Abstract
What is a social structure? For a discipline like sociology, the stakes of a good answer are high. Indeed, go into any introductory course and you’ll run into structural explanations of <topic>, Mills’s situating of the personal along the structural, challenging students to drop their atomized and individualistic interpretations to see structural constraints on society and the most intimate aspects of themselves. So, what is this structure that we continually talk about?
Jonathan Eastwood brings a new answer in his book Social Structure: Relationships, Representations, and Rules. A social structure should be considered as emerging from the ongoing actions of interdependent people. A good working definition of social structure needs components that are simple, clear, and real. Given all this, a social structure, according to Eastwood, is a bundle of three R’s: relationships, representations, and rules.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section, including the first three chapters, sketches out the core theoretical concepts Eastwood uses to define a social structure. The second section, including the next three chapters, sketches out how Eastwood’s social structure definition can be applied to various academic and policy settings.
The book’s main contribution is to define a structure by the three R’s. Relationships are recurrent patterns of interaction. Think social networks, and mostly the structural side of networks. We get forms of relations that emerge from triadic closure, structural holes, weak ties, and so forth. Representations are shared categories that sort people and things into groups. Think identity categories such as racial classification, branding, broad systems of us and them. Representations can thicken, layering on top of one another. Rules are prescriptions for, and proscriptions on, action. Thus, formal rules like laws and regulations, and informal rules like norms. Relationships, representations, and rules thus provide the three legs of the social structure stool. They are distinct and non-reducible to a smaller set. And, although our definitions of social structures are necessarily conceptual models, there is a real reality underlying these three dimensions that can be observed, felt, poked.
Eastwood next takes the reader through competing models of structure, from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Anthony Giddens to William Sewell, highlighting his R’s against other definitions of social structure as well as similar concepts: system, institution, macro, base, form, power. We get insights into the benefits of the R’s: specificity, concreteness, bounded definitions, realness, and flexibility. One of the big problems with the definition of structure is that it can overexpand and become a definition of, well, everything! The three R’s, because of their general bounded definitions, realness, and specificity, avoid such problems.
How, then, do we get from these relatively simple building blocks to the very complex and expansive social structures that exist in society? These three components of structures can interlace and intralace. By this, Eastwood means that different R’s (e.g., relationships and rules) or the same R’s (rules here and rules there) of multiple simpler structures can mingle and intertwine, deepening and expanding social structures, and creating larger and more complex ones. Thus, representations of social disorder and representations of race can intralace to forge deep representations of gun logic among police officers. Or daycare pickup rules can structure social relationships, with these social structure R’s fitting together to create a larger and more complex structure. These highlight the fact that simple structures can mingle and pile on top of one another, forming larger and more complex social structures—Eastwood sketches out general systems in which such mingling and piling may occur, as well as actions that individuals can take that intralace structures together.
The second half of the book takes a swing at various applications of the three R’s. Thus, in Chapter Four we get case studies of the application of the 3 R’s to ethnographies. Eastwood discusses several books, such as Forrest Stuart’s Down, Out, and Under Arrest and Robert Vargas’s Wounded City, and then uses his three-R framework to discuss the deeper social structures that exist around the main focuses of these books; and he discusses how the inter- and intra-lacing of structures help us understand the connection between the book’s primary focus and the deeper social structural context. That is, three-R thinking lets us develop a richer and deeper understanding of how the specific data presented in these studies are a result of, and connect back into, deeper and more complex social structures.
The fifth chapter takes us on a methodological detour. We get brief introductions to the underlying concepts of linear regression, the rationales for extending regression modeling to the multilevel, and the basics of the modeling logics that can be used for social networks, such as exponential family random graph models. Through this section, the reader gains insights and advice into how one could apply quantitative techniques to analyses of the 3 R’s, as well as reminders of the social constructedness of data—that our data are three R’s as well!
In the sixth chapter, we get an application of the three R’s to policy analysis. Here we are introduced to the basics of causal thinking through average treatment effects, as well as an introduction to the basic extensions of regression modeling, such as difference in differences. We get insights about the tricky, heterogeneous nature of the social context: it is difficult to port a policy effect from one place to another, and the complex lacings of structures in complex social environments make simplistic policy analysis difficult.
The book has some important and obvious strengths. I came to appreciate the three R’s as a conceptual bedrock for thinking about structure. Eastwood is fair and thorough when he situates his definition alongside the many others. The book weaves across many styles, from formalized spelling out of basic social processes to expositions on methods to more pedagogical applications of theoretical concepts to academic texts. The ideas of inter- and intra-lacing are quite useful, and they provide a nice conceptual framework to break apart complex social structures into smaller and more manageable parts. I quite enjoyed his application of the three R’s to the ethnographies to highlight their utility in deepening one’s interpretation and understanding of these cases.
There are a few uneven points in the book. The chapters on data and social policy are a bit imbalanced. I love a nice, clear conceptual overview of our standard quantitative tools as much as anyone. And Eastwood provides a lovely overview that covers fundamental statistical concepts. But the presence of such an overview in a book about structure is a bit odd. The time devoted is neither enough to bolster the discussion of structures nor to provide an adequate foundation for the methodological materials. I guess my unreasonable wish was that Eastwood would have written two books: one more fully devoted to structures and another as an introduction to quantitative methodologies for advanced undergraduates.
Although I am quite sympathetic toward the three R’s as a definition for social structure, I doubt that we have arrived at a settled and uncontested definition. For example, Eastwood makes a compelling argument to exclude “resources” and “power” from a definition of structure. In each case, the concept is overly vague and insufficiently concrete to merit incorporation into the book’s definition of structure. Fair enough! But I could not quite see why these critiques were applicable to resources and power, but not representations.
I am unsure whether the book will provide a strong anchor for a forward-moving research agenda. The empirical chapters are much more about pedagogical interpretation and critique. And that’s fine! This book’s big strength is that the three R’s provide a very promising pedagogical avenue for clarifying undergraduate conversations about the “structural,” to anchor them in reality and make them more concrete. That is a big win, and I will likely discuss the three R’s when I talk about structures in my introduction to sociology course.