procedure of taking collective decisions is, according to this approach, an actor� Hindess (1986) persuasively claims that the macro per-spective is also a reductionist one� Conventionally, the micro-perper-spective is treat-ed as a rtreat-eduction of complex social processes into their “atomic” level� Yet, holistic approaches are also reductionist, because they reduce the complexity of actors’

internal construction to simple consequences of structural determinants� This re-minds of the famous critique of sociology by Denis H� Wrong (1961), claiming that it employs the oversocialized conception of man which reduces human in-dividuals to enactors of social pressures� In a similar fashion, classical economics undersocializes the concept of man, reducing the complexity of social forces influ-encing decisions of individual� According to Hindess (1986), social structures of macro-level influence the action in its both phases� The decisions are to be taken

only in the framework of certain discourses which allow perception and categori-zation� Decisions are influenced by macro-cultural structures and acting on these decision is constrained by social and material conditions external to the actor�

The micro-macro pairing was firstly introduced in economics� The author who is credited for coining the terminology to distinguish micro- and macro-economics is Ragnar Frisch (1933), however, it is conventionally regarded that the creator of the subdiscipline of macro-economy is John Maynard Keynes (Canterbery 2011: 490)� Keynes (1937) focused his studies on employment, in-terest, and money� His approach was labeled as “macroeconomics” because it was focused on the processes occurring on the national level of economy: aggregate national income, product, employment, and overall price level� In comparison, microeconomics is focused on choices of smaller decision units (as sociolo-gists would say, “social actors”) such as consumers, households, and firms� Since that time, the division between micro-economics and macro-economics, insti-tutionalized in economics teaching curricula, became commonly accepted� As economics is for sociology very often a discipline to look up to – although soci-ologists very rarely admit to it – it was quite easy for them to start thinking about the processes they were considering in terms of micro or macro as well�

1.2.2 What does micro and macro actually mean?

Jeffrey C� Alexander and Bernhard Giesen (1987) in the introduction to the col-lected volume The Micro-Macro Link (Alexander et al� 1987) state that the micro-macro dichotomy is an analytical distinction� This, according to Alexander and Giesen, is what distinguishes micro-macro from previously discussed concrete (substantial) pairings� Individual versus society, and action versus order (anoth-er label for agency-structures dichotomy) are of substantive nature, which means that is possible to indicate the real entities behind them� Yet, seen from the more constructivist perspectives, this is not so straightforward: there are quite strong arguments to claim that both individual and society, or agency and structure, are notions developed by researchers in order to better understand social reality�

To support Alexander and Giesen’s view, it is necessary to state that “individual”

and “society” are categories of practice, while the micro and macro distinction is only used by social scientists analyzing social phenomena� It would be also hard to point to agency and structure as categories of practice but – putting aside the huge sociological debate about agency and structure – it is possible to point to their substantial designates�

Having agreed that micro versus macro is a distinction of an analytical char-acter, I need to point to the consequences of this fact: it is the decision of a

researcher what to name micro and macro; it is also his or her decision how to conceptualize their relation� There are two possible general ways of conceptual-izing the link between micro and macro: the first approach is to describe the mechanism mediating between the two; the second one is to introduce another analytical category of meso�

As George Ritzer (1990: 349) noticed, many sociologists use the analytical distinction between micro and macro empirically� The reason for this may be the strong institutionalization of these analytical categories in the scientific field� The consequence of such an use, however, may be their reification and production of artifacts� Thus, scholars often make an equation between the micro-level and the individual-level reality of everyday life, while the macro-level is equated with the social world or whole social reality� The artifacts of analytical framing might be easily produced if what is useful as a tool to analytically perceive reality (i�e�

as social processes on different levels) might be smuggled – or in unnoticed way transformed – into the statements on the substantial entities� This is an impor-tant lesson regarding the recurrent problem of social theories in which analytical categories are often treated as empirical categories, which may lead to the pro-duction of knowledge that does not pertain to social reality but the sociological perception of this very reality�

It is a contingent outcome of the development of sociological theory that mi-cro and mami-cro are so close to other theoretical pairings� As an analytic categori-zation they are both relational and arbitrary, so something treated as micro from one perspective could be treated as macro from another (Alexander 1987: 291)�

Apparently, there is some overlap between the analytical micro-macro distinction and the two other key theoretical distinctions, which I have already mentioned in the previous section� My guess would be that many scholars do not sufficiently understand this overlap and the differences between the pairings, and often treat the micro-macro dichotomy as more or less equal to, for instance, individual-so-ciety dichotomy� This makes it quite easy to state something about the micro-level having in mind individuals or their interactions� Although in this chapter I often interpret claims of classical theorists regarding other pairings as claims about the micro-macro dichotomy, I keep in mind that this has to be done very cautiously�

It is also important to be very cautious in the attempts of operationalizing mi-cro and mami-cro as observable and unobservable� It is not true that it is possible to plainly observe micro-level entities or processes such as motives, personalities, or biographies� On the other hand, some macro-entities (like legal systems or income distribution) are quite easily to be seen by social scientists (Alexander, Giesen 1987: 21), which is an important argument for treating the micro-macro

pairing as an analytical distinction� Another similar assumption made by some authors is that processes and entities on the micro-level are simple or uniform, whereas processes and entities on the macro-level are complex (Knorr-Cetina 1981: 20)� It is not true, because the micro-transactions of everyday life might be enormously complex, while some processes (or at least their representations) on a macro-scale might be quite simple� Some approaches to macro-level treat it as an aggregation of micro-level processes or entities, which in consequence may lead to the assumption that macro-level is more complex as it is a totality of mi-cro-level phenomena� It is a naive way of thinking, because – having in mind that micro and macro are analytical categories – it is necessary to reduce the com-plexity on both levels through the development of models of reality� The model of macro-process does not include all the elements of its micro-components�

Another important point about the micro-macro pairing is that it might be treated as a dichotomy or a continuum� George Ritzer (1990: 364) claims that micro and macro are just ends of a continuum� Yet, as they are analytical tools, only their usefulness for a better understanding of reality should be important here� Again, the treatment of micro-macro as a dichotomy is quite often con-nected to its overlap with other pairings which are “more dichotomous” in na-ture� In the case of individual-society, there is no place for continuum, although researchers often show that in social groupings of different sizes there are dif-ferent dynamics of social processes� In the case of agency and structure there is no place for continuum as well� Thus, to picture micro and macro as a floor and a ceiling, to some extent arbitrary set by a researcher, it is possible to point to the space between them and try to conceptualize it, as if it included some other levels (i�e� meso); it is also possible to talk about something being more macro (i�e� closer to the imagined ceiling) or more micro (closer to the imagined floor)�

Figure 1.1 Micro and macro as ends of continuum

To conclude, micro and macro do not mean anything, or they might mean quite a lot� As analytical tools they might be very handy in order to better understand the social reality, but taking them as something substantive might be very decep-tive� I truly believe that the use of micro and macro in sociological analysis is helpful in creating a conceptual order in the chaos of various substantive entities�

Yet, we – as scholars – need not to reify it�