Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology

Sociologists have long been interested in understanding the emergence of new social kinds. We argue that sociologists’ formation stories have been mischaracterized as noncausal, descriptive, or interpretive. Traditional “forcing-cause” accounts describe regularized relations between fixed entities with specific properties. The three dominant approaches to causality—variable causality, treatments and manipulations, and mechanisms—all refer to forcing causes. But formation stories do not fit the forcing-causes framework because accounts of formation violate the assumptions that ground forcing-cause accounts and instead emphasize eventfulness, assemblage, and self-representation. Yet these accounts are, we argue, fundamentally causal. In particular, formation stories provide the historical, empirical boundaries for the functioning of forcing-cause accounts. We catalog the breadth of formation stories in sociology and use examples from diverse literatures to highlight how thinking of formation stories as causal accounts can improve our understanding of the relationship of history and culture to causal analysis.