Abstract:Sociologists have long been interested in understanding the emergence of new social kinds. We argue that sociologists' formation stories have been mischaracterized as non-causal, descriptive, or interpretive. Traditional "forcing cause" accounts describe regularized relations between fixed entities with specific properties. The three dominant approaches to causality-variable causality, treatments and manipulations, and mechanisms-all refer to forcing causes. But formation stories do not fit the forcing causes framework because accounts of formation violate the assumptions that ground forcing cause accounts and instead emphasize eventfulness, assemblage, and self-representation. Yet these accounts are, we argue, fundamentally causal. In particular, formation stories provide the historical, empirical boundaries for the functioning of forcing cause accounts. We catalog the breadth of formation stories in sociology, and use examples from diverse literatures to highlight how thinking of formation stories as causal accounts can improve our understanding of the relationship of history and culture to causal analysis. * Authors listed in alphabetical order; both authors contributed equally. We would like to thank

In the context of calls for "postpositivist" sociology, realism has emerged as a powerful and compelling epistemology for social science. In transferring and transforming scientific realism-a philosophy of natural science-into a justificatory discourse for social science, realism splits into two parts: a strict, highly naturalistic realism and a reflexive, more mediated, and critical realism. Both forms of realism, however, suffer from conceptual ambiguities, omissions, and elisions that make them an inappropriate epistemology for social science. Examination of these problems in detail reveals how a different perspective-centered on the interpretation of meaning-could provide a better justification for social inquiry, and in particular a better understanding of sociological theory and the construction of sociological explanations.

We propose three interlinked ways that theory helps researchers build causal claims from ethnographic research. First, theory guides the casing and re-casing of a topic of study. Second, theoretical work helps craft a clear causal question via the construction of a contrast space of the topic of investigation. Third, the researcher uses theory to identify social mechanisms that condense causal accounts. We show how each step can accommodate the everyday meanings typically central to ethnographic research's contributions. This tripartite role for theory thus preserves ethnography's traditionally recognized strength in interpretive validity, while realizing ethnography's potential for offering causal, and partly generalizable, accounts that can engage the wider sociological discipline. The discussion brings ethnographic research into conversation with recent debates on the role of mechanisms, comparative and counterfactual thinking in causal accounts. We illustrate and defend our argument for theory in ethnography with an extensive analysis of a contemporary ethnographic monograph along with briefer attention to parallel uses of theory in two other ethnographic studies.

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How do proto-state organizations achieve an initial accumulation of power, such that they are in a position to grow (or shrink) as an organization, maintain their prestige (or lose it), and be viewed, by elite and populace, as something real and consequential that can be argued about, supported, or attacked? This article argues that state-formation has a performative dimension, in which the publicity of acts of violence, coercion, and negotiation made by agents of the proto-state, and the variable interpretation of these acts, are paramount to the state’s success (or failure) and developing character. In the model developed here, agents of a would-be state act in response to emergencies, and when public interpretations of those actions assign their character and effectiveness to “the state,” the state is performed into being. In particular, public performance solves, in part, agency problems obtaining between state rulers and their staff and elite allies. The formation of the federal government in the early American republic (1783 to 1801), whose success is insufficiently accounted for by extant theory, provides an opportunity to develop a model of the performative dimension of state-formation.