Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2006

Peter Hedstrm.
Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology.
Cambridge University Press, 2005, 145 pp.
$US 27.99 paper (0-521-79667-9), $US 70.00 hardcover (0-521-79229-0)
Mechanism-based explanation has received growing attention among social scientists over the last
decade. It is championed by some leading sociologists such as Charles Tilly. There are certain
things on which various contributors to this discussion agree: sociological theory should be
committed to explanation rather than mere description, typologies and taxonomies. Mechanismbased explanation differs from both covering-law and statistical approaches to explanation.
Explanation focuses on the middle range as opposed to grand theorizing or eclectic empiricism.
But beyond these commonalities, proponents of social mechanism-based explanation do not share a
common methodology. The debate on mechanismic explanation recapitulates many of the standard
contentious issues in the social sciences and the typical positions designed to deal with them. This is
true for Swedish sociologist Peter Hedstrm (Oxford), who with Richard Swedberg coedited a
volume entitled Social Mechanisms (Cambridge UP 1998), one of the earliest statements on the
contemporary mechanisms debate (see also Bunge 1997; Tilly 2001). Hedstrm is a strong defender
of methodological individualism, albeit not in the more simplistic rational choice version from which
he distances himself. As he stresses repeatedly throughout Dissecting the Social, he seeks precise,
abstract, realistic and action-based explanations for various social phenomena. His genealogy of
analytical sociology includes Weber, Tocqueville, Parsons and Merton, as well as Elster, Boudon,
Schelling, and Coleman. Bourdieu, on the other hand, especially his concept of habitus, serves to
illustrate the kind of mystifying approach that Hedstrm rejects. With just over 150 pages of text,
the book is quite short. Hedstrm manages to present his theoretical approach to sociology in about
100 pages, reserving the remainder for a brief discussion of causal modelling and a very useful and
more extensive empirical case study.
Hedstrm labels his position structural individualism to distinguish it from any extreme form of
methodological individualism but he is clear on the object of sociological inquiry: the core entity
always tends to be the actors in the social system being analyzed, and the core activity tends to be
the actions of these actors. (5) While this methodological rule mentions social systems, the authors
approach leaves them unspecified and on the margins. Hedstrm defines social as the collective
properties that are not definable by reference to any single member of the collectivity. His
examples of such collective properties include ideal types of actions, beliefs, or desires, distributions
and aggregate patterns, and informal rules or social norms. But ideal types, aggregate patterns and
social norms are concepts that do not correspond to real social entities. It appears that in Hedstrms
ontology, there are no real social entities, only properties of collectivities. His closest brush with
social structures and systems comes in his third example of a collective property: the topology of
networks that describe relationships between members of the collectivity. (5)
Since changes in collective properties, as he states emphatically, must be either intended or
unintended outcomes of individuals actions how else could they possibly be brought about they
should be analyzed as such. (5) Is it really possible to capture social systems such as a modern
state, a multinational corporation, the IMF, or any large-scale, historically evolved institution in
terms of collective properties? At bottom, Hedstrm is not only a methodological but also an
ontological individualist. There are no social entities with an existence and dynamic of their own.

Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2006

Hedstrm, Dissecting the Social - 2

Although the explanatory focus of sociological theory is on social entities, actors and actions are
the core entities and activities of the mechanisms explaining such phenomena. He supports his
ontological-cum-methodological individualism with a telling thought experiment. The causal
efficacy of actions would be readily seen if we were able to press a pause button that suddenly froze
all individuals and prevented them from performing any further actions. All social processes would
then come to an immediate halt. (28) The same of course would happen to social processes if we
froze all cells and prevented them from performing any further actions. But this is a weak argument
in favour of biological reductionism and why stop at cells, when the same applies to more basic
entities such as molecules or atoms?
Hedstrms version of the mechanismic approach, I believe, is ultimately compromised by this
individualist reductionism. In addition, his conception of social mechanisms remains unclear in
crucial respects. Take the following definitional statements: The core idea behind the mechanism
approach is that we explain a social phenomenon by referring to a constellation of entities and
activities, typically actors and their actions, that are linked to one another in such a way that they
regularly bring about the type of phenomenon we seek to explain. (2) A mechanism should thus be
seen as an empirical commitment on the part of the theorist as to how a process would unfold if the
assumptions upon which it rests were well founded. (31) Following Mill, mechanism-based
explanations can be described as propositions about probabilities of different outcomes conditional
upon general ceteris paribus clauses. (32) The type of interaction mechanisms that I focus on are
of a more general kind and deal with the centripetal forces that tend to make interacting individuals
coalesce around a certain p or a certain q, whatever p or q may be. (43)
Hedstrms theory of action revolves around an actors desires, beliefs, and opportunities (DBO) that
represent the proximate causes of actors actions. (38) Such a theory, he argues, should be
psychologically plausible, because otherwise we would simply be telling an as-if story, not detailing
the actual mechanisms at work. (35) Desires and beliefs are therefore treated as psychological
mechanisms, certainly relevant for but hardly themselves social mechanisms such as emulation or
isomorphism. The logic of a DBO explanation is illustrated with the following example: If we
want to explain why Mr Smith brought an umbrella today, we can point to a specific set of desires,
beliefs, and opportunities . . . (39) Aside from the fact that this does not represent a typical
sociological problem, does the concept of opportunities take us beyond psychological
mechanisms? Are opportunities a stand-in for systems, structures, or institutions? At best
indirectly: Although opportunities exist independent of an actors beliefs, they must be known to
the actor and hence they can be said to influence actions via the belief of the actor. (39, fn 7) Thus
also Hedstrms logic of interaction: the action of one actor influences the action of another by
affecting the opportunities available to this actor. (55) Where there are only interacting individuals,
there is no room for any structural or systemic logic. This explains why all social mechanisms in this
book seem to be social-psychological, as desires, beliefs, and even opportunities are treated as
psychological events and processes; there are then no strictly social mechanisms. Nor are there
social entities, for in Hedstrms conception of the social, there are only collectivities that are
somehow contained in or reducible to mental states, actions of a single individual, and the
opportunities and actions of two or more individuals (see table 3.1, 59).
To the authors credit, he presents (with Yvonne Arberg) a detailed empirical study of variations in
youth unemployment in Stockholm in the early 1990s that identifies a particular social-psychological
mechanism, the social interaction effect, and empirically demonstrates its significance in
producing part of the social phenomenon. It provides a useful and instructive application of the
methodological arguments of Hedstrms principles of analytical sociology. The problems raised by

Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2006

Hedstrm, Dissecting the Social - 3

this reviewer notwithstanding, Dissecting the Social is a substantial and important contribution to the
emerging paradigm of mechanism-based explanation.
References
Bunge, Mario. 1997. Mechanisms and explanation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 27, 410-465.
Tilly, Charles. 2001. Mechanisms in political processes. Annual Review of Political Science 4, 21-41.

Andreas Pickel
Trent University
apickel@trentu.ca
Andreas Pickel teaches Political Studies at Trent University. He is the editor of two special issues of
Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2004) on systems and mechanisms. His most recent book is The Problem
of Order in the Global Age: Systems and Mechanisms (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/dissectsocial.html
October 2006
Canadian Journal of Sociology Online