Gosta Esping-Andersen

Two societies, one sociology, and no theory

ABSTRACT
This article shows the declining effectiveness of the sociological classics to make
sense of the dramatically changing economy and society. However, the various
post-something analyses of such transformations, especially the post-modern
emphases on language and discourse, are also shown to be inadequate. In their
place the author advocates the use of various leitmotifs to establish certain con-
stants, in order then to be able to describe and determine various patterns of vari-
ance. The article makes various recommendations for future sociology to be
empirical and both diachronically and cross-sectionally comparative in order to
comprehend those dramatic changes that currently surround us as sociologists.
Sociology should establish such constants and worry less about being theory-
less.
KEYWORDS: Theory; comparative; empiricism; methodology; economic
sociology
WHY WORRY ABOUT THEORY?
Sociologists honour their classics to a degree rarely found in other disci-
plines.
1
This may be for lack of any real theory. Our forebears never built
anything resembling an axiomatic, integrated, and trans-historical theor-
etical edice. They were, rather more modestly, trying to come to grips with
their society. Some bequeathed us with truly magnicent sociology while
others have aged rather poorly. They continue to speak to us when what
they saw a century ago is what, by and large, we still recognize today; they
faded into oblivion when they got the long haul of societal evolution wrong.
Thus hardly anyone today reads Mosca.
A discipline without theory needs compensatory guidance. One such
were the great questions and, occasionally, also the answers that our clas-
sics forged and which, one hundred years later, still animate research. For
the most part, they were simply empirical questions, a search for regularities
and causal explanation, an effort to fathom the society that was unfolding
beneath their eyes.
2
Strip away the surplus value axiom, and Marxs theory
British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 1 (January/March 2000) pp. 5977
ISSN 0007 1315 London School of Economics 2000
of class becomes a very perceptive hypothesis of class polarization. Webers
theory of bureaucracy is in reality a formidable empirical generalization,
while his sociology of power is basically a typology.
3
Durkheims writings on
the division of labour give a sociological reformulation of Adam Smiths
prognoses; Michels law of oligarchy attempts to forge a more general
hypothesis from one case study. And Parsons heroic effort to pull it all
together into one grand equilibrium theory is, above all, an exercise in
classication, sub-systems, the AGIL scheme, and all.
4
Inspired questions, hypotheses, and typologies can obtain lasting value
when they are coined on a social order that achieves stable, hegemonic
form; one which propels overpowering convergent tendencies across
nations and time; and one which creates an institutional make-up that
shapes the way that people live, act, think, and decide generation after
generation. To paraphrase Merton, sociologists writing in the 1930s, in the
1950s, and even in the 1970s, saw ever more clearly because they continued
to climb the shoulders of preceding sociologists, some able and some even
giants. The dialogue with the classics remained vibrant because the kind of
capitalism that sociologists of the 1930s or 1970s saw followed a similar tra-
jectory as that which, say, Durkheim had seen before them.
We now face yet another millennium. Birthdays, of course, usually have
little historical signicance, yet the times that we now live in do seem
unusual, epochal. We may not be able to prove it, but many of us are con-
vinced that a novel, qualitatively different social order is unfolding. Our
discipline may be hovering between the known, let us call it industrial
society as usual, and the unknown, an evolving, still nameless, societal for-
mation. And if that is so, the legacy of our classics may lose its power, the
typologies and the conceptual vocabulary that generations of sociologists
so tirelessly developed may become ineffective. How then should we go
about understanding what is evolving? What kind of sociology should we
encourage for the century to come?
As a gesture to readers with little taste for speculation, I will anticipate
my conclusion. I do not see it as debilitating and shameful that ours is a
theory-less discipline. We can forge workable substitutes. What we need
are anchors, some stable, universally recognized, social constants against
which we can gauge the importance of the mass of variation before our
sociological eyes. It is my view that the great contribution of our old
masters is not their theories of society, their typologies, or even their
great questions, but rather their ingenious methodological solutions to the
problem they faced. Their problem, just like ours today, was how to fathom
something in its early stages of evolution. Their solution was a doubly com-
parative method. To grasp the essence of the new, they made diachronic
comparisons with the deep past and, cross-sectionally, they forged ideal-
types of what they thought were the vanguard expression of things to
come. They became our classics when they hit on the right vanguard.
There is something grandiose about this millennial issue of the British
Journal of Sociology. The occasion seems to call for profound thought, an
60 Gosta Esping-Andersen
astounding insight, a sociological Eureka, but I confess that I have no
Eureka to report.
THE GRAND QUESTION
Our cousin, Economics, would crash if there were no free choice. Para-
doxically, economists espouse a theory that is profoundly monopolistic.
Respectable economists are condemned to do their shopping in an aca-
demic equivalent to the Soviet komsomol store: choice is restricted to one
brand only of the same basic ware. Sociologists, in contrast, do conform
rather perfectly to homo economicus, frolicking in an orgy of variety that more
resembles the American supermarket. The sociologist comes awfully close
to the ideal-type sovereign consumer. There exists no acid test, indepen-
dently of peer group opinion, of what is comme il faut sociology.
Such freedom breeds energy and creativity, but without a theoretical
anchor there is no guarantee that creativity breeds relevance. We easily end
up drifting. How then do we arrive at some kind of disciplinary cohesion?
Principally, we rally around grand questions and suggestive Leitmotifs. The
grand question which gave the social sciences their identity was how social
order, democracy, equality, or solidarity could be compatible with an
urban, industrial capitalist economy: the tension between efciency and
solidarities.
The efciency side of the coin, eventually captured by the economists,
lent itself more easily to one trans-historical theory, at least following the
consolidation of marginalist theory and the notion of a general equilib-
rium.
5
Sociology became caretaker of the other side of the coin, social inte-
gration, thereby surrendering any claim to hard science.
6
In their own way,
both became vibrant disciplines in large measure because their life-blood
are huge trade-offs that affect all facets of human welfare. Where there are
trade-offs, ideology will raise its head. As the joke goes, the denition of an
economist is someone with a PhD in laissez-faire ideology. The sociologist,
preoccupied with solidarities and social justice, is more of a social demo-
crat.
However, latter-day sociologists seem to be losing interest in their his-
torical social democratic mission. The anything-goes, all-inclusive thrust
of sociology is now pushing it towards issues ever more removed from
central trade-offs, from the workings of capitalist democracies. The move
is towards psychologistic concerns with social identities; towards anthro-
pologizing, historicism, semantics. The heroes of n de sicle sociology are
blas postmodernists, deep historians, and savage deconstructionists,
none of whom appear especially inclined to maintain an ongoing dialogue
with say Weber. Today, there are probably more books on sexual identities
than on power or social class; more debates on language than on how to
conduct good empirical analysis.
Many sociologists thus nd little inspiration in the big questions that
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 61
haunted Sociology for an entire century. This may be because there is
a sense that Weber and, with him, the society he worried about are
now anachronisms. Witness the rapidly multiplying number of post-
somethings. Perhaps we can do no better than to paste a post onto some-
thing we do know, but the act itself signals the presence of a sharp rupture;
that modern industrial society is no more. Many social scientists concur,
however vaguely, with this assumption, but we would surely all love to go
beyond the post-something labels.
What should one do under such conditions? Will postmodernism,
Foucault or deconstructionism help us bridge the old and the new, or had
we better invest our resources elsewhere? Inter-disciplinary work is surely
to be lauded, but historians will always be better at history; linguists better
at language. If we see ourselves as sociologists, we should optimize what we
are best at. Mine is a plea for a return to the grand questions of causality,
and to the grinding empirical analyses that our now seemingly arcane fore-
bears pioneered. Studying identities, tastes, and words certainly has its
place, and may even aid us in the search for what is new. It is not trivial if
todays youth embrace an image of life that we, their parental generation,
nd alien. Mapping out their desires may tell us quite a bit about where we
are heading. But contemporary micro-sociological fashion comes short
because it does not easily connect with the great dilemmas, the inner work-
ings of a new economy and society. The postmodernists do not pose big,
epochal questions because their basic raison detre is that grand moving
forces have ceased to exist. To them, causal explanation is irrelevant
because everything is relativistic or even stochastic.
7
If our entire political economy is being recast, linguistic sophistication
would appear far less relevant than clear-eyed political economists, bent
on excavating the new logics of motion, in search of the fundamental trade-
offs. If this is what matters, our sociological eye must shift to the workings
of the emerging economy. Here, alas, economists may not be helpful. Just
like we need to re-evaluate our assumptions about the economy, so also the
economists need to re-examine their sociological assumptions.
8
THE UTILITY OF THE LEITMOTIF
To do Sociology, according to Stinchcombe (1968), is to explain observ-
able variance in the concepts that we have chosen to be our domain,
whether they are power, legitimacy, inequality, or divorce. Ours is a world
without constants. Our dilemma is this: to conduct empirical tests of
hypotheses, we crave maximum variation; but when variation is too great,
when the sheer number of trees blinds us to the shape of the forest, we no
longer see clearly. We need to hold variability against some common ref-
erent, some kind of constant. It is here that sociology, probably for lack of
an alternative, becomes a discipline of Leitmotifs, of concepts that do not
correspond to Stinchcombes strict criterion of variance.
9
62 Gosta Esping-Andersen
Die Arbeiterfrage was one such Leitmotif among German sociologists in
the Wilhelmine and Weimar era. So was, later, Lipsets democratic class
struggle, Bells end of ideology, or Kirscheimers waning of oppositions.
Industrialism was to the modernization theorist a constant in the making,
the encapsulation of all those huge convergent forces inherent within
urban, industrial society. Like also welfare capitalism and, more recently,
Fordism, these are Leitmotifs, not concepts pregnant with variance. Indeed,
the vast amount of writing they have inspired comes from their stipulation
of convergence, of some common, irresistible driving force: a Leitmotif sug-
gests that beneath all that chaotic variation, there lurks some fundamental
principle of organization and coherence.
Postwar sociology would have been much less dynamic had it not been
for its inherited grand questions and blossoming Leitmotifs. They provoked
debate, hypotheses, empirical verication and falsication exactly in the
same way that strong theory would. The Leitmotif is one substitute for
theory. But sociology at year 2000 seems to have depleted its once power-
ful reservoir of Leitmotifs and has, so far, been incapable of replenishing it.
A SOCIOLOGY OF POST-SOMETHING
As with the times of Marx and Durkheim, ours is also an epoch of massive
upheaval. Where is now Parsons family, Blau and Duncans occupational
structure, Berles and Means business enterprise, or Herbert Gans suburb?
Do we recognize the world as it was depicted in our college textbook? An
econometrician would speak of parameter shifts and structural breaks. But,
in order to estimate such, statistical analysis needs a lot of observations after
the break. I think we can all agree that something dramatically new is under
way in many parts of society. But if we are participants in the process rather
than observers comfortably settled into some new equilibrium, we are like
drivers in a dense fog. We can remember but no longer see our city of
departure, and before us we can, at best, eye some blurry outline of our
destination. In dense fog, we easily get lost and end up in a fatal crash.
When parameters become unstable and institutions are in ux we are, so
to speak, hovering between two equilibria and in such conditions we are
incapable of coining Leitmotifs. We are thus anchor-less, unable to make
sense of the variation before us. This may explain the attractions of post-
modernism, and our rather pathetic resort to a post-nuclear family, a post-
modern, post-productivist, or postindustrial society when we wish to signal
historical rupture. Our eyes gaze towards the future, but our benchmark is
the messy present.
Coining a post- does not help us, as earlier Leitmotifs once did, to inter-
pret the world around us. The democratic class struggle or welfare
capitalism are almost slogans, but they condense meaning, summarizing
the spirit of an epoch. A convincing Leitmotif is like the great neon light
above the Seven-Eleven, a one-word encapsulation of everything to be
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 63
found inside. And it works because the word in neon codies our common
understanding of the world a workable substitute for strong theory.
LEAVING BEHIND SOCIETY AS USUAL
Society as usual means that path dependency is the force that most power-
fully governs change. The rules that govern social conduct are stable,
diachronic variance is limited, and we cannot identify breaks in the time
series. We have no doubt witnessed epochal change from, say, the late nine-
teenth century until today. Many countries have witnessed the consoli-
dation of representative democracy and the coming of the welfare state.
Still, most of the core institutions of industrial capitalism the family,
bureaucracy, work organization, or the fundamental social and class cleav-
ages have retained their basic character across generations of sociological
research. When our world is path dependent, our concerns turn towards
questions of convergence or diversity; the interesting variance is mainly to
be found in cross-sections. Indeed, if we examine postwar sociology much
of its dynamism came from cross-national comparisons.
Of course, Germany in the 1950s was not identical to Webers Germany.
Neither was there universal convergence. Welfare capitalism came in types,
and Lipsets pluralist society was hardly universal. But there was enough
stability across time to allow sociologists to measure progress from Webers
to Dahrendorf s Germany, and there was sufcient basic similarity between
Europe and America to warrant their inclusion in one or other variant of
welfare capitalism. The logic of industrialism was a formidable benchmark
against which to measure diachronic convergence and cross-sectional vari-
ation; the same holds for the democratic class struggle and welfare capital-
ism. But when the forces of convergence disintegrate in institutional
ruptures, what then should we do?
Those who adhere to the end-of-history view of the world do not lament
the disappearance of benchmarks and path dependency. Postmodernists
do not nd it particularly worrisome if Webers hypotheses appear irrele-
vant for todays society. Theirs is a world governed more by stochastic noise
than by unfolding regularities. But if we believe that history, rather than
coming to an abrupt halt, has the creative energy to form something new
just like it did in the long passage from feudalism to capitalism, from abso-
lutism to representative democracy then we need to uncover emerging
regularities.
It is frustrating to have no benchmarks when one intuitively knows that
some reality has changed. Productivity is, like so many of our key concepts,
part of that un-reected, taken-for-granted luggage that we carry around
and routinely invoke as a variable or as an explanation. It is one of those
statics that blind. As in the case of productivity, we routinely treat our most
fundamental concepts be it bureaucracy, the family, or social class as if
their meaning and content were frozen in time and space.
10
It once took
64 Gosta Esping-Andersen
no less than a revolution the industrial one and massive collective action
by worker movements to persuade a sceptical public that manufacturing
workers merit a just reward because they are productive citizens. Todays
manufacturing workers are now the sceptical public, not easily persuaded
that social workers, day-care personnel, or nancial analysts are as gen-
uinely productive as themselves. As most people eventually occupy them-
selves with production that appears rather unproductive, what do we do?
Are we, as Block (1990) suggests, being strangled by a sort of neo-
physiocratism?
11
To fully escape a neo-physiocratic prison we need, like the statistician,
more observations ahead in time. The benchmarks we carry over from the
immediate past may help little, and they may even thicken the prison walls.
Karl Marx could not have written Das Kapital prior to capitalisms triumph;
Lipset could capture the postwar class settlement with his democratic class
struggle because he wrote in the 1960s, not in the 1940s. And, speaking for
myself, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism could not have been conceived
in the 1960s or even 1970s because, until then, the divergent welfare
regimes had not fully crystallized (Esping-Andersen 1990). They were in
process.
Our great conceptual tool-kit evolved when the fog that enveloped a
bygone process lifted and revealed some kind of stable equilibrium with his-
torical staying power, broad cross-societal diffusion and, not least of all,
causal impact. We can, as sociologists, see (or at least hypothesize) how
people, communities or nations are affected by some force. The magic
moment comes when there is sufcient clarity in order to choose a work-
able ideal type of some phenomenon. Webers bureaucracy emerged out of
the mists of centuries-long Chinese and, closer to Weber, German nation
building. German bureaucracy was gaining visible form, appearing invinc-
ible, superbly rational, and all-powerful against British dilettantism or
American corruption: a Germano-centric ideal type. Marx had little
patience towards his forebears diagnosis of capitalism but, in addition to
his brilliance, he had the advantage of writing when and where he did. The
social divisions that capitalist economies breed had become something of
a reality in Victorian England: an Anglo-centric ideal type of where class for-
mation was headed elsewhere.
An inherited conceptual tool-kit is effective under two conditions: when
history is stable and when it promotes some societal convergence. Consider
the evolution of parliamentary democracy at the turn of the century. Few
were able to foresee its implications. Would it amount to nothing more than
a talking shop, a legitimizing fa ade for entrenched elite or class rule, as
Lenin claimed? Or would it, as reformist socialists hoped and both liberals
and conservatives feared, constitute the Trojan horse of socialism?
12
Europe suffered revolutions, civil wars and fascism because the answer was
not clear. An answer with staying power did eventually emerge, but decades
later.
13
A large number of our most fertile concepts began as centrisms. Even
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 65
if Webers bureaucracy and Michels Iron Law were coined on German
reality, we see them as ideal types, as general phenomena, because inter-
national practice converged pretty much around their view. Similarly,
modernization theory and pluralist democracy are America-centric trans-
plants. Indeed, most Europeans and Latin Americans in the 1950s believed
(and hoped) that they would in due course become as developed, plural-
ist, and democratic as Americans. And most contemporary welfare state
thinking is heavily Swedo-centric welfare states are judged by how far they
deviate from Swedish practice (Shalev 1983). Centric concepts are power-
ful if there is convergence; if the motherland becomes hegemon.
The very same conceptual tool-kit becomes ineffectual when the under-
lying reality is no longer hegemonic. When past hegemonic forms erode,
that is when we nd ourselves wandering in the fog of process. Consider
Webers bureaucracy with its notion of independence between person and
ofce, a rather Fordist conception of efciency when viewed with con-
temporary eyes. As management gurus, social network researchers, and
recent studies of emerging production processes suggest, personality attrib-
utes and social skills are what make the latter-day ofce effective. Now it
apparently does make a difference who lls an ofce, a role. Webers Pruss-
ian bureaucrat is vanishing and with him, one more ideal-type.
Or consider standard notions of job and work hierarchy in stratication
research. Is the relationship between doctors, nurses, and hospital order-
lies, or between restaurant managers, waiters, and busboys akin to super-
visory hierarchies in industrial society? Possibly not, because service
society means that production and consumption coincide, that the main
relations of production occur between client and producer. Here we have
a problem of unfolding process: will postindustrial work hierarchies look
more like a bank or McDonalds, or more like a day-care centre or a
ClubMed? Or, to return to the productivity problem: is the price a customer
pays a meaningful gauge of the producers productivity? Is a $50 haircut at
Chez Pierre twice as productive as that at the the local barbers? Is a day-care
worker tending 10 tots ten times more productive than a mother of one?
How do we answer such questions? My simple argument is that assorted
posts are unhelpful. Someone may tell me that my investment consultant
or Chez Pierre involves post-fordist production and post-productivism, but
what have I learned from such categories?
When the mother-country is no longer a hegemon, when change is
drastic, and when the grand questions concerning how social integration is
possible in a hostile economic world do not invite grand answers, that is
when Sociology must, once again, come alive. That is when its raison dtre,
namely myriad variation, becomes unintelligible, and that is when Soci-
ology must search for new anchors.
66 Gosta Esping-Andersen
APPROACHING THE NEW SOCIETY
What can we do when all is process and we ourselves seem wrapped in a
blanket of fog? There appear to be three general responses to this predica-
ment. The rst is the end-of-history or postmodernist response that, in
essence, concludes that everything from now on has no inner meaning, no
guiding rod. The second, very fashionable these days, sees change as over-
powered by path dependency. Institutions, once created, and people, once
hooked into these institutional practices, recreate themselves in their own
image. Hence, pension systems will remain pretty much as they are; the
welfare state will survive. At the more general level, the emerging literature
on varieties of capitalism and distinct production systems falls into this
group. It rejects the proposition that we are headed towards some basic
system convergence with the end of communism and the rise of the global
economy, and it argues that differences in institutional make-up propel
economies towards parallel but distinct trajectories that are largely path-
dependent, given their institutional departure. This point of departure can
(and does) lead to two diametrically opposing hypotheses. One, rather
deterministic, is that once the rails have been laid down, the train will inex-
orably proceed towards its destiny; the second, and much more open-ended
one, is that a long series of small ubiquitous alterations, all undertaken in
the spirit of system-maintenance, may culminate into institutional
rupture.
14
The latter response is in harmony with the third position, namely
that we stand face-to-face with historical rupture, epochal change.
15
Is there a case for the third position? Historical rupture implies that
society is no longer as usual, that the way we did things yesterday is unrec-
ognizable today. The words we use to describe our deeds or institutions may
not change, but the content is new. We are driven by a different set of moti-
vations, wealth is produced in a radically different way, and class or social
divisions follow dimensions that were previously unknown. In short, the
trade-offs that govern society are being re-written. All great historical trans-
formations in the past were, at their root, governed by the arrival of a new
mode of production, new incentive structures, and a new way of utilizing
and distributing scarce resources. The denition of a scarce resource will
change: once it was land, then capital and now, possibly, social capital and
brains. This implies that people will make distributional claims on the basis
of acts and deeds that seem illegitimate to many, or that people are driven
by something that appears remote from the Protestant Ethic. New
economies imply new social congurations, conicts and cleavages. They
call for recast institutions when, sociologically speaking, the status quo
divides and atomizes more than it integrates. When labour became a com-
modity, the family became Parsonian, trade unions emerged, guilds
became corporatist associations, and the state became a welfare state, it was
then that Sociology made a name for itself. These were the kinds of inte-
grative forces that our classics identied, coined, and explained. If there
exists a strong case for the rupture scenario at present, what has Sociology
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 67
to say about it? Do we manage to pose great questions? Do we see new ideal
types or Leitmotifs emerging? Do we have a challenging hypothesis of novel
societal convergence?
There is of course always the odd futurologist amongst us. And there are
legions of scholars engaged in the careful scrutiny of emerging empirical
trends in this or that niche of society. Neither, of course, is especially likely
to identify the kinds of ideal types that nourish generations of committed
analysis. Let us, then, examine one scientically more challenging effort,
that of Castells (1996, 1997, 1998), whose ambitious three-volume opus on
the network society has inspired an astonishing reception. Castells is being
heralded as the new Max Weber.
16
Here is undoubtedly a genuine and con-
certed attempt to move beyond the study of society as usual, and to
venture into the terrain of ideal type constructs and Leitmotifs of the emerg-
ing social order.
Castells stands on many shoulders. There is the echo of Granovetter
(1985) and the new economic sociology in the core analyses of networking;
Touraine seems to be the inspiration behind the emphasis on social move-
ments. But Castells wants to venture further than others. The gist of his
argument is that the old order, governed by discrete individual units in
pursuit of money, efciency, happiness, or power, is being replaced by a
novel one in which motives, decisions, and actions ow from ever more by
uid, yet ever-present, networks.
17
It is networks, not the rm, bureaucracy,
or the family that gets things done. Clearly, what drives economic action
will eventually achieve cultural expression. One example, highlighted by
Castells, is religion. The era of industrial capitalism was driven by variations
on the Protestant Ethic. As Castells sees it, religion today is not a force of
energy but more like a modern-day Luddite movement holding back the
frontiers of progress. The twenty rst-century spirit of capitalism emanates
from the passions of mastering information technologies, from being
logged on and close to cyberspace. The passage from mechanical to
organic solidarity achieves a wholly new meaning if social networks now
dictate market transactions and production decisions; if the quality of net-
works is decisive for peoples incentive to collaborate and their ability to
trust one another.
Castells is not alone in stressing de-standardization and differentiation,
the disappearance of social homogeneity, and the decline of old social
prototypes. We can all agree that the standard production worker has
eclipsed. The energy behind collective mobilization will come from else-
where. The share of our labour force that actually fabricates physical goods
is now rather small, and there are exceedingly few who do the kind of
simple manual labour that is our basic norm of what it means to be working
class and productive. What, then, is class and where is the motor of con-
temporary change? Most people now, and almost everyone soon, will be
engaged in a kind of production which is simultaneous the consumption
of someone else. This is so at the high end of servicing, such as dentists,
nancial consultants or psychotherapists, and at the low end, such as
68 Gosta Esping-Andersen
waiting on tables or caring for the frail elderly. Servicing, in addition to
calling for social skills, changes the basic axis of authority and command.
Certainly, the doctor will give orders to the nurse; the headwaiter likewise
to the busboy. None the less, the lions share of demands that are put to
nurses or waiters, as well as doctors or business consultants, come from the
consumer, the client. It is this chain of social relations that matters; it is here
that mutual trust is forged, and that quality of performance is judged. The
network society is one way to grasp how dominant relations emerge and
Castells, my exemplar, furnishes hypotheses about the ways in which new
axes of conict, social division, and popular mobilization will evolve: they
will, reactionary or progressive, come from the side-lines, from the perime-
ters of global networking. But has there ever been much sociological evi-
dence that exclusion and peripheralization do dictate history?
Strong Sociology of the kind that the classics forged has always been more
institutional than voluntarist; agency affects structure via powerful insti-
tutions. How would such a perspective interpret similar evidence on the
rising importance of networking? One might hypothesize that, if economic
rewards and life chances depend primarily on how well, and in which kind
of network, one is inserted, the link between family, socialization, and class
will change. People will be competing for access to promising networks
rather than simply for well-paid jobs. Your prestige, income, and power will
depend less on your ofce and more on who you know, with whom you
have reciprocal linkages, and on how valuable are your networks. This
implies that inequalities will spring from social capital resources, how family
and schooling interact. Social capital and social skills increasingly compete
with conventional physical and human capital as being the fundamental
scarce resources to be hoarded and exchanged; an emerging source of
rents. If so, we need to assess their monetary value. And here, alas, we come
against a neo-physiocratic obstacle, namely how to fully grasp, let alone
measure, what is productivity, what is demanded, and what is scarce, in a
world where most people service each other.
The developing economysociety divide will probably not pit discrete
efciency-seeking capitalists against an atomized, undifferentiated working
class, as the stylized notion of industrial society and welfare capitalism saw
it. If social class remains the cornerstone institution of Sociology, the
concept needs radical rethinking. In fact, if we follow the preceding diag-
nosis of where we are heading, it appears that the task of social cohesion
will fall less on the shoulders of families, church, community and social
movements, and more on economic networks. Where does that leave our
time-honoured sociological institutions? If our goal is to understand his-
torical rupture and shed some light on the society that lies ahead, we could
do worse than start with the family, the most fundamental of all sociological
institutions. It is arguably also here that revolutionary change is visibly in
train. Indeed, some believe it is the vanguard, the dening core, of post-
industrial society.
18
The family, once the haven in a heartless world, may be transforming
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 69
itself from being the primary unit of social integration to becoming, just
like in pre-industrial society, a unit whose main relevance is economic. We
all know that the family is being radically recast. Demographers speak of
the second demographic revolution (van de Kaa 1987). If the ideal-typical
family of industrial society was some variant of the Parsonian model, a
small privatized nucleus dedicated to the provision of shelter, intimacy,
socialization and passive consumption, its successor, the evolving variety of
a-typical families, may hold the key to the dynamics of service economies
because they crave the external world more than the intimacy of the inter-
nal family. Here is, then, a potential catalyst of massive change. Can our
empirical knowledge, our research strategies, help us pinpoint its true char-
acter? The acid test, in my own personal view, is whether it can credibly
connect the incentives of individuals, the constraints of institutions, and the
contours of global change.
Let us see where recent empirical data on family change might take us.
To interpret such data, the concept of post-nuclear family is of little use.
We do, however, need a constant so let us begin with how it was. On the
economy side, the industrial economy was driven by population growth and
the insatiable demand for material consumer goods, such as automobiles,
refrigerators and stereos. The democratic class struggle, the pluralist
middle class society, and the afuent worker, as Leitmotifs of this order,
implied and assumed that families supplied one earner and that he, even if
unskilled, could bring home a family wage that would afford home owner-
ship, an automobile, and a full-time housewife. As Levy (1988) has empha-
sized, his sons, when adult, would do even better than himself. On the social
integration side, this ideal type family, via the housewife, not only assured
population growth, but also adequate care and comfort to its members.
This admittedly crude stylization has clearly no echo in todays world. On
the economy side, two fundamental changes have occurred. The rst is that
female labour supply is beginning to match males, and is supplanting
population increase as the principal dynamic force of growth. The second
is that the new servicing economy is family-driven, but in a very different
way than before. To be sure, demand for services depends as did demand
for cars on purchasing power (Engels law), and where there are two
earners, so much the better for service consumption. The problem though
is that productivity growth (as we measure it) tends to slow down in services,
meaning slower real income growth in the long haul. So the dynamics of
services must rely on additional factors. This is where the family appears as
possibly the dening element of the emerging economy.
The problem is one of relative prices. In an economy whose life-blood is
to produce consumer goods, households can either afford the good or they
must go without. Few households can assemble their own refrigerator, let
alone car. This is not so in servicing economies. The producer competes
hardly at all with cheaper foreign producers, so globalization may not be
the chief problem. Yet, the producer faces in the household an incredibly
ercer competitor because, in principle, households are capable of doing
70 Gosta Esping-Andersen
their own servicing (see Gershuny 1978, 1988). Hence, to expand the
service economy, prices must compete with the opportunity cost of self-
servicing. This means either of two options. The rst is to lower the cost of
services to households. This creates possibly dramatic wage and income
inequalities; arguably a new social polarization. The second is to augment
households need to buy services. This would occur when they lack the time
or ability to make do with self-servicing in the home. What is remarkable
about the emerging family structure, the so-called non-standard a-typical
family, is that it lacks sufcient time because of the revolution in womens
incentives and preferences. Single person, lone parent, and dual career
households suffer from severe time constraints because women choose
economic independence. This is why women, as femina economica, and the
family, as societal institution, create the service economy and imbue it with
its particular logic.
In brief, the unfolding service economy receives its dynamism from the
way that citizens, in an attempt to adapt, unwittingly revolutionize family
life. But in this very same process, citizens clash with economic realities that
seem far removed from our notion of industrial society as usual. On one
side, our emerging family is time-starved and urgently in search of servic-
ing options; on the other side, supply can only meet demand if prices are
affordable, meaning low wages. The USA is the vanguard, a possible ideal
type, of this trajectory; an economy in which many service workers prob-
ably earn too little to be able to afford even their own services. Such a tra-
jectory cannot possibly avoid the emergence of new social cleavages. If the
industrial economy nurtured a divide between core and periphery workers,
its successor is more likely to pit skilled, social capital rich knowledge
workers against an agglomerate of outsiders. What, empirically, the new
losers will look like is an open question although one possible scenario
depicts them as those only precariously (or not at all) linked to paid work,
who are network-poor and trapped at the low-end of service production.
A-typical families stimulate, maybe even create, the new economy, but by
doing so they pose new problems of social integration. An unchanged, path
dependent welfare state servicing primarily the needs of the erstwhile in-
siders, the conventional male breadwinner and his Parsonian family will cer-
tainly fail as a vehicle of social cohesion. But so may also traditional social
communities. What kinds of trends are visible on this front? Change seems
to pull families in two directions at once. Their capacity to furnish strong
social integration may weaken because the intensity of family and com-
munity life is probably inversely correlated with levels of out-of-home
service consumption. Family interaction will decline, and parents will have
less time to inculcate strong social capital in their children. A-typical
families have few children, and this might imply the reverse, namely the
capacity of parents to invest more social capital, affection, and attention in
the few they do have. Few siblings and absent parents might provoke ad-
ditional social isolation among youth, but this may be offset by intensied
interaction across families. Divorce often means that a child ends up with
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 71
eight grandparents. Yet, when all members of the family are either in an
old-age home, at work, at school, or in day care, the community empties
out. Those excluded from work or not yet institutionalized, say the unem-
ployed or the retired, will face a neighbourhood with no one to interact
with except themselves networks that probably go nowhere. But, again,
this may be offset by shifting community elsewhere to the day-care
centre, the place of work, the retirement community. The evolving
familywork nexus may deepen the abyss between those who have social
capital and those who do not, and social exclusion can harden into severe
isolation. Alternatively, the gist of what once was family is moved into new
loci. The workplace, as Hochschild (1997) suggests, may become one such
substitute, the fundamental network for social integration and emotional
satisfaction. If so, what will be the dynamics of social cohesion and exclu-
sion? How will this affect the great trade-off between efciency and social
solidarity?
This is not an essay on either futurology or on doomsday scenarios. What
comes to pass will, most likely, look very different from such dire predic-
tions. The point I wish to make has more to do with method than with prog-
nosis. Simply put, the single most urgent task for Sociology is to do the kind
of empirical work that will permit us to conclude one way or another, to
decide which, among alternative scenarios, constitutes the most convinc-
ing, durable, and convergent ideal type of the developing family, work-
place, bureaucracy or welfare state. I have exploited recent contributions,
not to venture a model of society to come, but to dene the kinds of tasks
that lay before us in our struggle to penetrate the dense fog of social trans-
formation.
A SOCIOLOGY FOR THE COMING SOCIETY
We can of course bide our time, and in the meantime preoccupy ourselves
with questions of discourse and Foucault. Or we can purchase fog lamps
which when properly used can broaden our horizon. What they do is to
illuminate more powerfully the immediate vicinity, the details just in front
of our eyes. Methodologically speaking, what I am advocating is intentional
and purposeful empiricism. If there is a new macro-cosmos in the making,
we will not identify it by trying abstractly to imagine an invisible whole, a
hidden Gestalt. A far better strategy is to examine what is actually happen-
ing in the myriad social particles that, some way or another, are constituents
of the whole. What is happening in families, or at the workplace? How do
people get jobs? What kinds of job? How do they get paid? And how do they
spend their money? We may not be able yet to see the city through the fog,
but perhaps we can glimpse a few suburban homes. The more suburban
homes we see, the easier it is to imagine what comes next.
Purposeful empiricism of this sort may receive substantial help from the
rational choice perspective when, by the latter, we mean a methodological
72 Gosta Esping-Andersen
approach rather than a full-blown theory of the world. As Goldthorpe
(1996) has recently argued, its lack of realism as far as individual action is
concerned may not matter much if we can agree that social aggregates are
tendentially more rational than their individual particles; that people
combine into social collectivities for some purpose. Or, as Hechter (1998)
argues, the point of rational choice theory is not to predict individual
behaviour but rather social outcomes. Take W. F Whytes (1955) famous
street corner gang, a seemingly irrational way of pursuing the American
Dream. Whytes patience he stuck with them for a long time was his fog-
lamp. Each individual member of the gang may or may not have behaved
rationally, but this is of no consequence. As one act after another cumu-
lated into systematic patterns of solidarity and collective action, the gang
began to reveal itself as a supremely rational entity. Purposeful empiricism,
as Whytes study reveals, can nd powerful guidance from rational choice
models if conducted in a rigorous Popperian spirit. There is probably no
better way to connect micro-data to macro-realities, especially if our aim is
to identify the mechanisms that explain why X predicts Y (Blossfeld and
Prein 1998: 1617; Hechter 1998: 287). It goes without saying that rational
choice or, for that matter, naked empiricism is pointless unless we have
some clear idea of the explanandum, Y.
Empiricism seems to go against the prescriptions of our disciplinary
masters who, under rather similar conditions, managed to write Das Kapital,
The Protestant Ethic, and Suicide, all great works of holistic analysis, great
questions, daring hypotheses, and all capable of ideal type construction. By
and large, these were scholars who, unwittingly, adhered to a rational
choice methodology. Did they also have superior fog lamps? Maybe, but we
should not forget that these grand macroscopic depictions of the new order
were the end products of tedious investigations of empirical minutiae: of
changing factory practices, of living conditions among working-class
families, of Chinese religious behaviour, or of suicide statistics.
Our disciplinary masters were therefore hardly innocent of empiricism,
so how did they move beyond description and classication? How did they
conduct purposeful empiricism? They used the comparative method,
usually in a double assault. One was diachronic comparison with deep history.
Pre-industrial, non-capitalist society was their constant, their reference
point, in order to decide what, in their era, was genuinely novel and what
was pre-industrial society as usual. Marx lashed out at his predecessors for
their lack of clear thinking. They were, of course, still too close to the pre-
industrial order. Weber recognized the essence of religious life in capital-
ism because he could reach back several centuries and thus see how
spiritual life had been colonized by new meaning. Durkheim knew, or had
at least read about, life in simpler pre-industrial societies and could there-
fore recognize that mechanical solidarities, as in tribal society, would be
unworkable in an industrial mass society.
19
Deep history for a sociologist
of post-industrial society should not be tribal communities or Medieval
England. Analytically, a much superior constant might be the logic of
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 73
industrialism, welfare capitalism, or the democratic class struggle. At
least this was my approach in my sketchy treatment of families and the
service economy. To ascertain whether the family is but another path
dependent institution or whether there is rupture, Parsons can be useful.
To do the same for relations of occupational hierarchy, revisiting Blau and
Duncan might be protable. Contemporary students of social organization
seem to be enamoured by Williamson and transaction cost theory, but if
their aim is to discover a new world of organizational behaviour, they might
actually be better off comparing their data to Whytes (1956) organization
man.
Diachronic comparison has its problems. One is evolutionary assymetry,
namely that rupture viz path dependency may vary across phenomena
and institutions. It is possible that the family is in the throes of revolution
while, concomitantly, the welfare state or industrial relations systems
remain impressively stable. Assymetric institutional change can provoke
intense disequilibria, social tension, or what we often term crisis. It is
therefore an ideal starting point for explorative analysis and, therefore, not
a genuine problem. A second, and this time real, problem comes from evo-
lutionary afnity: the immediate past may disturb our vision. There is
usually no such thing in social life as a sudden brutal rupture; change nor-
mally comes by stealth or, as Marx saw it, when quantity imperceptibly
becomes quality. For this reason, the diachronic comparison requires deep
history, a return to the womb of a social phenomenon. To establish whether
we have arrived in a new post-industrial (sic) order, it would be better to
return to the era of high industrialism. If we think that a radically novel a-
typical and non-standard life course is in the making, it would be prefer-
able to compare the dynamics of recent cohorts against those of distant
cohorts.
Purposeful empiricism with diachronic comparison must know what to
look for. How do we dene that fuzzy object still wrapped in fog? Castells
work seems to adhere to the principle of purposeful empiricism, but since
his explanandum is amazingly comprehensive, the empirics have little guid-
ance. My impression is that he began with an imagined holistic gestalt and
then proceeded to examine all the minutiae of all its component parts in
order to t them into his imagined whole. When you insist on examining
how everything is related to everything in a way that coagulates into some
greater Gestalt, the task is truly immense. Great intellectual minds could
begin by imagining the invisible city ahead of them and then see if the
details t the image. Unfortunately, most of us are not of this calibre; we
still need to invent fog lamps capable of illuminating the entire horizon at
once.
20
This is where the second and more cross-sectional comparative assault
comes in. To the driver in the fog, the rst suburban home constitutes the
vanguard. Can the driver safely assume that this home represents the city
ahead? Will most houses, as they gradually roll by, look fairly similar? In
other words, is the rst house an ideal-type of things to come? A fog-lamp,
74 Gosta Esping-Andersen
the stronger the better, is here clearly essential. And this means detailed
and purposeful empiricism dedicated to variance-seeking. The best (and
the bravest) of our forebears identied the right vanguard and transformed
it into a lasting ideal type depiction of society to come, of that overwhelm-
ing force that compels historical convergence. It does not matter if Weber
was lucky or brilliant when he seized upon German bureaucracy as his ideal
typical vanguard. Castells sees Silicon Valley as the vanguard of things to
come. But only history will eventually reveal whether the rest of the world
will converge into a variant of Silicon Valley, of Emilia Romagna, or poss-
ibly of Kabul. If Silicon Valley wins, Castells will have been correctly labelled
as our latter-day Weber.
There is, then, a solution to the problem of studying processes in trans-
formation without a theoretical anchor, a Leitmotif or, indeed, no solid
benchmark as referent. It consists in adopting the comparative method and
confronting extremes in the past with vanguards of the future, and in
assembling and scrutinizing as much data as is possible. The task, as always,
is to sift through the variance with the hope of identifying regularity. This
is the kind of activity that sociologists happen to be very good at. Indeed,
this is where our discipline may have an edge on those with strong theory.
The only lingering problem is whether most sociologists actually engage
themselves enough in this kind of methodological enterprise. Some re-
orientation of the sociological discipline may be needed if we want to invest
well in its future. Deep diachronic comparison assumes that the prac-
titioner knows some history. Becoming second-rate historians is clearly not
a sound objective. But do we know enough to allow valid deep historical
comparison? Are our students still being taught the workings of Golden Age
capitalism? Identifying promising vanguards assumes, in turn, more than a
supercial knowledge of other societies, economies or communities. How
many of our comparativists are really true comparativists in this sense of the
word? How do we assure that next-generation sociologists know enough
about the societies with which they need to contrast?
The kind of sociologist that will probably contribute little if anything to
the making of a bright sociological future is the kind that remains happily
glued to his or her own society and times. From the didactic point of view
we might therefore seriously consider a policy of not merely encouraging,
but actively requiring that coming sociologists never study just their own
society, but always in a comparative context. The capacity of sociology to
ask and answer big questions will be vastly enhanced when Americans study
Germany, when Germans study Spain, and when Spaniards study the USA.
If, indeed, Castells one day beats all those American sociologists in the great
race to become the Max Weber of our times, it may be because he is a
Spaniard working in the USA.
(Date accepted: August 1999) Gosta Esping-Andersen
Faculty of Sociology
University of Trento
Two societies, one sociology, and no theory 75
NOTES
76 Gosta Esping-Andersen
1. I am deeply indebted to Tom
Cusack, Peter Hall, Jose Maria Maravall,
John Myles, Enzo Rutigliano and John
Stephens for their generous help with this
article.
2. Giddens (1979) makes the distinc-
tion between social theory and theorizing
about society. The classics contribution
falls under the second heading.
3. Collins (1980) makes a fairly similar
argument
4. Perhaps I am too unfair about
Parsons attempt to build a unied theory,
a sociological equivalent to general equi-
librium theory in neo-classical economics.
Some say that its failure had to do with
Parsons selective fusion of Durkheim and
Weber at the expense of conict theory.
More problematic was, perhaps, its undy-
namic character and the banality that
resulted from its highly abstract skeleton.
5. Bell (1980) provides an informed
and clear presentation of this paradigm
shift in Economics.
6. Here, again, I exaggerate. Hard
science it may not be, but the efforts of
Homans (1950; 1961) to identify the uni-
versals of micro-social behaviour and, later,
of Coleman (1990) and others, to develop
a rational choice basis of social behaviour
indicate that not all sociologists are in
agreement with the American supermar-
ket model of their chosen discipline.
7. Indeed, it is somewhat embarrassing
that economists now seem more keenly
interested in the classical trade-offs than
are sociologists.
8. It is, however, encouraging that
economic sociology is enjoying a true
renaissance, as exemplied by the recently
published Handbook of Economic Sociology
(Smelser and Swedberg (eds) 1994).
9. Some might say that the Leitmotif
comes close to Giddens notion of theories
of society. I think not, since Leitmotifs do
not necessarily embody causal statements
or general hypotheses of how things hang
together, only that some phenomena do
hang together.
10. Much of current quantitative Soci-
ology is inexcusably guilty of mindless a-
historicism. Our journals are packed with
studies that control for the standard
package of variables, like bureaucracy,
state autonomy, class struggle, or social
democracy, apparently assuming that the
historical form of these is historically xed
and amenable to being measured today
the same way as always.
11. Adam Smith may very well be the
grandfather of neo-physiocratism. In The
Wealth of Nations productive employment
means manufacturing commodities of
lasting value. Services fail this acid test
because they perish the moment they are
made.
12. Eduard Heimann (1929) provides
the classical statement along these lines.
13. In the form of Schumpeters (1942)
representative democracy, and Lipsets
(1960) democratic class struggle.
14 The latter view is evident in the
recent work of Myles and Pierson (1999).
15. The difference between the three
alternatives is admittedly over-dramatized.
Those who adhere to an end-of-history
view logically believe that some historical
rupture has occurred. Also path depen-
dency and historical rupture are not auto-
matically mutually exclusive. For example,
advanced societies are replete with absolut-
ist and possibly even medieval practices.
Members of the House of Lords are not
elected and they still wear wigs.
16. See the review by Giddens in The
Times Higher Education Supplement (Decem-
ber 18, 1996) and, subsequently, Chris
Freemans review in The New Political
Economy.
17. It is not that easy to establish
whether one has got Castells work right
since it aims to present the grand holistic
picture and all the details in one fell
swoop; everything appears related to
everything, and all of it seems of equal rel-
evance. Hence, I am not sure I would be
able to re-tell the story to anyone else.
18. Here I cannot help but draw on my
own recent work (Esping-Andersen 1999)
which, in turn, was heavily inspired by Ger-
shuny (1978; 1988).
19. Connell (1997) argues that Durk-
heim and his French contemporaries got
their data on mechanical solidarities from
Frances colonization of the Maghreb.
20. Tilly (1984) provides an excellent
treatment of the methodological paralysis
that can come from this kind of compre-
hensive comparison.
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