historical sociology literature review

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• Research Guides

Doing a Literature Review in Sociology

Introduction, early in the process, during data analysis, getting ready to write, before submitting the paper.

• Searching: Early in the Process
• Organizing: Getting Ready to Write

Top Journals & Publishers

Recommended Journals

• American Journal of Sociology Published by University of Chicago Press, available through JSTOR
• American Sociological Review Published by the American Sociological Association, available through SAGE Journals database
• Annual Review of Sociology Published by Annual Reviews, available through Brandeis subscription to the Annual Reviews website
• Social Forces Published by Oxford University Press, most recent issues (2000-present) available through Project Muse database
• Social Problems Published by Oxford University Press, available through Brandeis subscription to Oxford University Press website
• Theory & Society Published by Springer, available through Brandeis's subscription to Springer Standard Collection

Recommended Publishers

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A literature review helps you figure out what scholars, what studies, and what questions your project is in conversation with. It typically happens in stages throughout the life of your project – it is not something you do once and are then finished with!

This guide explores how to think about and do a literature review at four different stages of a project. On this page, Professor Wendy Cadge suggests how to think about each step. Get specific advice on strategies for searching and organizing on the subsequent pages of this guide.

​Wendy's Process

The first time I do a literature review is when I am thinking about possible research topics and questions and want to know what people have written about these questions and what they have found. I search the topics and questions broadly aiming to get a relatively comprehensive sense of what is known about my topic and whether there is space for another study that is going to contribute meaningfully to the conversation. I am trying to figure out both who is in this conversation (what scholars specifically but also in what fields), what they are talking about, and what is known and not known according to these experts.

The goal here is to figure out whether my study will be new and relevant and whether there is a way to motivate it both empirically and theoretically for the audience I am thinking of. I need this answer to be yes in order to proceed with the process.

As I do this initial literature review I am also refining my research question, asking myself whether it makes sense, how it relates to the ways others have approached my topic, etc. Often questions are too big (they will require thousands of pages to answer) or too small (you don’t need an empirical study to answer them) so I am also trying to get my question to be the right size as I do this first review.

My search strategies are as follows   Google Scholar and Sociological Abstracts with key terms, and focus on books published by major presses and articles in well-known journals. When I get hits I sort them into groups based on what they are - materials by sociologists, by other academics, by journalists, etc. I only read things that are published (no conference papers!) and read books in the top academic presses first (Chicago, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge) and things in well-known sociology journals. (See the box to the left for links to these journals.) Depending on the topic, I may read a lot written by non-sociologists to learn more . I read almost nothing in the popular media on the first go through.

I also don’t “read” everything - I skim books and read article abstracts to get an overview. The goal is to write 5-6 double spaced pages about what is known and what my study might add. I also want to have a set of more specific search terms and author names to search later. Typically I am mostly reviewing the sociology literature to think about how to fit this into a social science frame while also separating out “primary sources” to read later. These other sources about my topic include data (like government reports, statistical information etc.), which will be analyzed later rather than used for sociological framing.

Before I start collecting data I check with various colleagues to make sure my assessment of the literature and the place of my study in it (my 5-6 page document) makes sense and is convincing (i.e., I don’t want to waste my time gathering data to answer a question that people either don’t think is interesting, has already been answered in the literature, or isn’t going to add anything new and significant to the conversation. I don’t want to be the dud at the dinner party who is saying something people already know or doesn’t have anything to say.

Themes typically emerge in the process of analyzing the data that require me to revisit what I think I know about my topic and question from the literature. This is usually the place where I am trying to figure out what my empirical and theoretical arguments are. Often I have ideas about what my theoretical hooks or arguments might be but they come from other literatures, scholars or friends working in different parts of sociology, etc. This is often where I go back to the literature (via Annual Review articles and searches) to see how people have used certain concepts and to see if those concepts might help me articulate what I am finding. I also read the key empirical articles cited in the Annual Review articles to see how what I am finding is similar to and different from what others know and how I can relate to those studies with my data.

Search strategies Google scholar and Sociological Abstracts, Annual review articles, asking people who know the discipline better than I do where to go to learn about concept x or y. At this point I’m looking for ideas as I read that will help me make and articulate whatever arguments might be supported by my data.

By the time I finish this step I have a good sense of what my findings and argument are and how they fit i nto the existing conversation / literature.

If I have done the above two steps well, I probably have an outline by now that lays out what I think my findings are and how I am going to situate them and motivate them in existing literatures. Before I start to write I read through my entire Endnote database and I put citations and notes in the outline that will help me make certain points. If I see holes or don’t feel like the outline is tight enough I do more lit review at this point to help me situate my question as tightly as possible in existing literature. While articles are written in a way that makes it look like you do the lit review, then the data collection and analysis, then articulate the findings, etc. this is actually iterative for me through the whole process.

For more information on EndNote and other citation management software like Zotero, see the Organizing section of this guide .

Search strategies The same as what’s outlined above. Part of the trick here though is knowing when to stop searching and start writing! I try to start writing before I feel like I am finished reading because I will discover as I write what is missing and will go back and fill it in.

I have friends and colleagues read my paper and give me feedback. If this is going to a journal I look at the editorial board and make sure I have engaged with the ideas of any scholars on the editorial board that are relevant as these people are likely to be reviewers . I also always fill in a lot of citations after the article is drafted so I can see it as a whole and see what is and is not needed to make the argument more compelling.

Search strategies This is when I am looking up certain people usually on the web to see if I read relevant publications or am searching for a particular article. If I know I need some citations about a certain topic to support a point, this is also when I find them. This is usually the easiest part of the process.

• Next: Searching: Early in the Process >>
• Last Updated: Mar 19, 2024 1:25 PM
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30 Historical Sociology

Karen Barkey is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. She studies state centralization/decentralization, state control, and social movements against states in the context of empires. Her research focuses primarily on the Ottoman Empire and recently on comparisons between Ottoman, Habsburg, and Roman empires. Her latest book is Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

• Published: January 2011
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This article examines the different methods employed in historical sociology through which historical macro social outcomes are investigated — comparative, institutional, relational, and cultural — as well as the enduring tension revealed by the meso-level structures that often shape outcomes. It begins with a discussion of two major categories of historical sociology: comparative historical analysis, characterized by historical sociologists and political scientists who seek an explanation for large-scale processes, and the focus on institutionalism and networks in historical studies. It then presents examples of work in historical social science that have come closest to the requirements of analytical sociology. It also considers ways of bringing historical institutionalism and network analysis together and argues that an emphasis on analytic historical sociology can help specify the causality behind processes that have not been clearly interpreted or have been misinterpreted in historical, sociological, and culturally oriented studies.

Introduction

While there has been a proliferation of work in the field of historical sociology, it has not always adhered to an original claim by historical sociologists to explain large-scale social processes. Here it is necessary to emphasize both ‘explanation,’ and ‘large-scale social processes,’ since both have been questioned. A marriage between historical sociology and analytical sociology would be a desirable goal, one that is already seriously endeavored in some circles. An analytic historical sociology would focus on explaining why phenomena happen and how they happen, rather than relying only on description and interpretation. What analytical sociology brings to the field is an emphasis on an action-oriented sociology which requires that we seek to understand why actors do what they do and how the micro actions link to macro social outcomes towards building middle-range approaches to sociological theory ( Hedström 2005 ).

In this chapter I discuss some of the directions in the field and argue that even though the early generation of historical sociologists were focused on producing explanations for ‘large-scale outcomes,’ they did so without considering the more meso and micro levels of analysis that link the macro causes to the macro outcomes. They also remained aloof from a cultural perspective, denying a chance to integrate structure and culture more fully. Though the field is more differentiated and complex than I represent it here, it still falls into two major groups. One major path which I call comparative historical analysis is well represented by the recent edited volume by Mahoney and Rueschemeyer (2003) and is characterized by historical sociologists and political scientists who seek an explanation for large-scale processes, asking ‘big questions,’ with research programs embedded in the real social and political phenomena relevant to a changing world. Many scholars initially worked in Marxist, Weberian, or joint agendas with the methodological tools of comparative historical analysis. Later approaches adopted and incorporated institutionalist, rational-choice, and network approaches. In this varied set of strategies many scholars stressed continuing the original agenda of looking for explanations of social processes based on the collection of historical evidence and the repeated working and reworking of the relation between data and theory. Another approach, which I will call the culturalist approach, though quite broad and diverse, overall represents a position removed from straightforward causality, claiming a more radical position than one discussed in the older Methodenstreit debate. This approach privileges interpretation, subjectivity and text, language and discourse, and therefore questions the ability to provide scientific explanations for social phenomena.

I briefly review some of these positions to clarify the lay of the land, and to uncover an analytic geography to historical sociology. I then spend the rest of the chapter presenting particular examples of work in historical social science that have come closest to the requirements of analytical sociology. I try to show how we can get additional leverage from an analytical sociology that is resolutely process-oriented, linked in its macro, meso, and micro levels, and where once again the focus can be the explanation of important social-historical processes. The examples demonstrate the manner in which the emphasis on analytical historical sociology can help specify the causality behind processes that have not been clearly interpreted or have been misinterpreted in historical, sociological, and culturally oriented studies.

30.1 Comparative Historical Analysis

The field of historical sociology claims many of the illustrious European thinkers of the nineteenth century as its intellectual forebears. In the USA, however, the rise of historical sociology was the result of a small intellectual revolution against the dominance of a Parsonsian paradigm. On the margins of a much more conservative and functionalist field, historical sociology claimed to analyze the large-scale social transformations that affected both western and nonwestern countries. The rise of capitalism, socialism, the revolutionary transformations of the past in Western Europe, and the continuing revolutions of the early twentieth century in colonies and ex-colonies represented issues of vast importance not readily analyzed in sociological circles.

These large-scale transformations were too important, complex, and connected across the globe to be explained by simple functionalist models tested on constrained and confined regions that were taken one at a time. Their insistence on the complexity and diversity of historical trajectories and their use of induction to build middle-range theories as formulated by Merton (1967) was their asset. Therefore, they did not develop a theory of capitalism, but rather produced important statements on the economic organization of the world system ( Wallerstein 1974 ; Brenner 1987 ); not a theory of large-scale transformation, revolution, or democratization, but various middle-range theoretical statements about a diversity of routes to democracy and revolution ( Moore 1966 ; Anderson 1974 a , 1974 b ; Tilly 1975 ; Skocpol 1979 ) or theoretical statements on the nature of nation-building and citizenship ( Bendix 1964 ). They pioneered an entire new expansion of qualitative research, developing an agenda that over the years led to significant knowledge accumulation ( Amenta 2003 ; Goldstone 2003 ; Mahoney 2003 ).

As Calhoun (1996) describes, not fully satisfied with their marginal location, historical sociologists engaged in a process of domestication, acquiring the thinking and methodology of their integrated brethren. Their strength lay in the manner in which they were able to combine theory and methods with empirical questions of significance and maintain scientific focus, given the nature of historical evidence. The methodology of comparative work was developed in the 1970s and 1980s to become the major tool of the trade ( Pzreworski and Teune 1970 ; Roth 1971 ; Smelser 1976 ; Skocpol and Somers 1980 ; Skocpol 1984 ; Ragin 1987 ). Historical sociologists concentrated on identifying generalizable causal features that explained outcomes across multiple cases. They explained the same or different outcomes across cases through a configuration of variables that were argued to have expected causal effects ( Moore 1966 ; Skocpol 1979 ; Goldstone 1993 ). Critiques followed, however, of the flawed conception of time and unilinearity ( Abbott 1990 ), of the independence and equivalence of cases being compared ( Sewell 1996 ), of the greater ontological concerns ( Tilly 1997 ), of the desertion of grand theory ( Kiser and Hechter 1991 ), and others on the small number of cases ( King, Keohane and Verba 1994 ; Goldthorpe 1997 , 2000 ). Such concerns produced a rethinking of the methodology of comparative historical analysis that yielded a variety of directions, combinatorial and unique. Some historical sociologists turned towards a narrative-oriented perspective that promoted the reconsideration of temporality, narratives, and events as the stuff of historical process while others refocused their efforts onto comparisons that were internally reframed within cases along temporal dimensions. The adoption of temporality, events, and narratives was displayed in wide-ranging studies in sociology (Abbott 1990; Sewell 1996 ; Stryker 1996 ; Kimeldorf 1998 ; Stovel 2001 ) and in the work on analytic narratives in political science ( Bates et al. 1998 ).

A different set of scholars concentrated on the combination of process, social mechanisms, and temporality. These approaches were in no sense novel in historical sociology or sociology more generally. Philip Abrams (1982) in Historical Sociology had argued for bringing history and sociology together, since both tried to understand human agency within a process of structuration, as Anthony Giddens was also forcefully doing (1979, 1986, 1987). Arthur Stinchcombe in his Theoretical Methods in Social History had already flagged the importance of what he called ‘deep causal analogies,’ by which he meant finding correspondence between narratives of similar processes, identifying causal analogies between sets of facts, and then building these sets of facts into a cumulative causal analysis of the process at hand (1978). Microeconomic models of strategic action had also been available for some time (Olson [1965] 1971 , 1982 , 2000 ; Hechter 1987 ).

The renewed interest in an analytic direction was clear in some of the rising fields of historical sociology, especially when combined with large-scale comparative questions. For institutionalists the puzzle was to explain long term historical continuity, the reproduction and duration of phenomena, through concepts of institutional inertia and change ( Thelen 2003 ; Pierson 2004 ), or through process-tracing and analysis (Goldstone 2003; Hall 2003; Mahoney 2003). For network analysis the goal was to reframe the study of society away from categorical attributes of actors towards connectivity-based and positional studies of the structured social relations between individuals (Burt 1980; White 1992 ; Bearman 1993 ; Padgett and Ansell 1993 ; Gould 1995 ). For analytic-sociology advocates, this has meant a rethinking of mechanism-based explanations and connecting of various levels of analysis ( Swedberg and Hedström 1997 ; Tilly 1998 , 2001 , 2004 ; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001 ; Hedström 2005 ). Another analytic direction took the form of trying to uncover laws of social and political behavior and action ( Hechter 1987 ; Levi 1988 ; Weingast 1996 ).

We can also observe a cultural turn in historical sociology, and history, mostly initially inspired by anthropology. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt claimed a new subfield that combined ‘social and cultural modes of analysis in an empirically concrete and yet theoretically informed fashion’ (1999: ix). Bonnell and Hunt, but also Sewell and Biernacki skillfully pose their challenge as carrying out a cultural analysis that combines attention to meaning and interpretation as well as explanation. Mostly inspired by Weber, an interpretive comparative-historical program includes a continuous and integrated dialogue between structure and meanings, as well as more insightful uses of temporal processes over time. In a path also set by Reinhard Bendix (1980) and Clifford Geertz (1968) , Rogers Brubaker accomplisheda path-breaking analysis of French and German citizenship and work on national identity in the post-Soviet republics (1992, 1996). Brubaker has consistently paid attention to the varying conceptions of national identity and citizenship, deriving his explanations about larger macro-institutional outcomes from structural as well as interpretive arguments. Richard Biernacki (1995) studied the impact on economic life of two essentially divergent definitions of the character of labor in Germany and Britain from 1640 to 1914. Here different cultural understandings of how labor was understood and interpreted in national contexts explained the different practices and developments in each country. We can also cite the work of Veljko Vujacic (1996) , whose comparison of Serbian and Russian national identity and politics embraced Weberian notions of national self-understanding, or Barkey’s analysis (2000) of Hungarian and Romanian nationhood in the interwar era, where the nature of the social and political networks between the state and various institutions, such as education and labor, provided different meanings to what it meant to be a nation. In these works culture is a Weberian verstehen formulation that has been integrated into the structural elements of the causal puzzle.

From this initial moderate vision to the new manifestos of cultural sociology (see Steinmetz 1999 , 2005 ; Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005 ) much opposition to comparative historical analysis was utilized to self-consciously demarcate a new position critical of positivism, and to demand a rethinking of the categories of social phenomena that have informed the world we study, such as modernity, capitalism, bureaucratization, and secularization. Those who adopted a stronger culturalist perspective have been ready to dismiss other determinants of social action while privileging a fully constitutive role for culture. So much so that, realizing that the pendulum had swung too far, Sewell, in Logics of History , admitted: ‘Somehow, at the very time when particularly powerful changes in social and economic structures are manifested even more intently in our daily lives, we cultural historians have ceased not only to grapple with such structures but even to admit their ontological reality’ (2005: 520).

Recently, new modes of thinking forced the field out of its more macro moorings to consider a variety of ways of studying social action more concretely, dissecting social processes while respecting their long-term continuity and unfolding. This rethinking is the product of the questions raised with regard to the easy causality used by historical sociologists linking macro states in one particular time to macro outcomes in a later period, without specifying the underlying intermediary mechanisms at work. Moreover, the work of Thomas Shelling brought to light the problems of trying to understand macro-level outcomes without explicitly detailing the micro-level processes that brought them about (1978). Even more critical, he showed the manner in which the micro motives of individuals and the macro behavior of the aggregate might not be the same but coincide as a result of unintended consequences. Such concerns have to resonate more deeply with historical sociologists whose understanding of micro motives of the historical period and setting are incomplete.

Briefly we can cite three major strategies of research that forced historical sociologists toward an increasingly analytical turn: rational choice, network analysis, and institutional analysis. Each of these approaches has self-consciously thought about the linkages between macro-level phenomena and micro-/meso-level actions to ‘demonstrate how macro states at one point in time influence individuals’ actions, and how these actions bring about new macro states at a later point in time’ ( Edling and Hedström 2005 : 7). Each approach focused on action and mechanisms mediating between structures and action. Given the different perspectives espoused by institutionalists, rational-choice theorists, and network analysts, we have different analytic orientations, sets of mechanisms, and explanations. Yet each subfield has produced significant studies that demonstrated the value of analytical thinking in historical projects. I provide key exemplars of each strategy, focusing on the analytic unpacking they use, the connectivity between levels, and the explanation.

30.2 Institutionalism and Networks in Historical Studies

30.2.1 institutions.

Especially in political science, the focus on the explanation of political behavior and political outcomes is increasingly located within the study of institutions, since these latter define those who can participate, and shape their preferences and their strategies. The field is divided into rational-choice institutionalism that aspires to uncover the laws of political behavior and historical institutionalism that seeks to understand how political institutions shape the political process. The best studies in rational-choice institutionalism assume that practices and rules that are organizationally embedded are significant in determining the incentives, preferences, and strategies as well as the resources available to actors for political participation. As such they are focused on not simply the micro level of the individual but also the meso level of organizations as structuring the incentives of political actors.

Of Rule and Revenue (1988) by Margaret Levi is a good example of how macrostructural forces determine the micro properties of actors who given certain transaction costs and collective goods engage in bargaining to affect the macro structures in return. When Levi tries to understand the differences in the tax systems that evolved in France and England from the thirteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century (and why English parliamentary rule proved more tax-efficient over time than French absolutism), she stresses how ‘policies are the outcome of an exchange between the rules and the various groups who compose the polity,’ how rulers had to balance getting monies with maintaining power, how producing revenue required quasi-voluntary compliance, and the importance of the contextual variables such as economic structure, international relations, and ‘forms of government’ (1988: 11–13). Key to her argument is ‘the relative bargaining power of rulers’ (p. 17) that depends on the resources they control and the resources those on which they depend control, and the bargains they strike within determinate institutional conditions. She also discusses the transaction costs that come with negotiating agreements with society, and how some institutions, notably parliaments, can reduce them. When the macro situation alters (war, the economy, the international situation, and changes to the form of government), the circumstances of bargaining between the Crown and the society change considerably and with these bargaining and transaction costs rulers seek to manage and reduce in their quest for taxation.

In the case of France and England, she shows convincingly that ‘the relatively weaker bargaining position of the English monarchs vis-à-vis their constituents led to concessions that French monarchs did not have to make. However, the Parliament that evolved ultimately enhanced the ability of English monarchs to tax. Parliament provided a forum for conditional cooperation. It engendered quasi-voluntary compliance and reduced transaction costs’ (1988: 97).

In a comparison that duplicates the cases but asks a related question of why Jews who had become so valuable to both crowns as economic assets were evicted in 1290 from England and 1306 from France, Barkey and Katznelson use a similar framework (2008). They combine a macro analysis of medieval state-building with the micro dynamics of monarchical strategies regarding taxation. By contrast to the literature stressing the diminished fiscal capacity of the Jews or growing religious animosity based on the transformation in the ambitions and worldview of the Church, crusading, fundamentalist mendicant orders, local religious enthusiasms, and hostility to usury, they show how key features in the making of Europe’s pioneering nation-states fundamentally altered the character of kingship and the decisions about resources and legitimacy that monarchs had to make. The economic situation of the Jews was not irreversible ( Mundill 1998 ), and despite the intense religiosity of the period, at no time did the Church either in England or France call for Jewish eviction. Nor did kings simply respond to anti-Jewish mass and elite demands. Instead, kings staunchly shielded ‘their’ Jews from such external pressures. Therefore, just economic or religious, cultural reasoning is not enough to understand the puzzle of eviction which happened as Levi demonstrates, at the time of the development of different monarchical bargaining power vis-à-vis institutions of Parliament in England and lack thereof in France.

Barkey and Katznelson develop an argument that combines macrohistorical analysis with the micro dynamics of agents’ strategies to understand the puzzle of expulsion. They argue the major changes that occurred with the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 sent the two countries on separate trajectories of state-building which affected the character and logic of rule and of public authority by replacing a territorially elastic and inherently feudal system of dynastic rule with situated states, thus including the imperative for rulers to construct regulations for satisfactory engagement with the politically active members of the societies they governed and to make predictable and effective their ability to extract resources for statist purposes.

The transformation from dynasty to states, the alterations to political bargaining, and the changes to taxation proved critical for Jews. Before Bouvines, Jews had been part of dynastic rule, since they were of clear economic advantage. After Bouvines, with the new goals of state-building and the new extractive bargaining relationships with urban and rural society, each regime worked to move away from customary taxation, deeply affecting the fate of Jews. English and French kings sought to make effective and legitimate states, and therefore raised the likelihood that kings would come to choose the expulsion of Jews at the cost of losing a financial asset. After Bouvines, in England the contentious relationship between the Crown and notables claiming rights produced a new type of government with the creation of Parliament as a national institutional site of negotiation between the Crown and political society. Post-Bouvines France, on the other hand, still experienced struggles between kings who sought to create a modern state and the nobility, who sought to rule significant territory by feudal right. The royal effort to impose control, rather than the creation of a powerful national legislature, was also partly the result of the subservience of the French representative forums at the regional and national levels ( Elias [1939] 2000 ; Fawtier 1953 ; Ertman 1997 ). Under such conditions, Barkey and Katznelson show that once the calculus of the monarchs shifted after Bouvines, kings came to their rationales for expulsion given their new bargaining power in the context of the institutions and social groups they encountered. In England, the monarch was more readily forced into expelling his Jews, since the new representatives in the Parliament who were burdened by their debt to Jewish moneylenders were much more successful at bargaining with the King. In France, the King made the decision not within the context of a forceful institution but rather as a result of successful bargaining with the various estates in society. He maneuvered to give the different estates a break from taxation after they had contributed to major wars, but only after he was reassured that he had ensured a steady source of taxation for the future from them.

In both cases Barkey and Katznelson show that monarchs arrived at the same decision of expulsion through different processes of bargaining embedded in different conditions, institutions, and financial exigencies. This clearly illustrates the benefit of a stronger linkage between rational choice and historical institutionalism, especially because in historical analysis we have to understand the rational decision maker within the context of the institutions and structural constraints of the period. The decisions of the rulers are strongly embedded in the developing institutions of the time, themselves the outcomes of very different sets of historical and structural relations between the monarchy and the different estates of the two realms. Here the relations between the micro and the macro levels are analyzed, though the intermediary level is not yet fully specified.

Historical institutionalism both is interested in real political outcomes and recognizes institutions as the major mediating variables where politics is played out. Institutions can promote or prevent action, become the site of policy development and contention; in other words, they can become the critical juncture in the unfolding of a political outcome. Institutions here are defined as more or less organized, routinized, and standardized sets of procedures that maintain and reproduce a set of common understandings about the world, and how it functions ( Jepperson 1991 : 143–7). How do institutions change over time? Scholars are now paying attention to lengthy and large-scale historical processes for extended periods of time, developing strategies for studying how institutions have emerged, evolved, reproduced themselves, and thrived in some contexts and not in others. The rise of historical institutionalism corresponds with a renewed ontological view that many social and political outcomes are the ‘result of causal processes in which distant events, sequencing and complex interaction effects play important roles’ ( Hall 2003 : 398).

Two central concepts in historical sociology, path dependence and contingency/conjuncture represent an important tension that is also at the core of the new institutional thinking. Those who believe that institutions are very slow to change endorse the economic work that argues for positive-feedback processes and path dependence, the argument being that once you have engaged down a certain path that has been working and self-reinforcing a reversal of course is quite difficult, therefore institutions often generate slow reproduction or absence of change, implying a lack of contingency (Mahoney 2000 , 2001 ; Pierson 2000 , 2004 ). In these situations the mechanisms that have been most theorized are about cost–benefit analysis as well as mechanisms about power, legitimation, and the functionality of certain sequences ( Mahoney 2000 ; Thelen 2003 ). In contradistinction to path dependence, the timing and sequence of historical events matter to the way in which paths of political development proceed. The ground-breaking analysis by Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) on the timing of economic development in Western Europe, or the particular configuration and timing of geopolitical and military competition among absolutist states in western Europe, according to Thomas Ertman, take seriously where and when the conjuncture occurs that brings about an alteration in the comparative outcomes across multiple cases.

The tension between contingency and path dependence is best treated by Kathleen Thelen ( 1999 , 2003 , 2004 ), who demonstrates how it is possible for such seemingly contradictory processes of institutional continuity and change to happen together. Her interest is in explaining those institutions that both experience change but also keep many important features of their past. Examples of such institutions could be the English Parliament, the United States Supreme Court, or the national systems of vocational training in the countries she studies. A long-terminstitutional analysis of the evolution of the German system of vocational training displays the strength of her analytic historical perspective. She studies the emergence of vocational training when the German Handicraft Protection Law came into being in 1897 and established apprenticeship and certification for artisans partly as a tool of the German government to strengthen the artisanal class against the rising working classes. Analyzing the vocational system through the different periods of German history, Thelen demonstrates the manner in which once institutionalized this apprenticeship system remained ‘a collectively managed system for monitoring how firms train their workers’ (2004: 296) and as such was exploited, emulated, and extended by different governments attesting to institutional flexibility, strength, and continuity.

In understanding Germany today, she argues both for positive-feedback processes, the effects of which were seen in the continuity of a vocational training system, but also for change through specific mechanisms of such change. While the continuity argument is about reinforcing existing sequences and is mostly conceived at the macro level, change for Thelen is where the interaction between levels and dissecting social processes becomes very important. She demonstrates that institutional conversion and layering were operational in Germany—conversion with the appropriation of the training and certification system by industrial and trade-union actors; that is, those who had been excluded before were able to take over and reform the vocational system in the middle of the twentieth century under different circumstances. She also shows how the mechanism of layering works; that is, how, over time, with the growth of private alternatives, institutional innovators adapted and added new features to the old institutional framework when they could not alter what was already entrenched through time. This layering occurred with the additional change of the 1969 law when trade-union participation was added in (2004: 259–64).

In many ways the elegance of Thelen’s analysis lies in her demonstration that this system, which was set up in 1897, persisted through several putative historical crises to maintain its basic training structure, and that it also changed because of adaptation and accommodation towards a standardized and centralized vocational training, and towards the incorporation of unions and labor-friendly policies that are present in the system of Germany today (2004). Thelen’s analytic feat is in her ability to connect the macro-institutional outcomes of differentiated vocational systems to the social, political, and economic contexts in which sets of actors navigate the general organizational structures and institutions. And the ways in which actors and their actions are linked in the management of institutional contexts help her clarify the mechanisms that are portable to other institutional settings to explain continuity or change. In this way, she combines comparative historical analysis with an institutionalist framework where outcomes and processes are compared and analyzed and mechanisms are found that bridge macro level phenomena to the orientation to action and the manner in which action and actors can reproduce basic mechanisms that bring about the type of phenomenon she tries to explain.

30.2.2 Networks

One of the most important recent developments in historical studies has been the incorporation of network theory and methodology into the reconstruction of the past. The network perspective continues the basic insights of classical sociologists such as Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel, who understood early on that it was not possible to grasp social life just as the aggregated motives and insights of individuals. Rather, we needed to study individuals within their social milieu, to study them as part of a wider social network. This is certainly also Harrison White’s insight that ‘social reality is in the middle-range order’ (2006).

Network analysis accounts for behavior and social processes by using networks of social relations that link actors, or link nodes that could be actors, groups, organizations, or other entities. The relations that tie the nodes are considered independent of the actors’ will, values, beliefs, and intentions; and social structure that transpires can be seen as the ‘regularities in the patterns of relations among concrete entities; it is not a harmony among abstract norms and values or a classification of concrete entities by their attributes’ ( White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976 : 733–4). The network perspective is also inherently historical, since structure is historical, shaping and changing over time, and historical sociology can be at the forefront of forging a more dynamic network analysis. By adopting a network perspective in history, it is possible to bypass many deterministic understandings of structure, individual action, and group attributes and therefore expand our historical reconstruction by allowing the conceptualization of the social world as multilevel networks involving many types of entities, people, organizations, and groups.

30.3 Bringing Historical Institutionalism Together with Network Analysis

The volume by Mahoney and Rueschemeyer remains powerful in its discussion of comparative historical analysis because it includes institutionalist and network thinking. I strongly believe that comparative historical questions remain key to understanding patterns of variation and difference across cases. Comparative historical analysis helps shape important analytic puzzles that may otherwise escape even the most historically trained eyes. Historical institutionalism studies ‘big social and political outcomes,’ but encourages process analysis, specifying sequences and studying transformations of different scale and temporality within each case, maintaining the integrity of long-term development, continuity, and change. Finally, network analysis’s fundamental insights are at the center of institutionalist thinking, also encouraging to specify the intermediary level at which different structural combinations of relations constitute different social mechanisms. Therefore historical sociology has to remain comparative, institutionalist, and relational at the same time, reinforced by the fact that each of these subfields is most comfortable in an analytic, middle-range approach to sociological theory.

The synthesis that I propose as the basis of an analytic historical sociology remains interested in causal explanations of large-scale social and political outcomes; it moves comfortably between different layers of analysis from the micro level of individuals to constitute the meso-level social networks that in turn inform and lie at the basis of the institutional structures that we study. It is furthermore within these institutional settings that meanings are generated, understandings are shaped that have in turn an impact on how institutions are understood further and programmed. Social actors and social action are at the basis of this inquiry; their actions reproduce, change, and maintain the social networks, social structures, and institutional frameworks that we need to understand as well as impact the cultural meanings within which they operate. The combination of relational with institutionalist historical work is important for such a perspective. But it is even more inclusive, since it engages social action and acknowledges the importance of marrying the dynamics of structure and culture (see Fig. 30.1 ).

This combination of perspectives can impact many historical inquiries. One such field is that of imperial continuity and change. Empires are political formations that have lasted for very long periods of time and, much more than their rise and decline, they are interesting because of their institutional longevity, the slow-moving aspect of their reproduction that also incorporates significant amounts of change. In Empire of Difference (2008) I ask these questions of Ottoman imperial longevity, in comparative perspective, by using the Ottomans’ two illustrious predecessors, the Roman and Byzantine empires, and their immediate contemporaries and rivals, the Habsburgs and the Russians. Macrohistorical questions are resolved from a meso, intermediate level of analysis. Often a macrohistorical occurrence such as war or trade causes a chain of events that engage the interface of society—that intermediary space where state actors and social actors meet and resolve their needs, their interests, and ideals, deciding and shaping the outcome that we study. Overall,

The dynamics of culture and structure (example for two periods, T1 and T2)

then, I argue that the answer to the question of the longevity of empire can be found in analyses of the organizations and networks connecting large segmented and constantly changing structures, by focusing on the multivalent, networked, vertical and horizontal linkages and the short-termor durable compacts established between state and social actors. A few anecdotes from Empire of Difference can be used to illustrate the fusion between institutional, relational, and comparative fields and the importance of understanding action at different levels of analysis.

One example is that of Ottoman emergence. Traditional narratives have suggested single-minded accounts of the rise of the Turks, their ethnic and religious force, and their ability to overwhelm through Holy War ( Wittek 1938 ; Inalcik 1983 , 1994 ; Koprulu 1992 ). They emphasize categorical attributes such as religion or ethnicity, structural determinants such as demographic conditions, or a sort of vague cultural-symbiosis effect to explain the swift emergence of the Turks from a small principality to a world-class empire. The results of a comparative analysis of the frontier institutions and their networks of association show that religious and institutional heterogeneity, tolerance, and innovation was at the base of the Ottoman state.

When we study the historical record at the micro level—that is, look for what these leaders were doing, who they were associating with, who were their real partners, and what kinds of organizational structures they encountered and fashioned—what we get from dissecting the actions of the different groups, and drawing the ego networks of leaders is relatively clear. What made possible the rise of Osman as a leader who was able to consolidate a state-like structure around him was both the nature of his horizontal relations and his ability to broker across different previously unconnected groups. In ways reminiscent of the Medicis in the Padgett and Ansell story, this Ottoman leader straddled structural holes among many groups of potential followers, so that when he had consolidated his position he had around him a network of interdependent groups linked to him. Through his actions he connected many different groups, even warring factions, behaving like their broker and resolving social problems arising in his environment. He also extended his reach to many different settlements, communities, and different religious groups, Orthodox Greek, Orthodox Sunni, and heterodox Sufi groups, akhi corporations of trade, and non-Muslim religious men of learning, each important groupings that had to lend their support for him to succeed. Brokerage is innovation-producing; it introduces different tactics, practices, and strategies that can be usefully appropriated ( Burt 2005 ). Furthermore, operating in a multivocal institutional environment such as this transitional frontier society with high levels of intermixing, his various declarations were interpreted coherently from multiple perspectives. Osman carried out two crucial tasks of leadership successfully: with brokerage and redistribution of booty from successful warfare, he was able to demand allegiance and transform horizontal relations into vertical relations of command and control. Except for Umur Bey, another leader of the structurally equivalent Aydin emirate, who partly succeeded at the same type of network connections, other leaders were stuck in a much more conservative, hierarchical network, where, rather than brokerage, closure was the rule (Burt 2001 , 2005 ).

The comparative analysis of the network ties of local leaders who were relatively similarly placed in the geography and economic and political structures of the frontier regions demonstrated that those leaders with the ability to broker across religious, ethnic, communal, and economic groupings were clearly more successful at accumulating social capital and using it to their advantage. Resources, manpower, and alliances across religions were the key advantages to have, and Osman’s family hoarded them and transformed such privileges into state-building strategies, building armies, and organizations to distribute welfare and tax the population. As such, the emergence of the Ottoman early state through brokerage across networks, mobilizing of different identities, and through strategies of actors embedded in networks is similar to the rise of the Medici through the crafty connection of different Florentine families and the resulting oligarchic-elite formation through marriage cooptation analyzed by Padgett and Ansell (1993) . We can see the effectiveness of the more general principles of being at the center of a spoke-like network structure, connecting otherwise segregated groups, and combining strategic action with multivocality in the context of elaborating state-like institutions. Such a perspective is further elaborated by White (2008) and White, Godart, and Corona (2008) .

Another example that reinforces the need to understand the processes of institutional continuity and change emerged in the early empire when rulers were faced with choices to make between the existing practices of the conquered populations and their own forms of rule. Again, while traditional historiography emphasized separation, enmity, and the annihilation of the conquered, careful attention to the level of social actors embedded in different networks negotiating across and choosing between institutional practices provides an entirely different picture that explains better the longevity of the empire. In land tenure for example, the early Ottomans mixed Islamic notions of prebendal (timar) benefices with the land distribution that the emperor Diocletian had enacted centuries ago and the Byzantine pronoia system of providing land to aristocrats as salary. The traditional Islamic-imperial land-tenure system insisted on state ownership of land and the distribution of land to state officials in return for military service. The pronoia was adopted in the sense that the form matched well with prebendal office, which also was distributed as a salary to officials, though the Ottomans insisted on the military aspect, and tried to take away such lands from aristocrats for fear they would become entrenched. The Ottomans wanted land to be centrally owned and administered, whereas the pronoia they encountered had become a decentralized institution. Here then we see that some of the structures of land tenure were accepted, yet converted through Ottoman understandings of who owns land in Islam, the sultan as a trust in the name of God. Such negotiation between existing forms and incoming practice is an excellent illustration of the mechanism of layering that Thelen uses to explain Germany’s modern adaptation of vocational training systems.

Beyond uncovering divergent explanations that stem from a variety of different sets of actions, the ability to scrutinize micro motives and behaviors in the historical context might yield some unexpected results. While traditional explanations have emphasized centralized rule and warfare as the key to Ottoman rule, I have focused on intermediary network structures that provided the Ottomans with control. When the sheer numbers of military servicemen exceeded the supply of land, Ottomans rotated their prebendal office holders every three years. A by-product of this was increased state control through the segmentation of networks, because landholders who frequently moved did not have the ability to create strong patron–client ties. Looking at the actual registers of land assignment, it is possible to uncover a totally unintentional process that provided the state with even further control over its elites and rural populations.

The prebendal assignment process resulted in a highly fragmented land structure whereby different landholders were assigned adjacent plots. When a prebend-holder died, was dismissed, or went into rotation, his land was returned to a fictitious pool as revenue. It is from this same pool that another deserving prebend-holder was assigned new land. A prebend-holder who had shown prowess at war was rewarded with additional revenue, additional villages, and/or new estates. Yet this process, according to the registers, was quite ad hoc , in the sense that there was not much attention paid to the assignment of contiguous land plots. Perhaps it was just impossible, since this continual movement of land, assessed as revenue and therefore parcelled up into villages as revenue, went in and out of possession too fast and too irregularly to keep track of. There has not been any study of landholding patterns in any one period that would map the assignments by landholder. If such a study were carried out, it surely would demonstrate high levels of tenure fragmentation. It is difficult, however, to assign intentionality to the state in such an enterprise. There is no doubt that the state benefited from both the movement and the parcelization. Yet they could not have planned such a tenure structure purposefully. The ad hoc aggregation of many individuals coming in and out of a revenue pool led to a significant but unintended outcome of state control. Here, again, we see the workings of an institutional level of landholding practices that helped shape the individual actions and strategies that in turn shaped the networks of segmentation, so crucial to imperial state control.

Although the terminology differs, other scholars have similar interests in connecting the multiple levels of networks and institutions. For example, in his work on historical and contemporary interstate boundaries Gavrilis demonstrates that state borders—traditionally seen as lines between independent states—are actually institutions that operate at multiple levels. At the macro level are the states with their high-level diplomatic agencies and ministries of security that seek to regulate at the micro level access to territory through the control of goods and people. Yet the most important level that determines the stability of a border is the intermediate meso level (2008 a ; 2008 b ). In a study of the Ottoman Empire’s nineteenth-century boundary with the new Greek state, Gavrilis demonstrates how Ottoman and Greek border guards, in the process of patrolling and administering the boundary unilaterally, learned to cooperate and trust one another. The guards of each side acted as a joint, bilateral institution and relied more on their counterparts across the border to police against bandits, smugglers, and ethnic insurgents than on their own high-level state agencies. As a result, a meso-level network of Ottoman and Greek border guards effectively policed the border and insulated the Ottoman and Greek capitals from everyday incidents that could have further deteriorated diplomatic relations.

Historical sociology has produced a tremendous amount of significant scholarship in the last few decades. It has emerged with a set of important political and social concerns that were thought to be best resolved in historical terms and has since then developed an imposing set of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Each of these perspectives has yearned to develop a more precise and functional tool of social analysis. I have argued that we can find an interesting analytic position in the combination of institutional and relational analysis, where meso-level social networks act as the mediating mechanisms between actions, structures, and institutions and thereby also shape the cultural understandings that create meaning.

The author wishes to thank Peter Bearman, Peter Hedström, Frederic Godart, and Michael Biggs for helpful comments.

Abbott, A. (1990), ‘ Conceptions of Time and Events in Social Science Methods: Causal and Narrative Approaches ’, Historical Methods , 23 (4): 141–50.

Abrams, P. ( 1982 ), Historical Sociology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press).

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Sociology Research Guide

• Picking a topic
• Background research and finding books
• Advanced searching in databases and Google
• Finding statistics
• Evaluating sources
• Literature Reviews

What is a Lit Review?

How to write a lit review.

• Video Introduction to Lit Reviews

Main Objectives

Examples of lit reviews, additional resources.

• SOC1: Morales (Cultural Artifact)
• SOC4: Ie (Literature Review)

What is a literature review?

• Either a complete piece of writing unto itself or a section of a larger piece of writing like a book or article
• A thorough and critical look at the information and perspectives that other experts and scholars have written about a specific topic
• A way to give historical perspective on an issue and show how other researchers have addressed a problem
• An analysis of sources based on your own perspective on the topic
• Based on the most pertinent and significant research conducted in the field, both new and old

• A descriptive list or collection of summaries of other research without synthesis or analysis
• An annotated bibliography
• A literary review (a brief, critical discussion about the merits and weaknesses of a literary work such as a play, novel or a book of poems)
• Exhaustive; the objective is not to list as many relevant books, articles, reports as possible
• To convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic
• To explain what the strengths and weaknesses of that knowledge and those ideas might be
• To learn how others have defined and measured key concepts    
• To keep the writer/reader up to date with current developments and historical trends in a particular field or discipline
• To establish context for the argument explored in the rest of a paper
• To provide evidence that may be used to support your own findings
• To demonstrate your understanding and your ability to critically evaluate research in the field
• To suggest previously unused or underused methodologies, designs, and quantitative and qualitative strategies
• To identify gaps in previous studies and flawed methodologies and/or theoretical approaches in order to avoid replication of mistakes
• To help the researcher avoid repetition of earlier research
• To suggest unexplored populations
• To determine whether past studies agree or disagree and identify strengths and weaknesses on both sides of a controversy in the literature

• Choose a topic that is interesting to you; this makes the research and writing process more enjoyable and rewarding.
• For a literature review, you'll also want to make sure that the topic you choose is one that other researchers have explored before so that you'll be able to find plenty of relevant sources to review.

• Your research doesn't need to be exhaustive. Pay careful attention to bibliographies. Focus on the most frequently cited literature about your topic and literature from the best known scholars in your field. Ask yourself: "Does this source make a significant contribution to the understanding of my topic?"
• Reading other literature reviews from your field may help you get ideas for themes to look for in your research. You can usually find some of these through the library databases by adding literature review as a keyword in your search.
• Start with the most recent publications and work backwards. This way, you ensure you have the most current information, and it becomes easier to identify the most seminal earlier sources by reviewing the material that current researchers are citing.

The organization of your lit review should be determined based on what you'd like to highlight from your research. Here are a few suggestions:

• Chronology : Discuss literature in chronological order of its writing/publication to demonstrate a change in trends over time or to detail a history of controversy in the field or of developments in the understanding of your topic.  
• Theme: Group your sources by subject or theme to show the variety of angles from which your topic has been studied. This works well if, for example, your goal is to identify an angle or subtopic that has so far been overlooked by researchers.  
• Methodology: Grouping your sources by methodology (for example, dividing the literature into qualitative vs. quantitative studies or grouping sources according to the populations studied) is useful for illustrating an overlooked population, an unused or underused methodology, or a flawed experimental technique.

• Be selective. Highlight only the most important and relevant points from a source in your review.
• Use quotes sparingly. Short quotes can help to emphasize a point, but thorough analysis of language from each source is generally unnecessary in a literature review.
• Synthesize your sources. Your goal is not to make a list of summaries of each source but to show how the sources relate to one another and to your own work.
• Make sure that your own voice and perspective remains front and center. Don't rely too heavily on summary or paraphrasing. For each source, draw a conclusion about how it relates to your own work or to the other literature on your topic.
• Be objective. When you identify a disagreement in the literature, be sure to represent both sides. Don't exclude a source simply on the basis that it does not support your own research hypothesis.
• At the end of your lit review, make suggestions for future research. What subjects, populations, methodologies, or theoretical lenses warrant further exploration? What common flaws or biases did you identify that could be corrected in future studies?

• Double check that you've correctly cited each of the sources you've used in the citation style requested by your professor (APA, MLA, etc.) and that your lit review is formatted according to the guidelines for that style.

Your literature review should:

• Be focused on and organized around your topic.
• Synthesize your research into a summary of what is and is not known about your topic.
• Identify any gaps or areas of controversy in the literature related to your topic.
• Suggest questions that require further research.
• Have your voice and perspective at the forefront rather than merely summarizing others' work.
• Cyberbullying: How Physical Intimidation Influences the Way People are Bullied
• Use of Propofol and Emergence Agitation in Children
• Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza's 'Ethics'
• Literature Review Tutorials and Samples - Wilson Library at University of La Verne
• Literature Reviews: Introduction - University Library at Georgia State
• Literature Reviews - The Writing Center at UNC Chapel Hill
• Writing a Literature Review - Boston College Libraries
• Write a Literature Review - University Library at UC Santa Cruz
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University Library

• Research Guides
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• Books, Encyclopedias, & Media
• Articles & Databases
• Methods/Stats/Datasets
• Annotated Bibliographies
• APA 6th Edition
• Majors, Minors, and Careers in Sociology

What is a Literature Review?

The scholarly conversation.

A literature review provides an overview of previous research on a topic that critically evaluates, classifies, and compares what has already been published on a particular topic. It allows the author to synthesize and place into context the research and scholarly literature relevant to the topic. It helps map the different approaches to a given question and reveals patterns. It forms the foundation for the author’s subsequent research and justifies the significance of the new investigation.

A literature review can be a short introductory section of a research article or a report or policy paper that focuses on recent research. Or, in the case of dissertations, theses, and review articles, it can be an extensive review of all relevant research.

• The format is usually a bibliographic essay; sources are briefly cited within the body of the essay, with full bibliographic citations at the end.
• The introduction should define the topic and set the context for the literature review. It will include the author's perspective or point of view on the topic, how they have defined the scope of the topic (including what's not included), and how the review will be organized. It can point out overall trends, conflicts in methodology or conclusions, and gaps in the research.
• In the body of the review, the author should organize the research into major topics and subtopics. These groupings may be by subject, (e.g., globalization of clothing manufacturing), type of research (e.g., case studies), methodology (e.g., qualitative), genre, chronology, or other common characteristics. Within these groups, the author can then discuss the merits of each article and analyze and compare the importance of each article to similar ones.
• The conclusion will summarize the main findings, make clear how this review of the literature supports (or not) the research to follow, and may point the direction for further research.
• The list of references will include full citations for all of the items mentioned in the literature review.

Key Questions for a Literature Review

A literature review should try to answer questions such as

• Who are the key researchers on this topic?
• What has been the focus of the research efforts so far and what is the current status?
• How have certain studies built on prior studies? Where are the connections? Are there new interpretations of the research?
• Have there been any controversies or debate about the research? Is there consensus? Are there any contradictions?
• Which areas have been identified as needing further research? Have any pathways been suggested?
• How will your topic uniquely contribute to this body of knowledge?
• Which methodologies have researchers used and which appear to be the most productive?
• What sources of information or data were identified that might be useful to you?
• How does your particular topic fit into the larger context of what has already been done?
• How has the research that has already been done help frame your current investigation ?

Examples of Literature Reviews

Example of a literature review at the beginning of an article: Forbes, C. C., Blanchard, C. M., Mummery, W. K., & Courneya, K. S. (2015, March). Prevalence and correlates of strength exercise among breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer survivors . Oncology Nursing Forum, 42(2), 118+. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com.sonoma.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&sw=w&u=sonomacsu&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA422059606&asid=27e45873fddc413ac1bebbc129f7649c Example of a comprehensive review of the literature: Wilson, J. L. (2016). An exploration of bullying behaviours in nursing: a review of the literature.   British Journal Of Nursing ,  25 (6), 303-306. For additional examples, see:

Galvan, J., Galvan, M., & ProQuest. (2017). Writing literature reviews: A guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences (Seventh ed.). [Electronic book]

Pan, M., & Lopez, M. (2008). Preparing literature reviews: Qualitative and quantitative approaches (3rd ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrczak Pub. [ Q180.55.E9 P36 2008]

Useful Links

• Write a Literature Review (UCSC)
• Literature Reviews (Purdue)
• Literature Reviews: overview (UNC)
• Review of Literature (UW-Madison)

Evidence Matrix for Literature Reviews

The  Evidence Matrix  can help you  organize your research  before writing your lit review.  Use it to  identify patterns  and commonalities in the articles you have found--similar methodologies ?  common  theoretical frameworks ? It helps you make sure that all your major concepts covered. It also helps you see how your research fits into the context  of the overall topic.

• Evidence Matrix Special thanks to Dr. Cindy Stearns, SSU Sociology Dept, for permission to use this Matrix as an example.
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Sociology: lit reviews.

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• Lit Reviews
• Sociology 127: Development and Globalization
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Literature Review

In a  literature review you explore research that has come before you and is relevant to your topic. It can help you identify:

• Core research in the field
• Experts in the subject area
• Methodology you may want to use (or avoid)
• Gaps in the literature -- or where your research would fit in

Helpful approaches:

• See what literature reviews already exist on your topic! Databases like Oxford Bibliographies Online: Sociology and Sociological Abstracts (limit the document type to literature review) can save you a lot of time. Also don’t forget the Annual Review of Sociology , and the Proquest Dissertations and Theses database; these in-depth pieces usually have comprehensive lists of references.
• Citation slogging (aka "snowballing") -- work your way back through citations (or footnotes) to key articles
• Forward citation -- see who has cited key articles using  Google Scholar  and  Web of Science Cited Reference Search  . ​

Writing Guidelines:

• Start with Writing for Sociology  from the UC Berkeley Sociology Department—it’s packed with great content!
• A great overview of the entire process from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• A piece from the blog Everyday Sociology on “ How (and Why) to Write a Literature Review ”

Systematic Reviews

Systematic reviews are not the same as literature reviews; instead, they can be considered an extremely rigorous subset of literature reviews.  Generally, systematic reviews take a team of professionals and one to two years to complete, and they usually can't be done for avenues of research which are newly being explored (there needs to be an established body of literature to examine).  This makes them very helpful resources if they exist for your topic of interest!

You may wish to peruse UCSF's  Systematic Review Guide  for information.

If you do decide to do a systematic review, UC Berkeley licenses  Covidence , a tool to help you. In Covidence, you can  import citations ,  screen titles and abstracts ,  upload references ,  screen full text ,  create forms for critical appraisal ,  perform risk of bias tables ,  complete data extraction , and  export a PRISMA flowchart  summarizing your review process. As an institutional member, our users have priority access to Covidence support.   To access Covidence using the UC Berkeley institutional account ,  start at this page  and follow the instructions.

Great brief overview, from NCSU

Synthesizing the literature

Now That You Have All Those Articles, How Do You Synthesize Them?

Unlike the annotated bibliography, the literature review does not just summarize each article or book. Instead, they synthesize. Some researchers find it helpful to develop a framework, making a column for each element that they want to compare. The elements vary depending on the research, making it easier to understand the relationships between  all  the articles and how they relate to your research. Here's  one example !

How To Organize and Cite Your Research

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The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences pp 1–26 Cite as

Historiography and National Histories of Sociology: Methods and Methodologies

• Fran Collyer 2  
• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 29 November 2021

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Histories of Sociology have become increasingly popular in recent decades, particularly national histories of Sociology, yet there have been few attempts to articulate a methodology and methods appropriate for the tasks at hand. This chapter examines the History of Sociology as a speciality of the discipline, defining its boundaries and tracing its own history. It investigates many national histories of sociology to ascertain their methods and methodologies, and reveals the extent to which these engage with existing methods and methodologies as found in the disciplines of Sociology and History, but also their related specialities, including the History of Ideas and History of Intellectuals, as well as Historical Sociology, the Sociology of Science, the Sociology of Ideas, the Sociology of Intellectuals, the Sociology of Institutions, and the Sociology of Knowledge. This systematic review suggests the subspecialty has recently shifted from an emphasis on the Sociology of Ideas to a Sociology of Institutions, and begun to adopt, albeit implicitly, the principles of the Sociology of Knowledge in its increasing acknowledgement of the shaping of Sociology’s terrain by the geo-socio-political context.

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Collyer, F. (2021). Historiography and National Histories of Sociology: Methods and Methodologies. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_64-1

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A Systematic View on the Use of History for Current Debates in Sociology, and on the Potential and Problems of a Historical Epistemology of Sociology

Christian dayé.

Department of Sociology, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Universitätsstrasse 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria

For various reasons, among them changes in the global higher education regime and competitive knowledge claims from other disciplines, the field of the history of sociology (HoS) has experienced an increased pressure to justify its own existence during the last decade. Positing that the best approach to justify the existence of a thing is to show its usefulness, the article discusses four types of claims to usefulness made by historians of sociology. The history of sociology can be said to be relevant in (I) shaping and maintaining the discipline’s identity; (II) in providing a rich fund of teaching future sociologists; (III) in informing current research and theorizing; and (IV) in reflecting more broadly on the cultural status of sociology in modern societies. The article then assesses the potential and problems of aspiring a historical epistemology of sociology, a proposal made recently especially in German and Anglophone contexts to link the history of science with its philosophy in the sense described as type III. It concludes that selected principles or ideas of historical epistemology can be very fruitfully applied in HoS. However, the project of transferring the whole program of historical epistemology into HoS is bound to fail. Nonetheless, there is plenty of reason to continue conceiving of HoS as an integral part of sociology.

A Field in Search of Justification: The Current Status of the History of Sociology

Throughout the last decade, scholars concerned with the history of sociology have experienced an increasing external demand – sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit – to provide justifications for the existence of their field. This demand originated in various places and depending on the place, it was informed by varying interests, some political, some economic, and some intellectual. One of the places where the demand for justification arose for the history of sociology (HoS) was the competition for resources within the discipline. 1 The fate of the archival records of the American Sociological Association (ASA) is a case in point.

Since the early 1990s, a group of sociologists had discussed the idea to initiate a collection of materials relevant in the history of the discipline. 2 Quite obviously, one important holding in this regard were the papers of the ASA. Alan Sica, who had just been joining Pennsylvania State University, established the contact between the librarians of his university and ASA. ASA officials were very reluctant, though. Amongst other kinds, the papers comprised both internal memos (including also the minutes of the ASA Committee on Professional Ethics, which was involved in a series of tenure cases) and the correspondence files of ASA’s official journals. Especially with regard to these holdings, it was feared that an archive providing unrestricted access to these materials could be interpreted as a violation of the principle of anonymity that was granted to the proponents. However, a contract was signed between the ASA and Penn State in 1997, stating that all in-house memoranda and reports as well as the complete correspondence files of ASA’s journals were to be sent to the university’s libraries. Over the years, the holdings at Penn State grew to an impressive archive of 588 boxes. However, in the mid-2000s, Penn State hired a new library director who found out that the initial contract between ASA and Penn State had established that the journal-related materials could never be accessed. Balancing scholarly value and space restrictions, Penn State informed the ASA that they would return the materials if ASA kept its strict position on the inaccessibility of the materials. ASA did not agree to change its position, so Penn State decided to not renew the agreement with ASA. This triggered an interesting, but ultimately unsolvable debate about what to do with these 580+ boxes. It centered on the problem of comparing the costs of material storage respectively of professional digitalization with the intrinsic intellectual value of the materials. 3 In the course of this debate, various scholars submitted statements to the ASA with the intent to emphasize the value of historical self-reflection for the discipline. Hence, a number of statements sought to underscore that the history of sociology must be seen as inherent part of the discipline itself. 4

The fate of these materials has been one trigger amongst others of a debate that has apparently followed sociology over the last half century. Arguments resembling those made in the Save-Our-Archival-Records campaign were made in a two-part piece by Richard Swedberg, who described HoS as providing the discipline’s “working memory” (Swedberg 2012 , 2013 ). One can also find them in a statement written by Martin Bulmer in 2016, then chair of the History of Sociology section, when the ASA Council on Sections summoned the section to declare its purpose, membership strategies, and justification for existence. 5 A similar statement had to be produced by the section leaders two years later under the aegis of David Swartz. Most of the arguments put forth on these occasions were not new; many can be found in earlier debates, for instance in what came to be called the “Historicist Controversy” in the late 1970s, or in a series on “World Sociology” run by the Swiss Journal of Sociology in the late 1990s. 6

Further challenges to reflect on the position of HoS and on its justification as a subfield of sociology emerged from shifts in the disciplinary tectonics characterizing the field. The history of the social sciences, and specifically their role in the Cold War era, has climbed onto higher ranks in the research agendas of professional historians over the last years. 7 This increased interest, in turn, has led to a questioning of whether HoS is a legitimate part of sociology, or whether it would fit better within the disciplinary bounds of history. Far from building a consolidated field of research, current studies on the history of sociology do not converge around a gravitational point – neither theoretically, nor methodologically, nor organizationally, in journals and associations.

In parallel to these developments, sociologists researching the history of their discipline have also experienced an urge to explain the usefulness of their research to university administrators. In an attempt to create a more transparent distribution system of reward and resources, universities have become oriented towards impact factors and other alleged indicators of academic relevance. The proliferation of new governance regimes and, especially in Europe, the related structural and intellectual remodeling of teaching in the universities obviously caught historians of sociology off guard. However the objective side of this developments might appear, they subjectively experienced a loss of terrain.

And yet this felt external pressure to self-reflection also had its positive consequences. From a methodological point of view, the question why one should write the history of sociology is inseparably related to the question how one should write it. Thus, the enforced debate on the value and future of the field built the ground for a renewed interest in its methodological foundations, principles, and potentials. Several publications acknowledge this renewed interest. In 2009, the Italian journal Sociologica featured an essay by Jean-Michel Chapoulie, who proposed a framework for the history of social and behavioral sciences (Chapoulie 2009a ) which was followed by comments by Daniel Geary ( 2009 ); Johan Heilbron ( 2009 ); Jennifer Platt ( 2009 ); Sica ( 2009 ); see also the rejoinder by Chapoulie 2009b ). Comparing the historiographies of various social science disciplines, the contributions to a volume edited by Backhouse and Fontaine 2014 addressed the questions how, by whom, and to what effect these histories had been written. The 2nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences included an entry on methodological and historiographical approaches and rationales (C. Fleck and Dayé 2015 ). Also, a collection of essays edited in German by Dayé and Moebius ( 2015 ) explicitly addressed the questions how and why one should write the history of sociology, as did a recent article by George Steinmetz ( 2018 ).

Assuming that one of the most fruitful roads to secure a place for the history of sociology within sociology is to underscore its (potential) use for the current practice of sociology, the present article proposes a schematic systematization of the varieties of answers given in these recent publications – as well as in the debates referred to above – to the questions how and why one should write sociology’s history. Certainly, taking this assumption as a starting point is not unproblematic. Why should HoS strive for being useful? Isn’t usefulness too restricting a principle to allow for “good” historiography? And indeed, in the literature reviewed, several authors argue that they prefer to do history of sociology for its own sake. Answering to the question why reading the classics, Gianfranco Poggi once claimed that one should do so just because they are useless (Poggi 1996 ; Poggi is in part reacting to Alexander 1996 ). Apparently, it wasn’t historians of sociology who made usefulness a standard in discussing the field’s value. As the above suggests, this category entered the discourse from outside the field, or, perhaps more precisely, appears to have been a reaction toward the felt pressures from outside the field. Associations for the advancement of “useful” knowledge – among them the Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften founded 1754 in Erfurt, Germany, and the American Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge founded 1766 in Philadelphia (cf. Burke 2016 , p. 98) – existed long before there was HoS in any true sense. Yet, discourses aren’t under anyone’s complete control, and once an idea has entered a discourse, it is much harder to make it disappear again. Because of the intrinsic link between the questions of how and why to write the history of sociology, the scheme I present on the following pages is as good a means of HoS’s discourse politics as it is a contribution to its process of methodological self-reflection.

In principle, two answers are possible to the question of whether the history of sociology has anything to contribute to current problems in the discipline: yes, and no. While proponents of the no-side sometimes put forth innovative arguments to corroborate their skepticism, in what follows I focus exclusively on the yes-side. It should be kept in mind that I am not so much concerned with the question whether or not research in the history of sociology actually contributes to current debates; rather, I theorize how this could be done. By and large, there are four types of positive answers. One can argue that the history of sociology is important (I) because it offers a source for collective conscience and disciplinary identity ; (II) because it provides and maintains an important way to teach new generations of scholars; (III) because it can inform current sociological research and theorizing; and (IV) because its allows to reflect on the shape as well as the broader cultural and social impact of sociology.

The paper proceeds as follows: the following section discusses these four types in more detail. One of the remarkable features in the philosophy of science is that the question why one should do research on a specific phenomenon is inseparably linked to the question how one should do so, and vice versa. Therefore, the discussion also has to investigate which research approaches seem appropriate for each of the four types of claims. In order to do this, I will refer to recent studies I deem exemplary. The adjacent section focuses on the third type of answers, the claim that history of sociology can (and should) inform current research and theorizing. Especially in the German speaking countries, this claim has recently been repeatedly made under the label “historical epistemology.” At first, the claim concerned mainly the natural sciences (Daston 1994 , 1997 ; Renn 1995 ; Rheinberger 1997 , 2010a , b ), but it was later extended to include the social sciences and humanities as well. 8 As critics have argued, the use of this label owes more to positioning strategies than to historical or theoretical veracity. The programs of Daston and Renn, as Cristina Chimisso ( 2003 , p. 298) once put it, “share the name but not the methods and aims” with those doctrines that have been at the center of debates in those academic circles where historical epistemology originally emerged: in France. 9 True, historical epistemology has never been a homogeneous field, and the spectrum of positions it encompasses is large. Yet, the recent revival – or, as Yves Gingras ( 2010 ) suggests, “branding” – of historical epistemology is highly selective with regard to its main sources, thereby neglecting the continued influence of certain authors on intellectual debates especially in France.

Chief among those original figures that have been neglected by the recent programmatic statements in historical epistemology is the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), whose project was to search for deep-seated, cultural imaginations informing scientific thought and to establish a psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. This is not to say that Bachelard’s ideas are not present in contemporary historiography of the (social) sciences. Especially through the conveyance of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, who both took up parts of his ideas, some of the tenets of Bachelard’s historical epistemology have been followed in recent contributions to the history of sociology literature. However, this happened quite often without reference to the source of these ideas, and to the system of thought that had originally environed them. Bachelardian historical epistemology, thus, suffered a double marginalization: a first out of strategic interest in claiming positions in the academic attention space, and a second out of unfamiliarity of historians of sociology with the philosophical traditions out of which came authors that are more famous in sociology, like Foucault and Bourdieu.

If this situation justifies a more detailed consideration of Bachelard’s thought, it does not guarantee that such a move of reversion results in an added value for the questions why and how to write the history of sociology. Indeed, as I show below, the attempt to approach the history of the social sciences in a Bachelardian spirit encounters various difficulties. The subsequent conclusion elaborates on what I think should be the consequences of these various uses for HoS as a field and for the discipline as a whole. If one accepts the answers that historians of sociology have given to the question of usefulness (or some, at least), there is ample reason to maintain its affiliation with sociology.

A final caveat might be appropriate. When describing the various approaches, I give a few examples of works that I think fit. It is important to keep in mind that these are examples sought to make the point; I do not provide a full literature review here. Also, it cannot be expected that the authors of these works agree with my interpretation of their work nor with the philosophical implications of their location in the scheme. Some authors might feel their text belonged to another category, or perhaps to several. However, the intended meaning is always only a part of the message, another one being the process of reception. Also, the analytic value of a scheme comes from simplification, and the same principle applies to my use of studies.

The Uses of the History of Sociology

This section discusses the four types of answers given to the question how HoS can be of use to sociology (see Fig.  1 ): that it shapes and maintains the identity of the discipline (I); that it offers invaluable teaching materials (II); that it can inform current research and theorizing (III); and finally, that it provides starting points for assessing and reflecting on the current state of the discipline (IV).

Has the history of sociology any use for the current practice of the discipline, and if yes, which ones?

Type I: History as a Means of Identity Politics

The first type of arguments justifying the existence of HoS concerns identity politics. A shared understanding, so the argument goes, of the history of the field is essential to forging the disciplinary identity of sociology, because it provides current scholars with figures, events, and ideas that strengthen, in Durkheimian terms, the collective consciousness of the sociological community and fosters solidarity among its members (I.1). Just like any other social collective, the identity of a scientific discipline is not pre-given, but the complex result of a continuous cultural discourse. Sociology’s identity, thus, can only be fully grasped by conceiving of it as a multidimensional phenomenon. It plays out at various levels, among them a cognitive identity, a social identity, and a historic identity (cf. Lepenies 1981 ). As a consequence, there are of course differences among the works proposing this argument. Nonetheless, the intent to shape or reflect on the identity of the discipline was the impetus of many contributions to HoS throughout the centuries, which very often took the form of monographs or edited volumes. Prominent examples are Harry Elmer Barnes’ An Introduction to the History of Sociology ( 1948 ), John Madge’s The Origins of Scientific Sociology ( 1963 ), Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet’s A History of Sociological Analysis ( 1978 ), but also Alvin W. Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology ( 1970 ), Wolf Lepenies’ Die drei Kulturen ( 1985 ) and Craig Calhoun’s Sociology in America ( 2007 ).

As especially the last three books mentioned indicate, the identity of the discipline of sociology is a field of knowledge politics, reputation strategies, and power struggles. Lepenies’ book thus had the identity of the field itself as the object of study. With regard to American sociology, for instance, it has been repeatedly argued that, secularist rhetoric aside, the discipline at the deepest levels still adhered to principles of Christian morality (Vidich and Lyman 1985 ; Smith 2014 ).

Gouldner’s book as well as some of the chapters of the volume edited by Calhoun in turn challenge the dominant narratives creating a disciplinary identity (I.2). This, of course, is important. The selection of “historic” figures, events, and ideas can and should be criticized and challenged, since it per force reflects the historical and social position of the person who selects. This has been a recurrent motif in many studies that sought to re-establish forgotten or allegedly marginalized scholars, such as Jane Addams (Deegan 1988 ; Schneiderhan 2015 ) or W. E. B. DuBois (Morris 2015 ). Various edited volumes complete the picture (e.g., Goetting 1995 ; Law and Lybeck 2015 ). However critical they may be of mechanisms of power and memory within the discipline, these books take a consistently positive and constructive position towards sociology. They want to make it better. By showing the constructedness of the disciplinary identity and opening debates aiming at reformation, such critical reflections on the canon of the discipline have the potential to reinforce the binding forces of the discipline, provided that these reflections are granted space. The construction of a canon and its critique are just two sides of the same coin.

Type II: The History of Sociology as a Resource in Academic Teaching

The second type of answers emphasizes the didactical value of sociology’s rich past. To learn how earlier luminaries did sociology is presented as one of the most important ways to learn how to do good sociology today. Classics play a major role in this regard, as evinced by works like Lewis Coser’s Masters of Sociological Thought ( 1971 ), Raymond Aron’s Les étapes de la pensée sociologique ( 1976 ), originally published in 1967, or Dirk Kaesler’s two volumes Klassiker der Soziologie ( 2003a , b ), first published in 1999 .

How exactly the classics can be used in teaching the next generations of sociologists is divisive. Looking back from today, the findings of the classics are outdated; their empirical procedures do not meet current standards – some of them did not even meet the standards of their time; most theories put forth by the classics have become refuted since their original formulation; and nobody wants students to emulate their style of writing. What, then, can young and aspiring sociologists learn from reading the classics?

In what remains to be the most systematic treatment of how classic sociological works are used, Arthur L. Stinchcombe ( 1982 ) discerned six functions. They can serve as touchstones , “examples of beautiful and possible ways of doing scientific work.” (Stinchcombe 1982 , p. 2) Second, they offer developmental tasks , inviting the student to replace every day clichés about the social world and to engage in the attempt to grasp an argument of high order complexity. The third function of classics is the small coinage function. Citing a few classic works in the first pages of your paper serves to inform the reader to which intellectual tradition the paper at hand aspires to belong. Fourth, sometimes current work addresses highly fundamental ideas , and many classics offer treatments of these ideas that help to orient one’s own research simply because they paint with a big brush. “In this case we praise the classics for being both unique and fundamental, rather than for being fine work as in the touchstone function, for being complex as in the developmental tasks function, or for being symbols with agreed-on meanings for the small coinage function.” (Stinchcombe 1982 , p. 3) Fifth, classics also contain hypotheses which students can decide to test empirically – and thus serve as a starting point for routine science .

Finally, and similar to what has been discussed in the preceding section, classics can serve as a resource for a sense of disciplinary solidarity. This is their ritual function . Stinchcombe writes:

We define what holds us together as sociologists in part by having a common history. So ritual myths about Max Weber’s staring at a wall in nervous prostration, Georg Simmel being kept from a professorship for being Jewish, Thorstein Veblen refusing the Presidency of the Economics Association because it wasn’t offered when he needed it […], Parsons’s dissertation on some obscure German’s ideas about capitalism, all serve the functions that the cherry tree and the Gettysburg address written on the back of an envelope do in American history. And like the cherry tree and the envelope myths, the fact that I don’t really know whether any of them are true indicates less about the quality of my scholarship than it does about the ritual function of these classics. (Stinchcombe 1982 , p. 4).

Leaving aside Stinchcombe’s remarks on the identity shaping function of classics, which has been discussed in some detail in the previous section, we can sum up his answers to the question which use the classics have in teaching by emphasizing that classics offer orientation, both to the newcomers and the long-established dwellers of the sociological village. They provide inspiration for empirical or theoretical projects, and they facilitate mutual understanding by providing quick-to-read clues. Most importantly, classics can be used to teach students what it means to approach things from a sociological perspective (cf. O’Rand 1982 ; Woodward 1982 ). Thus, while they might not learn “good” theory from engaging with the classics, students of sociology can learn the basics of good theorizing.

But what, then, would be the task of HoS in this respect? With the all materials available, how could HoS contribute intellectually to the way in which sociology is taught? I give a twofold answer to this. First, for some of sociology’s classics, there exist book production industries eager to publish new biographies on these past scholars. The task of HoS can be to produce works of this and other genres concerning the lives and works of the classic authors, thus ensuring that there is new input to the functions detailed above. Further, and probably more important, there is also the related industry on sociology textbooks. While most of the current introductory textbooks have a section on the history of sociology, and some refer to classic studies in subsequent chapters, I think that this by far does not exhaust the didactic potential of HoS. An introductory textbook to sociology written by historians would look quite different, I presume, than what is currently available. It would perhaps look more like the three classic examples referred to above, which, as I am told, are no longer used in teaching. But it would also include other topics in the history of sociology, like the development and social life of methods, the transformations caused by technical and infrastructural change (the introduction of computers, the founding of international associations, the activities of large funding schemes etc.), or the relation between larger social and cultural processes and the status of sociology as a discipline.

Type III: History Informing Current Research and Theorizing

Repeating parts of the argument made by proponents of the use of classics in teaching, several authors argue that the history of sociology should be written in a way that renders it useful to current research and theorizing. The claim is that the works of today’s sociologists would become more sophisticated if they were cognizant of, and sensible to, sociology’s past. Beyond sharing this basic conviction, as with type II, there is considerable heterogeneity among the answers subsumed as type III. And as with type II, some of the confusion around this claim might be clarified if the internal heterogeneity is acknowledge and structured.

There appear to be three distinct kinds of answers in type III. Some scholars emphasize what I – inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s fabled “Zettelkasten” – propose to call the card box function of history (III.1). Thus conceived, the task of HoS is to establish and maintain a record of important figures, works, ideas, findings, and events, and to be able to provide information upon request. Such a position was implied in Herbert Gans’ ( 1992 ) analysis of sociological amnesia, the effect that the discipline appears to have a memory that only rarely extends beyond a timespan of twenty years. Sampling over a variety of fields, Gans found that only 20% of the citations made in the texts he surveyed referred to publications older than this threshold. While he posited that “collective memory can be intellectually and otherwise inhibiting,” he also maintained that “the relative dearth of collective memory in sociology probably also helps to explain the lack of cumulation.” (Gans 1992 , p. 708) Studies were repeated not to replicate earlier work, but in complete ignorance of them. And this was an inefficient use of the cognitive potential of sociology as a science.

In a similar vein, Richard Swedberg ( 2012 , 2013 ) proposed to conceive of HoS as providing the working memory of the practicing sociologist. He argued that some core insights from cognitive science were relevant to reformulating the task of HoS. Among these insights, he singled out that “memory is not so much about the past as it is about the present.” (Swedberg 2012 , p. 11) We need our memory in order to navigate our daily lives. It provides a means of orientation without which we would be lost. Further, recent research also shows that human remembering is an interpretive and partially creative process. It is wrong to compare it to the mechanical processes of data storage used in computer technique. Memory is created in the present, and while parts of it are past experiences, new interpretations, contextualizations, links to other memories, and evaluations are added every time we remember. Thus, in addition to the card box, we also need a human brain to use it.

Translating these insights into principles for HoS leads us, as Swedberg maintains, to reconsider how historians of sociology select their topics. If one of the major tasks of HoS is to provide and maintain the discipline’s working memory, then historians of sociology should increasingly work on issues of immediate interest to practicing sociologists. If concepts like status, or valuation, or recognition, or social inequality re-appear at the research front, it might prove worthwhile to research the history of these concepts. If experiments re-appear as the method of choice for many sociologists, it might be good to write their history. In order to enter a conversation that, at worst, reduces the risk of repetition and, at best, increases the level of theoretical or methodological sophistication of current research, historians of sociology should be aware of the trends of the whole discipline and ready to follow them in their own research.

Other writers have similar ideas about how historical research might be useful for actual research and theorizing, but their vision of the task of the historian is different. It moves from memorizing, however active a process, the discipline’s past to a more dialectic partnership between sociology’s past and present. Also, the point of reference is not so much cognitive science, but historical epistemology, a direction in the history and philosophy of science emerging in reflections by scientists like Ernst Mach or Henri Poincaré that came to blossom in the decades later, especially in the works of Ludwik Fleck, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, Thomas Kuhn, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault. As one can see from this list, the term historical epistemology comprises a very diverse literature. Notwithstanding, Rheinberger ( 2010b ) proposed to identify as the common principles two movements of thought, the historization of epistemology and the epistemologization of history . While, Rheinberger contends, these two movements are intrinsically interrelated, it is helpful to differentiate them to get a clearer picture of how HoS can be of use to current sociological practice.

With good reasons, historians of sociology claim that it is important to historically contextualize the crucial elements of sociological knowledge production – theories, methods, methodologies, concepts etc. (III.2). The expectation is that by describing the contexts in which specific ideas were formed and identifying how contextual factors influenced the actual shape of cognitive elements, the level of sophistication with which these elements are used in current research and theorizing increases (cf. Reed 2010 ). This is because a historization results in a more complex picture of the original idea and at the same time identifies those aspects of a cognitive element that were concessions to the historical context and do not convey epistemological value. I select the formulation “complex picture” to avoid the term “nuanced” (cf. Healy 2017 ), and this points of course to a major pitfall of historization. It can be potentially indefinite. And it can lead to treatments that leave the reader no other choice than to ask “So, what?” Just like in theorizing, bad historization claims to provide a richer or more sophisticated understanding of a piece of knowledge “by adding complexity to it, usually by way of some additional dimension, level, or aspect, but in the absence of any strong means of disciplining or specifying the relationship between the new elements and the existing ones.” (Healy 2017 , pp. 118–119) Historical contextualization, as any contextualization, crucially depends on the link between the contextual factor explored and disciplinary knowledge.

Since many elements of knowledge production transgress disciplinary boundaries, most contributions to this literature are to be found outside sociology – just think of the seminal work of Hans Blumenberg ( 2015 , orig. 1987 ) on the history of theory or the more recent book by Stephen Kern ( 2008 ) on the history of causality. An excellent example of how the historization of epistemological elements can play out in HoS is Peter Baehr’s Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences ( 2010 ), which, after discussing how Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism was shaped in a series of interactions with colleagues, uses the thus theoretically enriched concept to understand contemporary radical Islam.

Other scholars embark on projects that speak more to the second movement of thought, the epistemologization of sociology’s history (III.3). They investigate the past with the purpose of identifying those factors that have an impact, both fostering and inhibiting, on the production, dissemination, and evaluation of knowledge (cf. Camic et al. 2011 ). Thus, their primary interest is not historical, but sociological, or psychological, or philosophical. The history of sociology is taken as a strategic research material to explore, for instance, social processes of recognition, structural patterns of cultural reproduction, or the impact of cultural myths on science. 10 Scholarly work that is interested in using the history of sociology to elucidate the production falls into three camps. The first camp (III.3.a) emphasizes the sociality of knowledge production, dissemination, and evaluation. Some examples might be appropriate. While writing a history of the Hawthorne experiments, Richard Gillespie’s Manufacturing Knowledge ( 1991 ) provides rich insights into how the large network of actors and resources that was constructed around these experiments, and the heterogeneous interests brought together in this alliance, shaped both the way the research was designed and the further career of the results it produced. Relying on Randall Collins’ theory of interaction ritual chains and their importance for intellectual life (esp. Collins 1998 ), Savelsberg and Flood ( 2011 ) looked at the field of criminology to explore how intellectual stimulation and emotional energy were channeled through specific network ties. Similarly, in Becoming Mead , Daniel R. Huebner ( 2014 ) uses “George H. Mead” to explore the social foundation of academic knowledge production. How, Huebner asks, do we know about other scholars? How do scholarly communities create, communicate, accumulate, and forget these understandings? Mead, a man who “is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write” (Huebner 2014 , p. 3), appears as a predestined object to answer such questions. And finally, Sarah E. Igo’s The Averaged American ( 2007 ) asked how the introduction of large surveys and opinion polls in America transformed the understanding of normality, and the sources by which people formed this understanding.

A second, yet sparsely populated camp is interested in using the history of sociology to explore more general patterns of cultural reproduction (III.3.b). The best example here is Andrew Abbott’s Chaos of Disciplines ( 2001 ), which argues that the mechanism operative in the history of social science – a sequence of fractal distinctions and remapping – can be found in any kind of interacting cultural system.

Even less populated is the third camp when it comes to the history of sociology. Nonetheless, work on other scientific disciplines suggest that this camp has something to offer to HoS. The main idea of this camp is to approach the history of a science with an eye on obstacles that inhibited earlier scientists to see the true nature of things (III.3.c). Scholars in this camp seek to identify cultural and psychological boundaries to the scientific mind, boundaries that make it hard to even conceive of a certain idea. An early treatise of this idea is of course Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact ( 1979 , orig. 1935), in which he defined thought style as unavoidable frame of reference for any insight. Fleck’s essentially epistemological/psychological argument however was eclipsed in the process of reception, and his more sociological ideas on how thought collectives function as bearers of thought styles were more vividly discussed. The epistemological line of thinking has also been developed very radically in the works of Gaston Bachelard, especially in his books The New Scientific Spirit ( 1984 ; orig.: Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 1934) and The Formation of the Scientific Mind ( 2002 ; orig.: La formation de l’esprit scientifique, 1938). In these books, Bachelard sought to establish a psychology, or even psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. In contrast to Fleck (and Kuhn), Bachelard was certain and explicit that there was scientific progress. Based on this conviction, he formulated a normative and deliberately presentist program. He argued that, in order to be of use, the history of science had to evaluate earlier science by current standards. Only such a normative approach would allow to identify obstacles that hindered the progress of scientific rationality.

Type IV: Reflecting Sociology’s Current State

Finally, a fourth type of answers to the question of the use of the history of sociology refers to the value of historical research to reflect on the current state of the discipline. These reflections can emphasize two levels. Firstly, historical data on the development of sociology is useful in understanding its current shape (IV.1). The classic, and in a sense paradigmatic study in this regard is Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner’s The Impossible Science ( 1990 ). Focusing on the material, symbolic, and organizational resources available to American sociologists since the final decades of the nineteenth century, they trace the failures of the repeated attempts to turn sociology into a “science.” While not necessarily following their theoretical argument, the focus of Turner and Turner on resources has been used in several other studies. 11 The frame of reference for this type of studies is mostly national, which is justified since the policy systems in which disciplines operate are still largely national. Such work allows for assessing the historical processes that gave the discipline its current shape. This helps to consider new paths of development, especially when compared to other national histories of this type. This was the explicit aim of some recent research projects in this area which established historical datasets that allow for comparison both across countries and across social scientific disciplines. 12

Another level where the history of sociology is used to reflect on its current state emphasizes the broader social and cultural role of sociology (IV.2). Modern societies entrust large parts of their self-observation to the social and cultural sciences. These sciences, and sociology chief among them, are thus themselves producers of culture, and should as such be subjected to a reflexive analysis informed by (classic) sociology of knowledge (cf. Endreß 2015 ; Srubar 2015 ). If sociology takes itself seriously as a discipline concerned with social and cultural forces and processes, it must per force explore its own role as such a force within modern society. It must explore the discursive power relations that structure the space of sociology in society, and it must investigate whether, or to which extent, its leading ideas are socially determined by the cultural, economic, and political positions of its members. Conceived as a historical sociology of knowledge about the social, HoS would function as a corrective to the leading discourses within the discipline.

Gaston Bachelard and the Normative Historiography of Science

Many recent contributions to the HoS literature, however, have shown a different corrective claim than the one just mentioned. Instead of reflecting on the discipline’s position within society, they focused more on the intellectual content and attempted to improve our understanding of sociological theorizing and research – past and present. As I argued above, this approach of linking the history of science with its philosophy has been called historical epistemology in the German (and Anglophone) countries, which introduced confusion especially among scholars cognizant of French intellectual history. This recent “revival” has covered up the roots of historical epistemology in the works of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and others. 13 In HoS, their ideas were partly present, yet not in their original form, but in the form they received in the works of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, who have received far more attention within sociology than their forefathers. This article will thus, in a first step, discuss how Bachelard conceived of the relation between history of science and philosophy of science, and then review which of his ideas were taken up by his more prominent pupils.

To start with a superficial similarity: Both Bachelard/Canguilhem and Foucault/Bourdieu have a more or less explicit interest in a normative historiography. 14 At the time when Gaston Bachelard came to the Sorbonne in 1940 as a professor of history and philosophy of science, a metaphor very common in French philosophical circles to describe the relation between the history and the philosophy of science was the laboratory. It was the place where the theoretical ideas formulated by the philosophers could be tested against reality (cf. Chimisso 2003 , p. 305; Brenner 2006 ). While this metaphor relies on the supposedly objective practice of controlled observation, Bachelard, as well as his successor as the director of the Institut d’histoire des sciences, Georges Canguilhem, proposed a different role for the history of science. Its task was normative. It was to evaluate and judge past forms of science. This program of a normative historiography of science was initiated by Bachelard and completed in the works of Canguilhem. 15 While it is possible to differentiate between the contributions, convergences and divergences of these two scholars, this is primarily of philological interest and will not be done here (cf. Chimisso 2013 ; Roudinesco 2008 ). Instead, the focus of the ensuing narrative is on Bachelard, but this Bachelard is a persona composed of both his own writings and the presentation of his thoughts in the writings by Canguilhem.

Bachelard argued that in the face of the rapid progress of the sciences, philosophy of science had to give up its a priori and normative stance towards science and to begin to reflect ex post on scientific practices. In his view, philosophy of science had to become an ancilla scientiae . It was not able to dictate ex cathedra how science should be conducted properly. Rather, philosophy of science had to adapt its terminology and structure in order to comprehend the flexibility and rapid evolvement of contemporary science (Bachelard 1984 , p. 10, 1974 , pp. 16–29). 16 Writing a normative history of science meant that the analysis provided insights which could be used to re-consider, re-orient, and calibrate the fundamental epistemology. The term epistemology, however, was understood broadly. It did not refer to a systematic theory of knowledge, but instead to an active way of reflecting “on the historical conditions under which, and the means with which, things are made into objects of knowledge.” (Rheinberger 2010b , p. 2) In contrast to the Anglophonic (but also the German) tradition, such a conceptualization of epistemology is also interested in scientific practices and, more generally, the context of discovery.

The metaphor Bachelard used to describe the relation between philosophy of science and the history of science was not the laboratory, as some of his contemporaries did, but the courtroom, or tribunal (Canguilhem 1994a ; Chimisso 2003 ). This tribunal had to assess and pass judgment on past scientific ideas. However, this metaphor required an important qualification: though historical epistemology produced judgments, it did not aim at sanctions:

A judgment in this case is neither a purge nor an execution. The historiography of science is no backward-oriented history of progress [i.e., no Whig history], not a representation of episodes that, from the vanishing point of today’s truth, are obsolete. Rather it wants to investigate and to make intelligible to what extent notions, attitudes or methods which are nowadays obsolete were themselves innovations at their time and to what extent, as a consequence, the obsolete past remains the past of an activity which still deserves to be called scientific. It should not only become intelligible why something had been dismantled, but also how it was first constructed. (Canguilhem 1994a , p. 14; my translation). 17

Like the laboratory metaphor, the metaphor of the tribunal conceived of the history of science as a field to retrieve data from, but the relation between data and theorizing had changed. Whereas the laboratory used history to test philosophical ideas about science, the tribunal assessed the past of scientific ideas in order to identify their errors.

To Bachelard, most of the history of science was about errors. In order to understand the current state of science, which in his view was a stage in a continuous movement of scientific progress, one needed to reflect on the histories of both the obsolete and the confirmed. Episodes or ideas that were obsolete from the present perspective might have destroyed wrong convictions at the time of their introduction. Progress in knowledge is not simply the occupation and structuration of the previously unknown, but to a much larger extent the replacement of the previously known. The realization of truth is inhibited not simply by non-knowledge, but by wrong pre-knowledge (cf. Schmidt and Tietz 1980 , p. 10). Thus, while Bachelard insisted that the history of science was a history of progress, it nonetheless appeared as a series of breaks, of ruptures with ideas previously deemed true. To him, any attempt to display science as a continuously and cumulatively growing field would lead into a blind alley, into non-science, non-philosophy. Nobody could seriously claim an intellectual linkage between alchemistic transformation and nuclear transformation (Bachelard 1974 , p. 76). Cumulation was a narrative artifact; ruptures were the very essence of scientific progress.

Several factors inhibited the process of scientific discovery, and since they were responsible for the existence of wrong pre-knowledge, the task of philosophy-as-tribunal was to identify them. Unlike other authors, Bachelard was less interested in genuinely social or political factors biasing science and emphasized psychological and cultural effects. He searched for epistemological obstacles, effects of the psychological inertia of the cognitive mind. In Bachelard’s view, the human mind formed habits of thinking that remained unreflected for the most part of our lives. While functional in everyday life, if brought to science, these obstacles could divert the cognitive processes from reaching the truth. Therefore, Bachelard claimed that a psychoanalysis of the scientific mind was needed. One type of epistemological obstacles were caused by primary experience. When a human being first experiences a thing, this experience is placed “before and above that criticism which is necessarily an integral part of the scientific mind.” (Bachelard 2002 , p. 33) Primary experience thus had the potential to counteract and hinder scientific thinking. Another potential source was universalization, i.e. the attempt to transfer observational sentences into general statements of the highest order (e.g., scientific laws). Bachelard claimed that the idea to establish a new science by claiming fundamental principles and take these as basis for universal systems of thought had repeatedly obfuscated the process of science (Bachelard 2002 , p. 65).

A third important source of epistemological obstacles was mythic thinking. Myths effectively confined the range of conceivable approaches to a phenomenon and thus could obviate epistemic progress, both on the individual and the collective level; a process that Bachelard extensively discussed with regard to fire (Bachelard 1964 ). 18 One example of a myth that Bachelard saw influential across all scientific disciplines was the myth of the digestion: the belief that the truth of a thing could only be found deep in its interior and that one had to internalize it in order to fully grasp it (Bachelard 2002 , pp. 172–184). Other examples for myths turning out to be epistemological obstacles that Bachelard mentioned were: “a sexualised view of nature, an attraction for small and precious objects, the instinct to possess these objects and the consequent desire for them to be ‘real’, and a disposition […] for attributing a soul, or at least life, to any object or substance.” (Chimisso 2003 , p. 303).

For Bachelard, it was thus paramount to break with these pre-scientific pieces of knowledge, a step he called epistemological rupture. This meant to draw a radical break between everyday and scientific insight. Every statement must be checked for implicit, non-confirmed assumptions. Intuition was not a way to attain true knowledge, as Henri Bergson and other contemporary philosophers claimed (cf. Bachelard 2000 ). Also, science was not simply a continuation of everyday thinking.

Bachelard used the notion of an epistemological obstacle also to define the distinction between a traditional history of science and epistemology. “A fact that a whole era has misunderstood remains a fact in historians’ eyes. For epistemologists however, it is an obstacle, a counter-thought.” (Bachelard 2002 , p. 27) While historians of science could content themselves with documenting a wrong truth, the historical epistemologists had to identify the factors leading to its acceptance and to assess whether the very same factors still influenced current research and theorizing. This was the normative, or prescriptive part of historical epistemology. Based on an examination of science’s past, it had to judge which parts of current science still rested on errors introduced by factors like culture, desires, or myths.

The standard used for this evaluation was “the standpoint of reason”. This standpoint of reason, however, was not informed by a historicist reconstruction of what “reason” meant at the time of the forging of an idea. Rather, Bachelard claimed that the evaluation had to be informed by actual, “developed” reason, “for it is only now that we can really judge the errors of the mind’s past.” (Bachelard 2002 , p. 27). While the traditional history of science by principle – or prima facie? – negated any attempt to evaluate the historic events it deals with, the task of the epistemologist is to evaluate scientific ideas (Canguilhem 1981 ).

In an attempt to evade traditional relativism, Bachelardian historical epistemology applied the normative criteria provided by current epistemology to discern obsolete from confirmed insights. For Bachelard, there was no doubt that science progressed: progress in science to him was “undisputable,” a fact “withdrawn from any discussion.” 19 Taking a provocative teleological stance, Bachelard was convinced that a science had a destiny, and not just a chronology (cf. Canguilhem 1994b , p. 175). And it was precisely because of this destiny that a philosophy of science could emerge from a history of science. 20

To sum up, the Bachelardian version of historical epistemology engenders a normative historiography of science that is not only concerned with a Rankean wie es eigentlich gewesen , but discerns between correct and false ideas and analyzes the interplay between these ideas with the aim to inform current scientific practice. Such normative historiography emphasizes the importance of epistemological obstacles, of habits of thinking that are of an origin external to science and hinder the scientific progress. To explore these obstacles would allow for developing an epistemology that would anticipate and counteract their effects by convincing scientists of the ultimate need for epistemological rupture with their pre-scientific thinking.

The Mediated and Partial Reception of Bachelard in Sociology

Bachelard and Canguilhem influenced a series of important French scholars. 21 The most important of these from the perspective of sociology certainly were Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, who participated in courses by the two seniors and both wrote theses under the supervision of Canguilhem (although Bourdieu didn’t complete his). In their work on the relations of knowledge and power, both Foucault and Bourdieu emphasized the context of discovery over the context of justification, to borrow Hans Reichenbach’s distinction (cf. Tiles 1984 , pp. 5–9). Also, the core project of a normative historiography was followed, albeit not in the sense proclaimed by Bachelard. Michel Foucault’s own archeology of knowledge (esp. Foucault 2002a , b ), while lauding the reflexive stance of Bachelard/Canguilhem towards epistemology, deliberately moved out of the territory of science to question the very phenomenon of science. From the perspective of Foucault, an analysis á la Bachelard appeared to be bound to a scientific rationality and was thus unable to reflect on it. What is of interest for Foucault is to find a position from which to reflect on the phenomenon of science, and this stance must be located outside the epistemic realm of science as we now know it, outside science’s episteme . As he put it in The Order of Things, his project was to explore.

what modalities of order have been recognized, posited, linked with space and time, in order to create the positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology, in natural history and biology, in the study of wealth and political economy. Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science: it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori, and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. (Foucault 2002a , p. xxiii).

Obviously, Foucault’s project thus was different from Bachelard’s. While Bachelard was concerned with the link between the history and the philosophy of science, science as the dominant mode of ordering things is the object of Foucault’s analysis. Yet, Foucault’s critique of Bachelard’s project is itself based on two Bachelard-inspired assumptions: first, that there are epistemological ruptures between epochs; and second, that certain questions cannot be addressed from within the dominant episteme , which thus has the effect of an epistemological obstacle. Finally, Foucault advanced a project that, while not being normative in the sense developed by Bachelard, had nonetheless undeniable an evaluative, and more precisely: political, message. His project was one of enlightenment, as Bachelard’s had been one of scientific progress.

A comparable mission of reflective enlightenment characterizes the works of Pierre Bourdieu. Well-known is his formulation that “one cannot avoid having to objectify the objectifying subject.” (Bourdieu 1988 , p. xii) The scientist, and thus the sociologist, is a creator of classifications, and must as such become the object of reflective sociological analysis. Only such analysis enables the sociologist to gain a fruitful distance to her or his usual world. As his writings on methodological issues, and especially the essays in The Craft of Sociology (Bourdieu et al. 1991 ) evince, this is the place where the notion of epistemic rupture entered Bourdieu’s thinking. Here, epistemic rupture describes the capacity of the sociologist to break with the pre-scientific knowledge she or he has as a member of society, and has thus a meaning quite similar to Bachelard’s. And while Bourdieu, to my knowledge, did not use the term, it is apparent that if not reflected, the familiar world of the sociologist functions as some sort of epistemological obstacle, inhibiting a truly sociological analysis. Such analysis is only possible when the sociologist’s own social status, available forms of capital, and social biography enter the analysis, thus relativizing the objectifying position from which the analysis is carried out. While presented mainly as a methodological argument, this relativizing position nonetheless has obvious political and emancipatory implications.

There is yet another similarity between Bachelard/Canguilhem and Bourdieu, and it is in the latter’s concept of historical anamnesis. Bourdieu used this term in The Rules of Art (Bourdieu 1996 ) with regard to traces of presentist thinking in the history of art, but he also referred to it in his more political writings on history and power, where he argued that since the past influences the present in partly unacknowledged, yet no less powerful ways, historical anamnesis meant to debunk the myths of traditional historiography, which has tended to serve the nation-state and its power structures. “The work of anamnesis of the historical unconscious is the major instrument for gaining mastery of history, and therefore of the present that is an extension of history.” (Bourdieu 2008 , p. 267) It is difficult to assess how much this concept of historical anamnesis owes to Bachelard/Canguilhem, but it certainly shares the idea that writing the history of a phenomenon goes beyond a wie es eigentlich gewesen , and instead has a diagnostic and normative-critical function. Despite this closeness, a second view suggests a subtle difference. This difference has become most clear in a recent book by Goldberg ( 2017 ), who used this concept as the starting point for his work in the history of social thought. Rather than focusing on the ruptures in the history (of science) or separating the history of the obsolete from the history of the confirmed, Bourdieu’s approach is to investigate the continuities from the past to the present. Thus, in line with Bourdieu’s understanding, Goldberg claims to “treat the present as an extension of history, albeit a history that is often forgotten and which thus exercises a hidden influence on the present.” And with reference to the Historicist Controversy, Goldberg continues: “This continuity between past and present is what allows one to apply the instruments of sociological analysis, which are a product of history, to the history of sociology itself.” (Goldberg 2017 , p. 10).

Mediated mainly by Foucault and Bourdieu, some of Bachelard’s ideas are thus still discussed in sociology. This, however, does not apply to his program of historical epistemology in its entirety, and the ensuing section discusses three aspects of Bachelard’s program that have not been taken up. All three point to difficulties that proclaiming a historical epistemology of sociology implies.

A Historical Epistemology of Sociology? Problems over Problems

As Fig. ​ Fig.1 1 shows, historical epistemology combines two movements of thought – the historization of epistemological elements, and the epistemologization of history. This follows many standard accounts of the field (e.g., Rheinberger 2010b ) and is shared also by those who recently called for a historical epistemology of the social sciences and humanities. However, in historical epistemology, these two movements of thought are intrinsically and inseparably linked. Clearly, one can do HoS studies that follow just one movement, and the discussion above presented ample evidence showing the fruitfulness of such studies. But if one claims to do historical epistemology, then there is no way around acknowledging both movements and synthesizing them in a sensible way.

One way of synthesizing these two movements has been Bachelard’s open call for a normative history, and more importantly, for a normative history that is deliberately presentist. While, as I have argued, the approaches of Foucault and Bourdieu were evaluative, political, or emancipatory in their own ways, the tribunal function has not seen much support in contemporary HoS as well as in the history of science more generally, and it appears difficult to develop a convincing agenda for a prescriptive approach to the history of sociology. To be sure, there are studies that reflect on current practices or suggest rethinking basic assumptions in the discipline, as the remarks above showed. Yet, they rarely end with prescribing modifications to sociology’s current epistemology.

Further, to follow Bachelard’s program in sociology would be to seek for epistemological ruptures. While the notion of epistemological ruptures might be acceptable to the historian of sociology, the proposal that ruptures result in scientific progress enters a difficult terrain. Clearly, the idea of progress is operative on the level of individual scientific work in sociology. We need it to justify our doing to our readers and to ourselves (cf. Mozetič 2015 ). However, to determine progress in sociology on the level of the collective is unrealistic. Sociology’s objects are continuously changing, and the discipline thus continuously produces new schemes of interpretation. It is hard to assess whether these new schemes are novel, let alone whether they indeed are a progress in a true sense of the word. While this might become clearer in historical hindsight, the continuous transformation of the social world also distances us at a rapid pace from worlds of the past. Thus, it is difficult both to understand which other ideas had be overcome by the idea under scrutiny, and since they are themselves part of the cultural transformation, it is also difficult to fully grasp the psychological or psychoanalytical forces influencing past sociologists. Also, in many cases, what could be observed in the history of the social sciences is not a simple rise-and-fall pattern, but rather a cycle pattern of rise-and-fall-and-rise-again.

Finally, if one was to decide on a label for the attempt to follow Bachelard’s historical epistemology in writing the history of sociology, one could ponder about calling it a historical psychology of the sociological mind. Yet, this label smacks of an old-fashioned line of thinking, and rightly so, because it counters several methodological principles now common HoS. One of these principles, alluded to in the previous quote from Goldberg, is that one has to write the history of sociology from a sociological standpoint. Bachelard’s attempt to find psychological, or even psychoanalytical causes for the sustained acceptance of wrong knowledge is at odds with this principle. Yet in order to do historical epistemology, a consideration of such psychological causes appears inevitable.

These three ideas – the normative and presentist understanding of history, the idea of scientific progress, and the search for psychological factors – render it difficult, and at the moment apparently impossible, for historians of sociology to follow the comprehensive program of historical epistemology. At the same time, they don’t have to; as long as they do not claim to do historical epistemology, they can follow whatever paths they want and use whatever parts of historical epistemology’s rich tradition that they seem fit. Perhaps, the writings of Bachelard have something to offer them, too. More complicated is the situation with regard to those sailing under the banner of historical epistemology. To convincingly claim that there is more behind their use of this label than just academic entrepreneurial positioning requires a much higher awareness of the past (and present) of historical epistemology.

In this paper I showed that there is a great variety of answers to the question how the history of sociology can contribute to current debates in sociology. Some scholars argue that HoS plays an important role in (I) shaping and maintaining the identity of the discipline. Identity politics consists in a continuous interplay of construction and critique, with both movements fostering the binding force of the disciplinary identity. HoS is also an important resource for (II) teaching sociology, where the classics remain valuable sources for training the next generations. Further, HoS insights can and should be used (III) to inform current research and theorizing. It can do so either by maintaining a back catalogue of sociological knowledge production and by providing, upon request, examples and advice to sociological practitioners – a service I called the card box function (III.1). It can explore the historical contingencies informing the formation of ideas and concepts, thus historicizing elements of sociology’s theory, methodology, and epistemology (III.2). Or it can use the history of sociology as a rich resource of material to address problems related to the sociality of knowledge production (III.3.a), the structurality of cultural (re-) production (III.3.b), or the psychology of the scientific mind (III.3.c). Finally, HoS also (IV) reflects on the status of sociology and sociological knowledge as part of modern societies and as a cultural force. Where available, I have discussed examples to further corroborate these claims.

Of course, the proposed scheme primarily has an analytical value. Most contributions to the mentioned debates argue on several levels that the scheme discerns. Notwithstanding, I hold that the scheme is of value for two reasons. Firstly, by structuring an ongoing and at the same time scattered debate amongst sociologists, it offers a synthesis of previous positions that might form the basis for the productive continuation of the debate. Secondly, by offering a systematic overview, the scheme also suggests potential approaches to writing the history of sociology which are not yet fully appreciated or utilized. While recent contributions to the history of sociology literature have shown an increasing interest in the sociality of knowledge production, dissemination, and evaluation, other perspectives, among them those focusing on cultural, structural, psychological, philosophical, or even psychoanalytical aspects of sociological research and theorizing, were taken less frequently. Without denying the importance of continuing the exploration of the social embeddedness of sociological research, we can still hold that the more we are aware of potential alternatives, the more we can reflect on the strength and weaknesses of the approaches we prefer. The scheme thus is intended to increase the level of methodological debate and reflexivity in the field. 22

This article put considerable emphasis on the program of a normative historiography of science as it was developed by Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. This program attempts to identify epistemological obstacles by comparing the history of confirmed insights with the history of scientific errors. Once identified, these epistemological obstacles should feed into a reformulation of scientific elements – of concepts, of theories, of methodologies, of epistemologies. While the program formulated by Bachelard and Canguilhem has only been followed partially in HoS, and then mainly via the mediation of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, there certainly is potential to do so. Using the history of the Delphi technique, I have once described epistemic hopes – the expectations towards capacity, productivity, efficiency, and impact of a scientific idea that guide the author(s) of this idea in its creation and development – as epistemological obstacles, because they blind them for the idea’s errors and inadequacies (cf. Dayé 2015 ). However, another brief and necessarily sketchy example from the history of sociology might be useful here. In The City , Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie published collected papers that described their research program in and on Chicago (Park et al. 1984 [1925]). The book’s second chapter, “The Growth of the City” by Burgess, introduced the famous circle model of the modern city which he used then to explain their theory of expansion: while the innermost circle (“The Loop”) was home to hobos only, the newly arriving city dwellers sought housing in the second circle, thereby driving out those who had been living there. These decided to move to one of the better areas in the third circle, where they caused a similar reaction.

One can criticize the use of Chicago as a model of the modern city – Boston’s Beacon Hill and Manhattan’s Upper West and East Sides are famous counter examples for housing areas for the well-to-do in the first (or second) circle. Yet, one can also question the choice of a circle to describe the modern city. That Chicago itself fills only one half of the circle, with Lake Michigan as the other, is just the first in a series of peculiarities of the author’s choice of a circle. Another oddity is that a few chapters later, a similar model of apparently concentric circles is introduced. In “Community Organization and Juvenile Deliquency,” Park listed the different spheres of an individual’s social environment: first, the body; second, the individual’s “clothing, tools, and property” (Park et al. 1984 , p. 101); third, the family; fourth, the neighborhood, and so on. It is not made explicit that the underlying notion is circular, but the discussion makes it clear that this is the mental image Park had. Again, as for instance Norbert Elias ( 1978 ) has shown, a circle is a rather tendentious and unrealistic way to describe individual’s social environment. Our relations are primarily to people, and people in figurations, as Elias would say, and we don’t have to cross the circle of family to reach school. Thus, we have, in the same book, two instances of selecting the very same mental image for theorizing two different cases; yet in both cases, this mental image lacks the power to convince of its applicability.

A Bachelardian analysis would now question the meaning of the circle as a symbol, and it would locate the ultimate reasons for choosing the circle in its cultural connotations. And indeed, this is not a bad fit, if one is ready to follow the depth psychology of C. G. Jung and others. Circles (or spheres) symbolize wholeness, the completeness, integrity, and harmony of the self, as well as sometimes healing and the halo of God (cf. Jung 1964 ). This, of course, fits well with the social problems Park and his colleagues dealt with: the rising numbers in poverty, the decline of the family as a place for moral education, and juvenile delinquency. Thus, under the condition that one feels confident enough with psychoanalysis and depth psychology, one can make the claim that the unconscious motive for the choice of circles by the Chicago sociologists was the wish to improve – heal – the social ills they perceived in Chicago (and elsewhere).

It should be clear that these remarks amount to no more than conjectures, but they might nonetheless serve as an example how a psychology of the scientific mind (III.3.c) might work out in HoS. Again, HoS has the advantage vis-à-vis those claiming to do historical epistemology that it can remain eclectic the corpus of historical epistemology. Those advocating a historical epistemology of the social sciences and humanities, however, must approach this corpus in a more catholic manner.

Considering the whole range of capacities of HoS to inform contemporary debates in sociology, it appears reasonable to conceive of HoS as a crucial part of sociology. This claim is neither a form of strategic boundary demarcation vis-à-vis historians nor is it an attempt to secure the intellectual vitality of the history of sociology. On the contrary, historians have recently provided excellent contributions to the history of the social sciences. What is more, there is a vibrant meta-discourse within history on why and how the history of science should be written (for an overview, see Erickson 2010a ; as well as the ensuing debate with contributions by Fara 2010 ; Fuller 2010 ; Rouse 2010 ; and a response by Erickson, 2010b ). Thus, HoS itself is not endangered. If sociological associations decided to close the sections devoted to their own history; if sociological curricula continued to marginalize the history of sociology; and if major sociological journals continued to reject historical work for lack of fit into the methodological mainstream of the discipline, then the gravitational point of HoS would certainly move. Yet, the field would not disappear. However, as I hope to have shown, this move out of the discipline would be a loss to sociology.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks all the scholars supporting this project, among them Charles Camic, Matthias Duller, Christian Fleck, Chad Alan Goldberg, Verena Halsmayer, Stephan Moebius, Larry Nichols, Andrea Ploder, Alan Sica, Frank Welz, and three anonymous readers. A version of this paper was presented at the Regular Session on History of Sociology/Social Thought at the 112th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association 2017 in Montreal – I am grateful for the critical and positive remarks it received there. I also wish to thank the participants of the 3rd workshop of the Research Network “The sociology of sociological knowledge” (supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG), held in Osnabrück, spring 2018, for their critical engagement with the text. As Georges Canguilhem once put it, “objectivity is the syndicalism of insight.”

Funding Information

Open access funding provided by University of Klagenfurt.

1 Unfortunately, the term “history of sociology” denotes both a scientific field (in an unspecific sense) and an object of study. Sociology has a history, and it is studied by members of the history of sociology community. I will use the acronym “HoS” to refer to the field only.

2 The ensuing summary of events is based on available materials as well as a personal communication with Alan Sica (via email, September 2017).

3 Matters were worsened by the judgment of a lawyer specialized in intellectual property rights, who argued that most of the materials (especially unpublished manuscripts and reviews) were still the property of their authors, and to make these materials accessible would require to secure the agreement of the authors or their heirs. Two memoranda document the debate and ultimately the decision of the ASA leaders: the “President’s Memorandum to Membership on Council Decision regarding Editorial Paper Records” (March 1, 2014) and the “Memorandum on the Disposition of Editorial Office Files From 1991 to 2009” (March 1, 2014), both available at http://www.asanet.org/asa-statements , accessed June 11, 2018.

4 The website used to collect these statements, saveourarchivalrecords.org , is currently inaccessible (July 7, 2018).

5 The outcome of these debates was mixed. While the History of Sociology section continues to exist, ASA management decided not to pay for the preservation of the journal records, but allowed the “Save Our Archival Records” initiative led by Charles Camic and Alan Sica to seek for “interested parties” willing to donate. While the fund-raising campaign succeeded in collecting the required amount of money, Camic and Sica were excluded from the further proceedings, the current status of which remains unclear.

6 The “Historicist Controversy” played out in contributions by Jones ( 1974 , 1977 , 1981 , 1983a , b , 1985 ); Camic ( 1979 , 1981 ); Seidman ( 1985 ); Turner ( 1985 ); Warner ( 1985 ). The debate in the Swiss Journal of Sociology consisted of papers by Hirschhorn ( 1997 ); Valade ( 1997 ); Camic ( 1997 ); Jones ( 1997 ); Turner ( 1998 ); Sica ( 1998 ); Kaesler ( 1999 ).

7 Among the book-length contributions to this literature by historians over the past ten years, one might mention Cohen-Cole ( 2014 ); Erickson ( 2015 ); Erickson et al. ( 2013 ); Haney ( 2008 ); Heyck ( 2015 ); Igo ( 2007 ); Isaac ( 2012 ); Mandler ( 2013 ); Rohde ( 2013 ); Rindzevičiūtė ( 2016 ); Solovey ( 2013 ); Solovey and Cravens ( 2012 ); Thomas ( 2015 ).

8 Apart from the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin ( http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de /, accessed June 19, 2018), where Daston and Renn are leading figures, academic units concerned with the historical epistemology of the social sciences and humanities can be found at the Institute for German Literature of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ( http://fheh.org /, accessed June 19, 2018) and at the Forschungszentrum für Historische Geisteswissenschaften of the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main ( http://fzhg.org/forschungsfelder/ff1-historische-epistemologie/ , accessed June 19, 2018).

9 It is also questionable whether their programs are really superior to the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociological programs in the history of science (cf. Kinzel 2012 ).

10 I borrow the term “strategic research materials” from Robert K. Merton ( 1987 ).

11 Together with John Holmwood, Stephen Turner is in the process of editing a series of national histories published by Palgrave MacMillan, called “Sociology Transformed” ( http://www.palgrave.com/in/series/14477 , last visited August 31, 2017). At the moment, there exist volumes on Australia (Harley and Wickham 2014 ); Austria (Fleck 2016 ); Belgium (Vanderstraeten and Loucks 2018 ); China (Chen 2018 ); the Czech Republic (Skovasja and Balon 2017 ); Denmark (Kropp 2015 ); France (Masson and Schrecker 2016 ); Ireland (Fanning and Hess 2015 ); Israel (Ram 2018 ); Italy (Cossu and Bortolini 2017 ); New Zealand (Crothers 2018 ); Poland (Bucholc 2016 ); Portugal (da Silva 2016 ); Russia (Titarenko and Zdravomyslova 2017 ); South Africa (Sooryamoorthy 2016 ); Sweden (Larsson and Magdalenić 2015 ); and the United States (Turner 2014 ). Further books are in preparation. Several of the books in this series share the resource-oriented perspective developed in The Impossible Science (Turner and Turner 1990 ).

12 See, for instance, the INTERCO-SSH project ( http://interco-ssh.eu/en/ , accessed June 19, 2018).

13 The history of the label is itself complicated. Bachelard appears to have never used it (Canguilhem did), but a thesis written by Dominique Lecourt under the guidance of Canguilhem and later published both in French and English explored “Gaston Bachelard’s Historical Epistemology” (Lecourt 1975 ). An instructive overview over the history of the label has been offered by Gingras ( 2010 ).

14 The term “normative” might be mistakable, but it is a term used by Canguilhem describing Bachelard’s approach, and I therefore decided to keep it. There might also be some translation issues involved, and in English, the term “evaluative” might describe the similarity between Bachelard/Canguilhem and Foucault/Bourdieu more accurate.

15 Here, I fully agree with Cristina Chimisso’s remarks: “Canguilhem advocated the normative approach to history of science in several articles and talks. When he wrote his theoretical remarks on history of science and epistemology, the normative turn in my view had been fully realized. The epistemological approach had disentangled itself from the ideal of total history and had chosen normativity over a relativistic and philological approach. The goal of combining the historical craft with philosophical aims had been abandoned, and the tension between these two poles of history of science had been resolved. It had been resolved thanks to the success of the epistemological approach in the hands of Gaston Bachelard, closely followed by Canguilhem. In his theoretical essays, Canguilhem indeed relied on the ideas and authority of his predecessor in the Sorbonne chair of history and philosophy of the sciences. Indeed, Canguilhem made important reflections on this type of history in articles on Bachelard.” (Chimisso 2003 , p. 310)

16 In contrast to all other branches of philosophy who had to construct systems, philosophy of science thus could be understood as “la seule philosophie ouverte ”, the only open philosophy (Bachelard 1966 , p. 7).

17 „Un jugement, en cette matière, n’est. pas une purge, ni uns exécution. L’histoire des sciences ce n’est. pas le progrès des sciences renversé, c’est-à-dire la mise en perspective d’étapes dépassées dont la vérité d’aujourd’hui serait le point de fuite. Elle est. un effort pour rechercher et faire comprendre dans quelle mesure des notions ou des attitudes ou des méthodes dépassées ont été, à leur époque, un dépassement et par conséquent en quoi le passé dépassé reste le passé d’une activité à laquelle il faut conserver le nom de scientifique. Comprendre ce que fut l’instruction du moment est. aussi important qu’exposer les raisons de la destruction par la suite.” (Canguilhem 1994a , p. 14)

18 In The Psychoanalysis of Fire , Bachelard ( 1964 ) discussed a series of psychoanalytic and psychological complexes that influence cognition, among them the Prometheus complex, the intrinsic wish to know more than our fathers and teachers.

19 “On peut discuter sans fin sur le progrès moral, sur le progrès social, sur le progrès poétique, sur le progrès du bonheur; il y a cependant un progrès qui échappe à toute discussion, c’est. le progrès scientifique dès qu’on le juge dans la hiérarchie des connaissances, en son aspect spécifiquement intellectuel.” (Bachelard 1966 , p. 21)

20 “Une science a son destin et non seulement une chronologie. De l’histoire de la science, philosophiquement questionnée, c’est-à-dire quant à la formation, à la réformation et à la formalisation des concept, surgit une philosophie de la science.” (Canguilhem 1994b , p. 175)

21 Although similarities exist, it should be clear that compared to, for instance, Alexandre Koyré’s ( 1957 ) concept of a scientific revolution or the change of paradigms that Thomas Kuhn ( 1970 ) saw to occur in such revolutions, Bachelard’s notion of epistemological rupture referred to a different kind of discontinuity. Both Koyré and Kuhn were concerned with science as a collective and did not include the scientific individual in their analyses. Also, while epistemological ruptures for Bachelard were radical on the individual level, and per force had to be radical in order to allow for scientific progress, they were always partial on the collective level and did not embrace the totality of a (scientific) weltanschauung, as in Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Koyré 1957 ). Finally, in Bachelard’s writings, we find nothing comparable to Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability, a term by which he denoted a break in the development of a science which rendered impossible any form of epistemic continuity. The historical and theoretical relations between Kuhn and the French epistemologists are discussed in more detail in Brenner ( 2006 ); Simons ( 2017 ).

22 A comparable, but less comprehensive scheme has been proposed by German sociologist Frank Welz ( 2010 ). Welz discerns three types of historian of sociology, which he dubs identity engineer, collector of ideas, and trace-tracker. These types fit into the scheme power in this article (categories I.1, I.2, and III.2, respectively). However, Welz has been criticized for using Robert K. Merton as example of a positivist historian of sociology (cf. Dayé 2012 ; Welz 2012 ).

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The Sociology of Literature

• Gisèle Sapiro
• Translated by: Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman
• X / Twitter

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Copyright year: 2023
• Audience: Professional and scholarly;
• Main content: 212
• Illustrations: 11
• Keywords: sociology of culture ; sociology of literature ; literary studies ; field theory ; authorship ; translation studies ; publishing ; reception ; writers
• Published: October 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503637603

MERRIMACK COLLEGE MCQUADE LIBRARY

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• Find Images / Art
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• Database Search Strategies
• Types of Resources

Writing a Literature Review (University Library, UC Santa Cruz)

"the literature" and "the review" (virginia commonwealth university).

• Evaluate Sources
• Cite Sources
• Annotated Bibliography
• SOC Websites
• SOC Organizations
• Government Resources

Additional Online Resources

• How to: Literature reviews The Writing Center, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• The Literature Review A basic overview of the literature review process. (Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth University)
• The Process: Search, Assess, Summarize, Synthesize Getting Started: Assessing Sources/Creating a Matrix/Writing a Literature Review (Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth University)
• Review of Literature The Writing Center @ Univeristy of Wisconsin - Madison
• Tools for Preparing Literature Reviews George Washington University
• Write a Literature Review University Library, UC Santa Cruz

Your SOC Librarian

1. Introduction

Not to be confused with a book review, a  literature review  surveys scholarly articles, books and other sources (e.g. dissertations, conference proceedings) relevant to a particular issue, area of research, or theory, providing a description, summary, and critical evaluation of each work. The purpose is to offer an overview of significant literature published on a topic.

2. Components

Similar to primary research, development of the literature review requires four stages:

• Problem formulation—which topic or field is being examined and what are its component issues?
• Literature search—finding materials relevant to the subject being explored
• Data evaluation—determining which literature makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the topic
• Analysis and interpretation—discussing the findings and conclusions of pertinent literature

Literature reviews should comprise the following elements:

• An overview of the subject, issue or theory under consideration, along with the objectives of the literature review
• Division of works under review into categories (e.g. those in support of a particular position, those against, and those offering alternative theses entirely)
• Explanation of how each work is similar to and how it varies from the others
• Conclusions as to which pieces are best considered in their argument, are most convincing of their opinions, and make the greatest contribution to the understanding and development of their area of research

In assessing each piece, consideration should be given to:

• Provenance—What are the author's credentials? Are the author's arguments supported by evidence (e.g. primary historical material, case studies, narratives, statistics, recent scientific findings)?
• Objectivity—Is the author's perspective even-handed or prejudicial? Is contrary data considered or is certain pertinent information ignored to prove the author's point?
• Persuasiveness—Which of the author's theses are most/least convincing?
• Value—Are the author's arguments and conclusions convincing? Does the work ultimately contribute in any significant way to an understanding of the subject?

  3. Definition and Use/Purpose

A literature review may constitute an essential chapter of a thesis or dissertation, or may be a self-contained review of writings on a subject. In either case, its purpose is to:

• Place each work in the context of its contribution to the understanding of the subject under review
• Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration
• Identify new ways to interpret, and shed light on any gaps in, previous research
• Resolve conflicts amongst seemingly contradictory previous studies
• Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort
• Point the way forward for further research
• Place one's original work (in the case of theses or dissertations) in the context of existing literature

The literature review itself, however, does not present new  primary  scholarship.

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• Last Updated: Apr 9, 2024 12:15 PM
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SOCIOL 495S: Sociology Honors Thesis Seminar

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What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is a “critical analysis of a segment of a published body of knowledge through summary, classification, and comparison of prior research studies, reviews of literature, and theoretical articles” (University of Wisconsin Writing Center).

Do not confuse a literature review with an annotated bibliography.

Information for this page is taken from the Thompson Writing Program .

• The introduction should explain why you are writing the review (“so what/who cares?”) and make some central claims about the current state of the literature (e.g. trends, debates, gaps, etc.).
• Organize the body of the paper by common denominators among sources, such as methodologies, conclusions, philosophical approaches, or possibly chronology (assuming topical subsections)
• The conclusion should summarize significant contributions to the field, situate the reviewed literature in the larger context of the discipline, point out flaws or gaps in the research, and/or suggest future areas of study.

Lit Review Process

Literature Review Tutorial

Questions to Ask

• How are sources similar in terms of methodologies, philosophies, claims, choice and interpretation of evidence, reliability, etc.?
• How do they differ?
• Do you observe gaps in the research or areas that require further study?
• Do particular issues or problems stand out?
• Do you want to compare texts in general or hone in on a specific issue or question?
• Determine your purpose.Understanding the purpose and expectations of the prompt will help you place appropriate emphasis on analysis or summary.
• Keep track of sources by writing a brief summary for each.
• Consider making a table or chart to map how different sources relate to/contrast with one another.
• Consider the significance of each work to the field. The amount of space you dedicate to an individual source denotes its significance within the body of literature.
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What’s the Big Deal about Bigfoot?

In The Secret History of Bigfoot , journalist John O’Connor ’03SOA explores the mystery and legacy of the North American sasquatch.  

What exactly is Bigfoot?

It depends on who you ask. There are two realms of thinking. Folks who call themselves “flesh-and-blooders” believe that Bigfoot is an undiscovered giant hominid that has somehow escaped detection in the American wilds. Those often described as “woo-ers” believe that Bigfoot is magical or paranormal and can disappear through wormholes. There’s a lot of gray area and overlap between those two beliefs. 

Where did the myth originate?

Bigfoot is a strangely cross-cultural and trans-historical figure. Some of the oldest American Indigenous legends deal with Bigfoot-like creatures. There are similar mythical monsters found throughout most of the world, including Australia, South America, and Japan. There were “wild men” in medieval European folklore. The most recent American iteration of Bigfoot comes from Northern California in the late 1950s, after a logging crew claimed to find large hominid tracks in an area called Bluff Creek. The famously disputed 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, which shows a grainy Bigfoot striding across a riverbed in harsh sunlight, was shot there. I would argue that the iconic image of Bigfoot you see on beer cans and bumper stickers comes from this film. 

How did you conduct field research on the creature? 

The project started years ago as an admittedly bad screenplay I wrote with a friend who, like me, was an underemployed stay-at-home dad. We shelved the script, but I later came back to the topic. As part of my research, I attended Bigfoot conventions and went on four “expeditions,” two of them organized by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization , where you camp out in the woods looking and listening for evidence of Bigfoot. I also did my own self-guided expedition in the North Cascades in Washington. I didn’t find Bigfoot. 

Numerous alleged Bigfoot sightings are reported each year. What explains this phenomenon? 

I think the sightings boil down to misperception, what psychologists call the predictive brain and our desire to see what we want to see. Our minds are very good at convincing us that what we want to be there is there. Bigfooters certainly aren’t alone in harboring irrational beliefs.

The prevalence has a lot to do with what’s on TV and the Internet. When the Animal Planet reality series Finding Bigfoot aired, from 2011 to 2018, there was a huge uptick in Bigfoot sightings. Similarly, the most popular years of The X-Files saw a 200 percent increase in UFO sightings. Hoaxes also play a role: there are people who go out in the woods and take staged photos or videos and post them online. 

Do you see an overlap between Bigfoot believers and other types of conspiracy theorists?

In most cases, Bigfooting is a benign weekend activity for people who are maybe yearning for something they can’t quite articulate. The majority tend to be white, male, conservative, and working- or middle-class. But lots of research has shown strong connections between supernatural beliefs and conspiracy thinking, and at the margins of Bigfoot culture are folks like right-wing Second Amendment fanatics and what I would call January 6 types. 

Is there any convincing evidence for Bigfoot? 

In terms of physical evidence, there isn’t much — no credible photographs or videos, certainly no fossil evidence, and no DNA analysis of hair or scat. Footprints thought to be from Bigfoot tend to have clear alternative explanations; often they’re bear tracks. Bigfoot believers like to argue that no remains have been found because large mammal bones decompose very quickly in the wild. I’ve talked to wildlife experts from Maine to Montana, and they’ve all told me that’s utter bullshit, that old bear and moose bones are found in remote locations all the time. 

I think that, especially now, we need to be governed by reason and fact-based reality, and Bigfoot simply defies logic. We’re not talking about a tiny salamander. The idea that a seven-hundred-pound mammal could survive in the United States without being noticed or monitored is just inconceivable. 

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