Orienting to Chance

"Since the founding of the discipline, sociologists have endeavored to understand the structures of groups, organizations, and societies and how these entities condition our behavior. While some of the foundational theorists in the discipline saw these processes as largely deterministic, sociological theory has increasingly insisted on the importance of culture in shaping our position in and responses to social entities. With the rise of big data, we are once again susceptible to deferring to clear, knowable determinants, rather than the messy contingency of subjective experience. In this new work of theory, sociologists Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo aim to show that the social order, its moral sensibility, its events and catastrophes, its promise and peril, bears an unmistakable and intimate link to chance. What's more, this link can in fact be found in some of the discipline's founding thinkers. Probability, in this perspective, is an objective part of the social world, as opposed to a tool we use to form knowledge about it. While statistical data favored by quantitative sociologists makes use of a weak version of probability, Strand and Lizardo urge us instead to think about how chance conditions our actions. Though our life in society is often predictable, we are constantly responding and recalibrating in response to encounters with the unexpected. We are thus caught somewhere between a predictable world and one we know to be uncertain. Our responses to the predictably unpredictable are thus an essential element of our interactions with each other and social structures. This quotidian insight sits at the crux of diverging models of sociological research and theory. Using the few incorporations of this version of probabilism in sociology, particularly in the work of Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Pierre Bourdieu, the authors provide a sweeping overview of a new perspective in social theory that they call probabilism. They thus not only offer new tools for examining social life, but a new interpretation of the sociological canon. As quantification and big data come to have an ever more powerful hold over knowledge production in the social sciences--indeed, social life itself--probabilism is an essential intervention for understanding the ineluctable role of uncertainty in social life"--

Michael Strand is assistant professor of sociology at Brandeis University, where he is also affiliate faculty in the History of Ideas Program.