The Structure of Contingency 1

Can we identify and theorize contingency as a property of processes and situations? Applied to social and historical events, contingency denotes a mode of causality characterized by its indeterminate character. Conjunctural causation and period effects lack the specificity required to identify a dis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American journal of sociology 2015-07, Vol.121 (1), p.64-125
Main Author: Ermakoff, Ivan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abolition
Aerospace engineering
Aristocracy
Causality
Causation
Parliaments
Political parties
Political protests
Social interaction
Spacecraft launching
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Summary:Can we identify and theorize contingency as a property of processes and situations? Applied to social and historical events, contingency denotes a mode of causality characterized by its indeterminate character. Conjunctural causation and period effects lack the specificity required to identify a distinctive class of processes. References to chance happenings offer no clue to analyze endogenous disruptions. Focusing on breaks in patterns of social relations and the role played by individual agency, the author distinguishes four types of impact—pyramidal, pivotal, sequential, and epistemic—and investigates how these relate to the possibility of indeterminacy through an Event Structure Analysis of the night of August 4, 1789, in Versailles. This empirical foray underscores the significance of junctures that are indeterminate with respect to their collective outcomes. The article grounds analytically this class of conjunctures with the concept of mutual uncertainty, gauges the phenomenal scope of this contingency in terms of action domains and group types, contrasts it with the notion of chance events, and draws its implications for the study of social and historical change.
ISSN:0002-9602
1537-5390
DOI:10.1086/682026