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Believing in Groups: The Possibility of Local Sociology

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

James Joyce, Ulysses

At the heart of the writings of James Joyce, arguably the most influential novelist of modernity, are deep and granular depictions of his beloved city of Dublin. Joyce was a master of emphasizing how tiny communities provide a window into the human condition. His magnum opus, Ulysses, brims with a multiplicity of groups and connections. Along with its linguistic and literary fireworks, Joyce provides a map of social relations: the novel is a form of social cartography - a travelogue of intimate places. Dublin is the world writ small. As he wrote, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." Ulysses reveals Dublin's soul through the details of its scenes. Countries and cities, families, faculties, and factories arise from the particular.

In contrast to much sociological writing that focuses on those institutions and structures that stand above - and often apart from - groups and their members, we take inspiration from James Joyce and his focus on the local. A sociology that does not focus on groups is an inadequate and thin discipline. We address this weakness by developing an approach that we label "local sociology." As Eviatar Zerubavel (1997) emphasizes, people belong to "thought communities," but, simultaneously, they belong to action communities. Our vision for local sociology attends to these thought and action communities via a focus on group interaction.

Local sociology is based on the idea that sociology must include sociality. It is an oddity of the discipline that many forms of sociological analysis choose to avoid an emphasis on the social. By this, we mean that they ignore the ongoing interactions and group life that constitute lived experience. Our goal in this volume is to demonstrate how a focus on groups, their meanings, the social relations of members, and their intersections provides a valuable approach. This is not the only way to view the world, but it is a perspective that too often is marginalized when sociologists emphasize structure or personal agency.

In focusing on the local, we argue that group life provides a basis by which individuals fit into society and through which social structures shape action. Sociological analysis has been replete with debates about "micro" and "macro," but all too often these arguments miss the point. It is not simply that microsociology provides a foundation for macrosociology, or that macrosociology provides a foundation for microsociology, but that interacting groups are the hinge that connects them. Exploring how groups create social order is our topic. To understand how structures matter and how individuals navigate them, sociologists must watch and listen to groups and people gathering in local communities. We provide an approach that demonstrates how the meso-level of analysis informs both the macro- and micro-levels. This is where the action is.

In the pages that follow, we make the case for local sociology, hoping to expose those who emphasize individual actors or collective entities to the importance of communities of interaction. Of course, the pieces of our argument are not new. We have been developing this approach for decades. Further, this is an approach with a lengthy pedigree in sociology and that resonates with many sociological classics, even if it has never been the dominant model.

This text is a work of synthesis, a compact account of a level of analysis that treats interaction and culture as central. Although we present new material, we draw on research by Gary Alan Fine in his previous books, Tiny Publics: A Theory of Group Action and Culture (Fine 2012) and The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments (Fine 2021). While hoping for a wide audience, we write primarily for the committed graduate student or advanced undergraduate major who desires an overview of how to think about social order apart from assuming a dominant role of either the individual or the society, a theoretical approach that is distinct from cognitive hegemony or structural supremacy.

Beyond the "Macro" and the "Micro"

The discipline of sociology has long been split over the choice of which analytic level is most valuable, and, it must be admitted, justifications exist for each choice. People and structures will always constitute society, and we do not dismiss either. Sociologists, with their training and their preferences, study what they feel is crucial, and they do it well. As a discipline, we benefit from pluralist lenses, but each way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. Many sociologists argue that the field's core concerns how institutions, states, and global systems have effects, channeling and constraining personal options. In this vision, individuals and interaction are confined to the margins. Perhaps we might describe this as a social science that avoids the social. In contrast, others examine how persons respond, elevating a social psychology, a world of selves, buffeted by the institutional. These scholars focus on interpersonal relations, identity, and selves as they affect individuals, but at times they ignore what people do together and how those interactions matter. In a sense, they, too, avoid the social. Our task is to bring these scholars together on the grounds of the social without dismissing either the personal or the institutional.

These two groups of scholars have been labeled Macros and Micros. This division became so solidified that several decades ago some theorists demanded a "Micro-Macro Link" (Alexander et al. 1987), a bandage intended to bind a sociological wound. Individual action - what was described as agency - might, in this view, coexist with institutional structure. Consensus emerged that such a connection was necessary and essential, but its acceptance often rested on a pragmatic reality that the perspectives developed under a protective, if hypothetical, umbrella: a big tent sociology that would let scholars go their own way.

These alternate approaches miss a crucial point. Participation in groups is central to the shaping of identity. That we belong to local communities - and treasure them - provides a grounding that permits us to commit ourselves to building and preserving the world around us as experienced. From this, we argue that joint action is central to society, and that groups are the quintessential sites where people act together. Sociology should theorize this joint action as central to how society is possible. To appreciate the influences of structures and individuals is to recognize how they are connected. To move beyond the limits of the Micro-Macro meme, local sociology recognizes groups as essential for developing a meso-level of analysis that stands between the individual and larger structures (Turner 2005). This approach constitutes the nexus of a full sociology.

Treating the group as a central organizing principle claims that it is metaphorically both a crucible and a hinge. Local communities are crucibles in that much change and solidarity occur within bounded spaces. These spaces can generate heat and conflict. But they are also hinges in that the group provides a semi-autonomous and flexible means of joining micro and macro. "Crucible" and "hinge" are companion tropes that characterize local sociology. We emphasize the place of engagement (the crucible) and the linkage of levels of analysis (the hinge).

In focusing on groups and communities, local sociology values those methodologies that rely on keen vision, close listening, and precise description: these are our disciplinary birthright. Sociology is a field that thrives in place: in the kitchens, parks, taverns, and offices of Dublin, Dubai, Chicago, Chennai, Hong Kong, and Addis Ababa. And currently on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Tinder. Honoring local action, observations open windows of understanding. Accounts of what people do and say are inevitably limited in that they present a particular event to reveal more frequent occurrences. This constitutes sociological synecdoche, transforming anecdote into theory. The willingness to report what one witnessed relies on the claim that the particular can be generalized, revealing wider or deeper meanings. Seeing is believing - and persuading. Specifics stand for a panoply of similar events. If audiences judge the account as plausible or if they have had comparable experiences, they treat it as reflecting a widespread practice. Our approach to meso-level theorizing considers ethnographic observation especially amenable to the group-level analysis that justifies local sociology.

To treat the world as social space, we must recognize that groups - their cultures and their dynamic processes - shape who we are, how we behave, and what we believe. When groups change, voluntarily or through pressure, individuals are altered as well. In short, the communities with which we identify and people with whom we associate direct our practices, both those that are routine and those that are creative. We reside in a world of tiny publics, or, in the language of Alexis de Tocqueville, a crowd of minute associations.

One advantage of examining groups is the many...