1996 Hedstrom Swedberg Social Mechanisms

Social Mechanisms
Author(s): Peter Hedstrm and Richard Swedberg

Source: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1996), pp. 281-308
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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ACTA SOCIOLOGICA
Social Mechanisms
Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg
Stockholm University
In this article it is argued that the search for 'social mechanisms' is of
crucial importance for the development of sociological theory. With this
concept - which is occasionally used in the sociological literature but
has received little systematic attention - attention is called to an
intermediary level of analysis in-between pure description and storytelling, on the one hand, and universal social laws, on the other. While
the search for universal laws and grand theory has a great deal of
appeal, we do not believe that this type of theorizing is likely to foster
the development of a useful body of explanatory theory. Drawing on the
heritage of Robert Merton and James Coleman, it is argued that the
essential aim of sociological theorizing should be to develop fine-grained
middle-range theories that clearly explicate the social mechanisms that
produce observed relationships between explanans and explanandum.
We provide a tentative typology of social mechanisms, and we illustrate
our argument by showing that three well-known theories in sociology the self-fulfilling prophecy (Robert Merton), network diffusion (James
Coleman), and threshold-based behavior (Mark Granovetter) - all are
founded upon the same social mechanism.
Peter Hedstrdm and Richard Swedberg, Department of Sociology,
Stockholm University, S-10691 Stockholm, Sweden
C)Scandinavian Sociological Association 1996
1. Introduction
Even though the concept of 'social mechanisms' is occasionally used in the
sociological literature, it has received little systematic attention. Our main
ambition with this article is therefore to examine more closely the notion of
mechanisms, in an attempt to evaluate its potential role in explanatory
sociological theory. The main message of the article is that further advances
of sociological theory call for explanations that systematically seek to
explicate the generative mechanisms that produce observed associations
between events.
It might appear obvious that every sociological theory, worthy of its
name, should be explanatory. But upon closer examination, it turns out that
what often goes under the rubric of general sociological theory, should more
properly be viewed as conceptual or sensitizing schemes, and not as
explanations proper. Much of Anthony Giddens's work, for example,
282 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996
VOLUME 39
exemplifies this tendency (e.g. Turner 1986; cf. Giddens 1987). And according
to Jeffrey Alexander, writing in Handbook of Sociology, sociology should pay
less attention to 'explanation' and more to 'discourse' (Alexander
1988:78-81). In an insightful article by someone who has devoted most of
his academic career to general social theory, Goran Therborn (1991:178)
notes: 'Absent in or marginal to currently prevailing general sociological
theorizing is any ambition to explain. Little interest can be found in
contributing to answering questions like: Why do these people act in this
way? Why does that social order change in that way?' The type of
mechanism-based theorizing advocated here focuses exactly on these types
of why-questions.
The focus on mechanisms advocated here should not be confused with a
purely descriptive sociology that seeks to account for the unique chain of
events that led from one situation or event to another. All proper
explanations explain the particular by the general, and as will be
demonstrated below, there are general types of mechanisms, found in a
range of different social settings, that operate according to the same logical
principles. Our vision of an explanatory sociology, contains an ensemble of
such fundamental mechanisms that can be used for explanatory purposes in
a wide range of social situations.
Given the present, practically non-existent state of serious discussion of
the notion of mechanism in sociology, we approach our task in a somewhat
roundabout way.' First, we briefly relate Robert Merton's discussion of the
role of explanatory mechanisms in middle-range theorizing, and thereafter
we consider two recent discussions of explanatory mechanisms and their role
in the social sciences, by Jon Elster and Arthur Stinchcombe. This is followed
by brief discussions of a number of topics that we believe need to be clarified
and elaborated. These include the interdisciplinary nature of the concept of
mechanism; the role of mechanisms in sociological explanations; and a
critique of a variable-centered type of theorizing that is inherent in the
approach. Thereafter we employ the work of Merton (1968) on the selffulfilling prophecy, of Coleman et al. (1966) on the diffusion of a new drug,
and of Granovetter (1978) on collective behavior, in order to illustrate our
notion of a general social mechanism, namely that the same mechanism often
underlies different phenomena and different sociological theories. The article
ends with a brief typology of such social mechanisms.
2. The use of mechanisms in sociology
Among the classics the term 'mechanism' is rarely used,2 even if the idea
often is present.3 An explicit use of the concept of 'mechanism' does not seem
to have appeared in sociology until after World War II. The most suggestive
discussion of the concept is in our opinion to be found in the writings of
Robert Merton, who brought together the idea of mechanism with that of
middle-range theorizing (Merton 1967). Merton firmly rejected all attempts
to develop general systems of sociological theory and instead advocated that
sociological theory should deal with 'social mechanisms'.4 The point was to
locate a middle ground between social laws and description, Merton said, and
'mechanisms' constitute such a middle ground.
Social Mechanisms 283
Merton defined social mechanisms as 'social processes having designated

consequences for designated parts of the social structure', and argued that it
was the main task of sociology to 'identify' mechanisms and to establish
under which conditions they 'come into being', 'fail to operate' and so on
(Merton 1968:43-44). Merton briefly discussed concrete mechanisms that
determine reference groups, create dissonance, and articulate role-sets,5 but
the most important contribution of his essay, in our opinion, was his view of
mechanisms as elementary building blocks of middle-range theories.6
During the last few decades the emphasis on mechanisms that had
played such a vital role in Columbia Sociology has largely been pushed aside
by a resurgence of general social theories, on the one hand, and of a variablecentered mode of theorizing, on the other. A few successful attempts to
develop sociological theory founded upon the notion of explanatory mechanisms can be found in the literature, but these represent the exception rather
than the rule. Before discussing these efforts, however, we will outline part of
the recent meta-theoretical discussion on the role of explanatory mechanisms
in social theory. This discussion has been dominated by Jon Elster, though
Arthur Stinchcombe has also made an important contribution.7
3. Elster and Stinchcombe on the use of mechanisms in social science

Jon Elster's work has for some time been infused with a strong sense that it
is imperative to use the notion of mechanism in the social sciences. Through
mechanisms, Elster argues, it will be possible to bypass the old opposition
between laws and description in the social sciences and to focus research on
an intermediary and much more flexible level. A view that Elster attributes
to French historian Paul Veyne is probably also held by himself: 'progress in
the social sciences consists of knowledge of ever-more mechanisms rather
than ever-better theories' (Elster 1989:173).
In his book Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989), Elster gives the
most complete account of what he means by this concept. He enumerates five

things that a mechanism is not, and when taken together, these can be said
to add up to a negative definition of the concept. They are the following:
* First, causal explanations must be distinguished from true causal
statements. To cite the cause is not enough: the causal mechanism must
also be provided, or at least suggested;
* Second, causal explanations must be distinguished from assertions about
correlations;
* Third, causal explanations must be distinguished from assertions about
necessitation;
* Fourth, causal explanations must be distinguished from story-telling; and
* Finally, causal explanations must be distinguished from predictions.
Sometimes we can explain without being able to predict, and sometimes
predict without being able to explain. (Elster 1989:4-8)
In Nuts and Bolts, as well as in other works, Elster gives a number of
concrete examples of mechanisms, from the natural and the social sciences.
As an example of a 'psychological mechanism', he mentions the example of
VOLUME 39
'sour grapes' or the fact that one often ceases to desire what one cannot get.
There also exists an opposite tendency: 'forbidden fruits', which refers to a
situation where one desires what one cannot get. Two other such opposing
'mechanisms', mentioned by Elster, are 'the bandwagon effect' and 'the
underdog effect' (Elster 1993:13-15).8
That Elster's work on mechanisms is still at an early and evolving stage
is, however, also clear. One indication of this is that he has, up until now,
failed to give a formal definition of what constitutes a mechanism (see
especially Elster 1989:3-10; 1993:2-3).9 Another is that he has changed his
opinion of what characterizes a mechanism in general. While in Nuts and
Bolts Elster says that mechanisms imply 'explanations of ever finer grain', in
a later work he maintains that mechanisms, as opposed to laws, only have
limited generality (Elster 1989:7; cf. Elster 1991:7-8).
Like Elster, Stinchcombe argues that 'we do not have a suffilciently
supple armory of mechanisms for making social science theory', and the main
purpose of his contribution to the current discussion of mechanisms is to help
remedy this situation (Stinchcombe 1993:24). It is important to note,
however, that Stinchcombe advocates a much more restrictive definition of
mechanisms than Elster:
Mechanisms in a theory are defined here as bits of theory about entities at a
different level (e.g. individuals) than the main entities being theorized about
(e.g. groups), which serve to make the higher-level theory more supple, more
accurate, or more general. (Stinchcombe 1991:367)
Examples that Stinchcombe uses to illustrate his definition include
maximizing individuals (on the lower level) who create a market through
their actions (on the higher level); and molecules (on the lower level) that
under certain conditions turn into gas (on the higher level).
Unlike Elster, Stinchcombe seems mostly concerned with establishing
what constitutes a purely sociological mechanism. While in economics, as
well as in much of sociology, the analysis often starts with individuals and
ends up with outcomes on a group level, there also exists another possibility
for sociologists, according to Stinchcombe. This is to view a situation as a
mechanism ('situational mechanism'; Stinchcombe 1993:28-30). Stinchcombe
refers at this point of his argument to Erving Goffman's definition of a
'situation', where the general idea is that people monitor one another in
public places and adjust their behavior to the situation at large.10
The works of Elster and Stinchcombe raise a number of questions that
need to be examined more closely in order to arrive at a useful and
sufficiently precise definition of a 'social mechanism'. One such question, to
be discussed in the next section, is how the notion of mechanisms has been
used in other sciences, from physics to economics. We can obviously only
provide a first and incomplete sketch of what is a huge and difficult topic.
Nonetheless, one interesting aspect of the notion of mechanisms is exactly its
interdisciplinary nature and the prospect that sociology might be able to
incorporate certain ideas about or types of mechanisms from the other
sciences.
4. The concept of mechanism as used in other sciences

In physics the word 'mechanism' is rarely used. One important reason for
this is of a historical or accidental nature and has to do with the fact that in
physics the word 'mechanism' is connected to the scientific world view of the
17th century (e.g. Dijksterhuis 1986). It should also be remembered that in
the 19th century thermodynamics popularized the notion of a system, which
is broader than that of 'mechanism/machine'and allows the analyst to choose
the environment of the system according to the purpose of the study. The
attempt to conceptualize all phenomena according to the elementary laws of
mechanics became impossible after the emergence of field physics in the
middle of the 19th century. From then on, the word 'mechanism' has been
used sparingly in modem physics.
The 17th century notion of mechanism spread from physics and
astronomy to a number of sciences - such as chemistry and biology where the term 'mechanism' is still used, though with different meanings.
The Cartesian notion that organisms can be conceptualized as machines
turned out to be very useful and became central to a new biological
philosophy called 'mechanism', which is usually contrasted to that of
'vitalism' or the doctrine that life cannot be reduced to mechanics (e.g.
Beckner 1967). In the 19th centurlTthe term mechanism was disconnected
from the metaphor of the machine' and instead became linked to that of the
system. 12
The concept of 'law' is only used occasionally in the biological sciences typically in connection with genetics and on the understanding that they are
never without exceptions. Accordingto Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel
Prize in 1962 for his discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, 20th
century biologists prefer to think in terms of'mechanisms' and not 'laws'. The
reason for this is that the notion of 'laws' is generally reserved for physics,
which is the only science that can produce explanations based upon powerful
and often counterintuitive laws with no significant exceptions. 'What is
found in biology is mechanisms, mechanisms built with chemical components
and that are often modified by other, later, mechanisms added to the earlier
ones' (Crick 1989:138).
In the social sciences, the prevalence of explicitly stated mechanismbased explanations varies widely between the disciplines. These types of
explanations are rarely used in history, sometimes in sociology, and quite
frequently in economics and psychology. Particularly in cognitive psychology,
the notion of mechanism plays a key role. The basic approach here is one of
'information-processing', where the cognitive process is divided up into
different stages with special 'mechanisms'. To cite a well-known work, 'The
information-processing approach [in cognitive psychology] assumes that
perception and learning can be analyzed into a series of stages during which
particular components ('mechanisms') perform certain transformations or
recoding of the information coming into them' (Bower 1975:33).
Economists often see themselves as thinking in terms of mechanisms, as
opposed to sociologists and historians, who are believed to be more interested
in institutions (e.g., Schumpeter 1989:293). The one mechanism that
economists relate most of their analyses to - their master mechanism, soto-speak - is clearly the market, conceptualized according to marginal utility
VOLUME 39
theory. That the market can be seen as a 'mechanism' goes back to the 18th
century, when economics (via e.g. Adam Smith) became influenced by the
Newtonian-Cartesian
worldview; and it has become so self-evident to
contemporary economists that the market is a mechanism, that they often
use the terms 'market' and 'market mechanism' synonymously.
The basic approach in economics, to repeat, is to analyze a phenomenon
by relating it in some manner to the market mechanism. Much of
neoclassical economics in the 20th century can be understood as an attempt
to explain ever more aspects of the economic process through the mechanism
of the market: production as well as consumption and distribution.
Economists' talent for thinking in terms of mechanisms, however, often
becomes clear to non-economists only when they go beyond the traditional
boundaries of economics. Examples of this can be found in Hirschman's Exit
and Voice (1970)13 as well as in much of Thomas Schelling's work (e.g. 1978).
As economists gradually have expanded the boundaries of their
discipline to include a range of topics traditionally considered the domain
of sociologists, such as the family and organizations, the difference between
the disciplines to an increasing extent have come to concern the types of
theories being used. One such difference, but by no means the only one,
centers exactly on the importance attributed to explanatory mechanisms.
Comparing labor market sociology with labor economics, Aage S0rensen has
noted that most labor market sociologists think of theory
as having to do with which variables should be included in the equations and
how these variables relate to other variables - and not as something which is
about which mechanisms produce the observed associations in the variables.
This is where there is a huge difference between sociological research and
economic research in this area; and the difference is very much to the
disadvantage of the sociologist. (S0rensen 1990:308)
5. The explanatory importance of social mechanisms

The core argument of this article is that the identification and analysis of
social mechanisms is of great importance for the progress of the sociological
enterprise. But what exactly is a mechanism and why should we focus on
mechanisms rather than on statistical associations or other forms of
relationships between the entities of interest?
It is far from trivial to provide a precise, yet sufficiently general
definition of a social mechanism that captures the essence of the concept. As
suggested by philosopher of science Rom Harr6 (1970), one key defining
characteristic of an explanatory mechanism is the function it performs in an
explanatory account. When we have observed a systematic relationship
between two entities, say I and 0, in order to explain the relationship
between them we search for a mechanism, M, which is such that on the
occurrence of the cause or input, I, it generates the effect or outcome, 0. The
search for mechanisms means that we are not satisfied with merely
establishing systematic covariation between variables or events; a satisfactory explanation requires that we are also able to specify the social 'cogs and
wheels' (Elster 1989:3) that have brought the relationship into existence.
This generative view of causal explanations differs in important respects

from the classic covering-law model as advocated by Carl Hempel and his
followers (see Hempel 1942, 1962). According to Hempel, an explanation of
an event entails subsuming the event under a general law. A satisfactory
explanation therefore must specify the general covering law and the
conditions which make the law applicable in the specific case.14 According
to Hempel, deterministic laws are quite unlikely in the social and the
historical sciences. The general 'laws' that can be invoked in the social
sciences are instead of a probabilistic nature, i.e., they state that the
occurrence of a particular event will come about with such and such
probability if certain specified conditions are at hand.
Since this form of explanation simply entails applying a general law to a
specific situation, the insights offered by the exercise are directly proportional to the depth and robustness of the 'probabilisticlaw'. If this law is only
a statistical association, which is the norm in the social and historical
sciences according to Hempel, the specific explanation will offer no more
insights than the law itself and will usually only suggest that a relationship
is likely to exist, but it will give no clue whatsoever as to why this is likely to
be the case. Covering-law explanations in the social sciences therefore
normally are 'black-box'explanations and they do not attempt to reveal any
mechanisms that might have generated the observed relationships. We are
inclined to agree with von Wright's position that it is better 'not to say that
the inductive-probabilisticmodel [of Hempel] explains what happens, but to
say only that it justifies certain expectations and predictions' (von Wright
1971:14).15
The main reason for advocating explanations that directly refer to
generative mechanisms is, in our opinion, that they provide (or encourage)
deeper, more direct, and more fine-grained
explanations.
The search for
generative mechanisms consequently helps us distinguish between genuine

causality and coincidental association, and it increases the understanding of
why we observe what we observe.
The role that the search for mechanisms plays in distinguishing between
spurious and real associations can be illustrated by the recent controversy
surrounding possible health effects of electromagnetic fields. Some epidemiological studies have found an empirical association between exposure to
electromagnetic fields and childhood leukemia (see Feychting & Ahlbom
1993). However, the weight of these empirical results is severely reduced by
the fact there exists no known biological mechanism that can explain how
low-frequency magnetic fields could possibly induce cancer (ORAU 1992).
According to Bennett (1994), it is furthermore extremely unlikely that a
mechanism will ever be found, because such a mechanism would have to
violate well-established physical principles. The lack of a plausible mechanism increases the likelihood that the weak and rather unsystematic
empirical evidence reported in this epidemiologicalliterature, simply reflects
unmeasured confounding factors rather than a genuine causal relationship
(Hedstrom 1994a).
The distinction between black-box explanations and explanations that
refer to explicit and generative mechanisms can be illustrated in more
general terms with the following example that is adopted from the work of
VOLUME 39
philosopher of science and

have observed a systematic
events or variables, I and
variables are linked to one
L1
physicist Mario Bunge (1967). Assume that we

(non-random) relationship between two types of
0. The way in which the two sets of events or
another is expressed with the mechanism, M:
WVhatcharacterizes a black-box explanation is that the link between input

and output, or between explanans and explanandum, is assumed to be devoid
of structure or, at least, whatever structure there may be, is considered to be
of no inherent interest (perhaps because it cannot be observed). In a blackbox explanation, Bunge maintains, the 'mechanism' linking input and output
is a purely syntactical link between a column of values for the input, I, and a
column of values for the output, 0.
In sociology, the most systematized form of black-box explanation can be
found in the so-called causal modeling approach (see Duncan 1975), which
will be discussed more fully in the next section. In the causal-modeling
tradition, the explanatory 'mechanism' simply is a regression coefficient
linking I and 0, and this regression coefficient (if the model includes all
relevant variables) is supposed to describe the causal influence of I upon 0.
One important difference between black-box explanations and the type
of explanation advocated here concerns the information content of the
proposed mechanism. Since the alleged 'mechanism' in a black-box explanation (e.g. a regression coefficient) exclusively is derived from I and 0, it
contains no information that is not already contained in the events or
variables themselves. The approach advocated here does not rest with
describing the form of the relationship between the entities of interest but
addresses a further and deeper problem: how, i.e. through what process, was
the relationship actually brought about?16
Consider the example of poisoning (Bunge 1967). It would be possible to
estimate the parameters of an equation describing the relationship between
the intake of, say, strychnine and the risk of dying. If the model had the
correct functional form, we might even have established a 'covering law' of
the dose-response relationship which could be used in subsequent explanations of other occurrences of strychnine intake. But as long as we have not
specified the mechanisms that link strychnine intake to morbidity and
mortality, the explanation is clearly wanting. By pointing to how strychnine
inhibits the respiratory centers of the brain and to the biochemical processes
responsible for this paralysis, we provide a mechanism that allows us not
only to describe what is likely to happen, but also to explain why it is likely to
happen.
A comparison of behaviorist and rational-choice accounts of individual
behavior illustrates the same basic point. Explanations in the behaviorist
tradition, such as that represented in sociology by the work of George Homans,
resemble what we have referred to above as black-box explanations; their aim
is to arrive at general propositions relating stimuli to response without
invoking any (unobserved) generative mechanism that might have brought
about the relationship. Homans's so-called 'success proposition' is a representative case in point: 'For all actions taken by persons, the more often a
particular action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to

perform the action' (Homans 1974:16). Rational-choice theory does not rest
with observing and describingthe formofthe relationship between reward and
behavior, but tries to explain precisely those associations which a behaviorist
like Homans is content with only establishing. The rational-choiceexplanation
postulates the existence of a more supple generative mechanism built upon
hypothetical constructs such as preferences and intentions (see Hedstr6m,
forthcoming). By spelling out a detailed mechanism linking individual
behavior and rewards, the rational-choice theory provides a deeper and more
fine-grained explanation than behaviorist theory.
One line of sociologicalresearch that illustrates the shortcomingsof blackbox explanations is research on class and its individual correlates. In
empirically oriented sociology, individuals' class-belonging has become a
popular explanation for various individual-level phenomena such as income
(e.g. Kalleberg & Berg 1987) and health (e.g. Townsend & Davidson 1982). The
concept of class might be useful for descriptive purposes where it serves as a
shorthand for various aspects of individuals' socio-economicliving conditions,
and research in these traditions has producedinformative empirical research
describing the living conditions of different 'classes'. Whether the empirical
exercise of relating variables describing class and income or class and health
also has an explanatory value - in the deeper sense of saying something about
why we observe what we observe - is much more doubtful.
Despite the common sociological rhetoric of describing class as a
'determinant' of various individual traits and behaviors, class in and of
itself obviously cannot influence an individual's income or health. A 'class'
cannot be a causal agent because it is nothing but a constructed aggregation
of occupational titles. A statistical association between 'class' and income, or
'class' and health, tells us that individuals from certain 'classes' have lower
incomes or worse health than others, but it says nothing about why this is
the case. To answer such questions it is necessary to introduce and explicate
the generative mechanisms that might have produced the observed
differences in average income or health between the occupational groups
that the researchers have assigned to different 'classes'. A statistical 'effect'
of a class-variable in contexts like these is essentially an indicator of our
inability properly to specify the underlying explanatory mechanisms. The
worse we do in specifying and incorporating the actual generative
mechanisms into the statistical model, the stronger the 'effect' of the classvariable will appear to be.
It is important to note that both the biochemical mechanism and the
rational-choice mechanism referred to above are mechanisms of some
generality, and it is this generality that gives them their explanatory
power. Simply making up an ad hoc story tailored to a specific case does not
constitute an acceptable sociological explanation. Even moderately talented
journalists are able to make up these sorts of ad hoc stories, and, as Arthur
Stinchcombe once noted, 'a student [of sociology] who has difficulty thinking
of at least three sensible explanations for any correlation that he is really
interested in should probably choose another profession' (Stinchcombe
1968:13). Serious, non-commonsensical, sociological explanations require
mechanisms of some generality.
VOLUME 39
Generative explanations usually invoke some form of 'causal agent'

(Bhaskar 1978) or 'causal power' (Harre 1970), which is assumed to have
generated the relationship between the entities being analyzed. It is by
explicitly referring to these causal agents that the relationship is made
intelligible. In the natural sciences, causal agents come in a variety of forms
such as organic reactions in chemistry and natural selection in biology. In
sociology, however, the elementary 'causal agents' are always individual
actors, and intelligible social mechanisms should, in our opinion, always
include explicit references to the causes and consequences of their actions.17
This principle of methodological individualism is motivated by the same core
idea as is advocated throughout this article: understanding is obtained or
enhanced by making explicit the underlying generative mechanisms that
link one state or event to another, and in the social sciences actions
constitute this link.
It is important to note that explanatory mechanisms, in the natural as
well as in the social sciences, often are unobserved or only observable in their
effects. Weinberg (1993) emphasizes the important role that unobserved
entities have played in physics. For example, the existence of both the
electron and the neutrino was conjectured and their roles in various physical
processes were usefully theorized, long before they actually were observed.
Similarly, the social sciences routinely postulate the existence of unobserved
explanatory mechanisms. Assumptions of intentions, discounting, and
preferences have proven extremely useful for the analysis of individual
action even though they never can be observed. Mechanisms thus are
theoretical constructs that provide hypothetical links between observable
events. In many situations the operation of a postulated mechanism can only
be tested by logically deriving the effects that should be observed if the
mechanism was operating as assumed in the theory, and then comparing
these theoretical expectations with what actually is being observed.
Elster (1989) appears to have a slightly different view of the role of
unobserved mechanisms in scientific explanations. He argues that mechanisms should provide an account of what happened as it actually happened,
and not as it might have happened. No one would dispute the correctness of
this proposition if it were possible to realize, but accounting for something 'as
it actually happens' is always problematic. As argued by Bunge (1967),
simply describing all the events, microscopic and macroscopic, that take
place in a room during one second would - if it were technically possible take centuries. Thus, when describing 'what happened', we can never cite all
events immediately preceding the event to be explained (not to mention more
distant events), but we must be highly selective in what events we chose to
include in our description of what 'actually happened' (see also Weber 1949).
Hence, mechanisms as well as general theories can refer only to a -subset of
the potentially important events, and they can therefore only give plausible
accounts of what happened as it could have happened.18
The belief in explanations that provide accounts of what happens as it
actually happens has pervaded the sociological literature for decades and has
produced an abundance of detailed descriptive narratives, but few explanatory mechanisms of any generality. It is through abstractions and analytical
accentuation, however, that general mechanisms are made visible. But these

*.*. . ..
......
abstractions also distort by their nature the descriptive account of what

actually happened, by accentuating certain aspects of the situation and
ignoring others. Francis Crick's characterization of the process through
which good biological theories are arrived at is, in our opinion, equally valid
for the social sciences: 'To produce a really good biological theory one must
try to see through the clutter producedby evolution to the basic mechanisms
lying beneath them' (Crick 1989:138; see also Van Parijs 1981). And as Rom
Harre has argued, making hypothetical models of unknown mechanisms is
usually what moves a scientific field forward:
Generallyspeaking, making models for unknown mechanisms is the creative
processin science,by which potentialadvancesare initiated, while the making
of models of known things and processes has, generally speaking, a more
heuristic value. (Harre 1970:40)
6. Variables versus social mechanisms

The widespread use and knowledge of survey analysis and the statistical
techniques needed for analyzing such data have clearly improved the ability
of sociologists to describe social conditions and to test sociological theories.
But the increasing use of these techniques has also fostered the development
of a variable-centered type of theorizing that pays only scant attention to
explanatory mechanisms. Coleman (1986) has aptly described this type of
sociology as a form of 'individualistic behaviorism'. The guiding principle
behind this type of theorizing - usually referred to as 'causal-modeling'- is
the notion that individual behavior can and should be explained by various
individual and environmental 'determinants', and the purpose of the analysis
is to estimate the causal influence of the various variables representing these
determinants.19
Accordingto Coleman, this emphasis on 'causal' explanations of behavior

represented a considerable change from the type of explanatory account used
in the earlier tradition of community studies: 'One way of describing this
change is to say that statistical association between variables has largely
replaced meaningful connection between events as the basic tool of
description and analysis' (Coleman 1986:1327-1328). In the causal-modeling
tradition, variables and not actors do the acting (Abbott 1992).2o

The tension between a variable-centered causal approach to sociological
theorizing and a generative view emphasizing the importance of social
mechanisms came to the fore in an exchange between Robert Hauser and
Raymond Boudon in the mid-1970s. The context of this exchange was a
review by Hauser of Boudon's (1974) book on education and inequality. In
this book Boudon developed a theoretical model which he hoped would make
intelligible a number of apparent paradoxes reported by empirical research
on social mobility.21Hauser suggested numerous changes to Boudon's model,
but the main message of his article was a strong disbelief in the very idea
that had motivated Boudon to write the book, i.e., that an important
distinction should be made between statistical and theoretical models, and
that theoretical models are needed to explain the results of an empirical
analysis:
VOLUME 39
Boudon dismisses several standard representations of the mobility process as

being 'basically statistical'. I can only guess what this means - perhaps that
they are rich in formal properties or that sampling distributions of their
parameters are known. Neither of these properties strikes me as undesirable,
and these models do have coherent and intuitively meaningful interpretations
relative to the mobility process. (Hauser 1976:923)
Boudon responded by noting that descriptive models of the sort advocated by
Hauser are undoubtedly useful for many purposes, but that their usefulness
for causal analysis is considerably more restricted than assumed by Hauser.
According to Boudon, understanding normally is achieved not by the means
of descriptive models such as path-models, but through theoretical models
which show the logic of the process being analyzed. In order to understand
this logic, Boudon argued 'we must go beyond the statistical relationships to
explore the generative mechanism responsible for them' (Boudon 1976:117).
One way of describing the difference between Boudon and Hauser is
through the distinction between descriptive and structural models. Hauser,
being one of the leading figures in the causal-modeling tradition, had a
strong commitment to the idea that it is possible to estimate true structural
models on the basis of non-experimental data, i.e., models expressing
invariant causal relationships between different sociological and demographic variables. Boudon, on the other hand, viewed regression models as
purely descriptive and therefore in need of explanation. As Boudon expressed
it in a different context,
causal analysis does not explain the [statistical] chart. It simply summarizes it.
Understanding a statistical structure means in many cases building a
generating theory or model . . . that includes the observed empirical structure
as one of its consequences. (Boudon 1979:51-52)
The position taken by Hauser and others in the causal modeling tradition
has also been challenged by sociologists such as Mark Granovetter, who has
argued that these sorts of correlational analyses can be useful in ruling out
theories and arguments previously taken seriously, but that they are
wanting because they cannot tell 'by which mechanisms these correlations
have their effects, or what broader historical and socio-economic forces have
set these mechanisms in motion' (Granovetter 1982:259-260).
The statistician David Freedman (1991, 1992a, 1992b) has discussed the
statistical foundations of the causal modeling approach in some detail.
According to Freedman, the belief of some social scientists in the possibility
of estimating true structural models is both naive and counterproductive.
The basic tools of causal modelers such as path analysis and its latent
variable counterparts, Freedman argues, are based upon a network of highly
restrictive stochastic assumptions that rarely, if ever, are fulfilled. The basic
thrust of Freedman's argument is that social scientists need to think more
about underlying social processes, and they also need to look more closely at
data without the distorting lens of conventional and, according to Freedman,
largely irrelevant stochastic models: 'In my opinion, the confusion between
descriptive and structural models pervades the social-science scholarly
literature of the past 20 years, and has distorted the research agenda of a
generation' (Freedman 1992b: 123). According to Freedman, investing even
more time and intellectual energy in trying to estimate non-existing

parameters would not be a particularly worthwhile activity. At best, these
types of statistical models can provide compact descriptive summaries of the
data - but they cannot in themselves provide causal explanations.22
The epidemiological research tradition has produced some important
and duly celebrated examples of non-experimental empirical research
leading to the identification of genuine causal mechanisms. Snow's research
which suggested that cholera was a water-borne disease, and Doll's research
on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer are perhaps the most
notable examples (see Doll & Peto 1981; Hamlin 1990). But these success
stories appear to be the exceptions that probe the rule (and Freedman no
doubt would attribute part of their success to the fact that they did not use
structural equation models). Despite some 30 years of causal modeling
carried out by some of the most gifted sociologists of this generation, no
similar findings have been reported in the sociological literature. Given this
paucity of results, it might be time for causal modelers to contemplate the
implications of David Freedman's (1992b) advice that causal inferences
should always ride on the strength of the argument, and not on 'the magic of
least squares'.23
So where does this leave us? We do not wish to suggest that quantitative
empirical research is of minor importance for the sociological enterprise.
Quite the contrary: Quantitative research is essential both for descriptive
purposes and for testing sociological theories. We do, however, believe that
many sociologists have had all too much faith in statistical analysis as a tool
for generating theories, and that the belief in an isomorphism between
statistical and theoretical models, which appears to be an integral feature of
the causal modeling approach,has hampered the development of sociological
theories built upon concrete explanatory mechanisms.
Over the past few years, one can discern a movement away from the
'hard core' position represented by Hauser. Nevertheless, the way in which
quantitative sociologists still allocate their time and intellectual energy
between statistical and theoretical modeling reveals a strong preference for
description and testing of hypotheses formulated by others. 4 As suggested
by Stinchcombe (1993:27-28), sociologists in the multivariate modeling
tradition still 'make only rhetorical use of the language of mechanisms' and
they rarely show any serious intellectual commitment to developing the
theoretical foundation of the discipline themselves.
7. Social mechanisms: some selected examples
In order to concretize the idea of general social mechanisms underlying a
range of different social processes, we briefly examine three well-known
theories in sociology - the self-fulfilling prophecy (Robert Merton), network
diffusion (James Coleman), and threshold-based behavior (Mark Granovetter) - and we suggest that all are founded upon the same basic beliefformation mechanism.
The self-fulfilling prophecy is perhaps the most famous of all mechanisms-based theories in sociology and was formulated in 1948 by Robert
Merton in a seminal article (Merton [1948] 1968). The basic idea is that an
VOLUME 39
initially false definition of a situation evokes behavior that eventually makes

the false conception come true. The key example that Merton uses to
illustrate his argument is a run on a bank. If a rumor of insolvency somehow
gets started, some depositors will withdraw their savings. Their withdrawal
will strengthen the belief in the rumor, partly because the withdrawals
actually may hurt the financial standing of the bank, but more importantly
because the act of withdrawal in itself signals to others that something
indeed might be wrong with the bank. This produces even more withdrawals,
which further reduces the trust in the bank, and so on. Because of the
operation of this mechanism, even an initially sound bank may go bankrupt
if enough depositors withdraw their money in the (initially) false belief that
the bank is insolvent.
The study of network diffusion processes is an important area of
sociological research (cf. Burt 1987; Marsden & Podolny 1990; Strang &
Tuma 1993; Hedstrom 1994b). To a considerable extent this research is
inspired by Coleman, Katz & Menzel's classic study of the diffusion of a new
drug (see Coleman, Katz & Menzel 1957, 1966). Their main finding was that
the physicians' positions in various professional networks influenced the
diffusion process, particularly during the period immediately after the new
drug had been introduced on the market. Their explanation for this finding is
reminiscent of Merton's argument about the self-fulfilling prophecy:
Why should these sociometric ties to colleagues who have used the drug be
influential during the first months of the drug's availability, but not later? One
possible answer lies in the greater uncertainty about the drug that must have
prevailed when it was new . . . We know from work in the tradition of Sherif
that it is precisely in situations which are objectively unclear that social
validation of judgments becomes most important. More generally, this
explanation implies that a doctor will be influenced more by what his
colleagues say and do in uncertain situations, whenever and wherever they
may occur, than in clear-cut situations. (Coleman, Katz & Menzel 1957:
268-269)
The core of their argument is consequently that networks are important
because information about innovations, in this case a new drug, diffuse
through them, and that an individual's propensity to adopt the innovation is
influenced by what others do, particularly when there is a great deal of
uncertainty about the true value of the innovation.
Our final example is Granovetter's threshold theory of collective
behavior (see Granovetter 1978; Granovetter & Soong 1983). Granovetter
argued that an individual's decision whether or not to participate in
collective behavior often depends in part on how many other actors already
have decided to participate. He further argued that actors differ in terms of
the number of other actors who already must participate before they decide
to do the same, and he introduced the concept of an individual's 'threshold' to
describe this individual heterogeneity. An actor's threshold denotes the
proportion of the group which must have joined before the actor in question is
willing to do so.
An important qualitative result of Granovetter's analysis was that even
slight differences in thresholds can produce vastly different collective
outcomes. Assume, for example, a group of 100 people. One individual has a
threshold of 0, another has a threshold of 1, a third has a threshold of 2, and
so on up to the last individual who has a threshold of 99. Initially only the
person with a threshold of 0 will participate. His/her participation will
activate the person with a threshold of 1 and this person's participation, in
turn, will activate the person with a threshold of 2. This process will continue
until all 100 people participate. If the distribution of thresholds changed
slightly - for example if the person with a threshold of 1 was replaced with a
person with a threshold of 2 - the collective outcome would change
dramatically. The initiator, of course, will participate also under these new
conditions. But since there is no one with a threshold of 1, the process ends at
this point; only one person will participate in the 'collective'movement. The
populations are virtually identical, but the collective outcomes are vastly
different (see Granovetter 1978).
Granovetter gives a range of examples of threshold-based behavior, but
the following example illustrates particularly well the logic behind this sort
of conditional behavior:
Supposeyou are in an unfamiliartown and enter an unknown restaurant on
Saturday evening at seven o'clock.W)hetheror not you decide to take a meal
there will dependin part on how many others have also decidedto do so. If the
place is nearly empty,it is probablya bad sign - without some minimalnumber
of diners, one would probablytry another place. (1978:1438-1439)
The reason that the number of visitors at the restaurant is likely to influence
an individual's choice of restaurant (or more generally, why the number of
participants in a collective action is likely to influence an individual's
decision whether or not to join the action), Granovetter argues, is that in
situations of uncertainty, the number of diners (movement participants) is a
signal about the likely value of the action (e.g. the quality of the food being
served or the benefits that are likely to accrue to the individual if he/she joins
a particular group for collective action), and this signal may be decisive for
the individual's choice of action.
In order more clearly to see the logical structure of the arguments
advanced by Merton, Coleman, and Granovetter it is useful to adopt a
slightly more formalized language. Let
Pit = propensityof individuali to performthe act being analyzed at time t, e.g.
withdrawing savings from the bank, adopting a new drug, visiting a
restaurant, or joining an organizationfor collectiveaction, and
bit = the strength of individuali's belief in the value or necessity of performing
the act in question at time t.
All three authors assume that individuals are goal directed and that an
individual's propensity to perform the act being analyzed is an increasing
function f of the individual's belief in the value of performing the act:
Pit = f(bit). However, the core mechanism that gives Merton's, Coleman's,
and Granovetter's analyses their counter-intuitive appeal concerns the ways
in which individual beliefs are being formed. More specifically, their
proposed mechanism states that individual i's belief in the value or necessity
of performing the act is a function of the number of other individuals who
VOLUME 39
performed the act at time t-1. Merton's bank customers based their
judgments about the solvency of the bank on the number of other customer
withdrawing their savings from the bank; Coleman's physicians based their
evaluations of the possible effect of the new drug on the doings of their
colleagues; and Granovetter's restaurant visitor based his/her decision on the
number of diners already in the restaurant. That is, they all assumed that
bit=
g(nt--l)
where
nti, = number of individuals performing the act time t-1, and
g is an increasing function.
Inserting this expression into the former one, we arrive at Pit = f(g(nt-1))
which suggests that an individual's propensity to withdraw savings from the
bank, adopt a new drug, visit a restaurant, or join an organization for
collective action is an increasing function of the number of other individuals
who already have performed the same act.
The main difference between the three theories considered here centers
on the function g, which provides the fine-grained details of the link between
bit and nt1l, and the details of this link will influence the aggregate dynamics
of the system.25 But the core characteristic of these theories that gives them
their non-obvious character and appeal is the general belief-formation
mechanism which states that the number of individuals who perform a
certain act signal to others the likely value or necessity of the act, and this
signal will influence other individuals' choice of action. It is this beliefformation mechanism that is at the heart of the self-fulfilling prophecies of
Merton, the network effects of Coleman, and the bandwagon effects of
Granovetter.26 On the fundamental level of mechanisms, the run on the
bank, the prescription of the drug, and the emergence of the collective
movement, all are analagous.27
8. Social mechanisms: a typology

In order to specify in more general terms the types of mechanisms we believe
to be of particular importance for sociological theory, we propose a tentative
typology. This typology takes its departure from James Coleman's well
known model for how to conceptualize social action, the so-called macromicro-macro model (see Figure 1).
The general thrust of this model is that proper explanations of macrolevel change and variation entail showing how macro-states at one point in
time influence the behavior of individual actors, and how these actions add
up to new macro-states at a later time.28 That is, instead of analyzing
relationships between phenomena on the macro level, one should always try
to establish how macro-level events or conditions affect the individual (Step
1), how the individual assimilates the impact of these macro-level events
(Step 2), and how a number of individuals, by their actions and interactions,
generate macro-level outcomes (Step 3). This way of conceptualizing social
Macrolevel
(1)
(3)
Microlevel
(2)
Figure 1. Macro-micro-macro relations, according to James Coleman.
Source: James S. Coleman, 'Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action',
American Journal of Sociology, May 1986, pp. 1309-1335.
action lends itself in a very natural way to a typology of mechanisms: macromicro mechanisms, micro-micromechanisms, and micro-macromechanisms
- and a few words will be said about each of these.29
The first of these three types of mechanisms covers the macro-to-micro
transition, and following the suggestion of Stinchcombe (1993) we refer to it
as a situational mechanism. Erving Goffman's (1963) work on behavior in
public places and Karl Popper'sform of situational analysis (cf. Popper 1994)
have these sorts of mechanisms at their core. The belief-formation
mechanism discussed above, opportunity-generating mechanisms such as
White's (1970) vacancy chains, and preference-formationmechanisms such
as those expressed in the idea of reference groups (see Merton & Rossi 1968;
Boudon 1988), are prototypical examples of general social mechanisms that
in a systematic and reasonably precise way link a social structure or other
macro-sociological state to the beliefs, desires, and opportunities of
individual actors.
The second type of mechanism is a micro-level mechanism, and we refer
to it as an individual action mechanism. This type of mechanism shows how
a specific combination of individual desires, beliefs, and action opportunities
generates a specific action. A plurality of psychological and social
psychological mechanisms operates at this level. General decision theories
as well as more specific theories such as Leon Festinger's (1957) theory of
cognitive dissonance and George Ainslie's (1992) on discounting illustrate
different types of action mechanisms. One concrete example that Coleman
uses to illustrate individual action mechanisms comes from his reading of
The Protestant Ethic (see Figure 2). The micro-to-microtransition has in this
case to do with the individual believer's realization that his or her values also
imply a change in orientation towards economic activities, followed by action
inspired by these values.30
The third type of mechanism covers the micro-to-macrotransition, and
we propose to call it a transformational
mechanism. Here a number of
individuals interact with one another and the specific mechanism (which
Macro:
VOLUME 39
Capitalist
economic
system
Protestant
religious
doctrine
Micro:
-_
Individual
values
Orientations to
economic behaviour
Figure 2. Weber's Protestant

Ethic, conceptualized according to Coleman's model.
Source: James S. Coleman, 'Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action',
American Journal of Sociology, May 1986, p. 1322.
depends upon the type of interaction) describes how these individual actions
are transformed into a collective outcome, sometimes unintended and
unexpected by all actors. Several of the theories mentioned elsewhere in
this paper - such as Schelling's tipping model, standard game-theoretic
models such as the tragedy of the commons, and neoclassical market models
- are built upon and illustrate specific transformational mechanisms.
9. Concluding remarks
In this concluding section we briefly summarize the main thrust of our
argument (see also Hedstrom & Swedberg, forthcoming (b)). We have argued
that the notion of social mechanisms is essential for sociological theory, and
that mechanism-based explanations are characterized by three core features:
1. The principle of direct causality;
2. The principle of limited scope;
3. The principle of methodological individualism.
The first of these principles - direct causality - has essentially to do with
opening up the black-box, and that one should always strive to narrow the
gap or lag between input and output, cause and effect. A mechanism-based
explanation seeks to provide a fine-grained and tight coupling between
explanans and explanandum.
The second principle - limited scope - captures the essence of middlerange sociology and expresses the idea that sociology should not prematurely
try to establish universal social laws (which are unlikely to even exist) - but
should instead aim at explanations specifically tailored for a limited range of

phenomena.
The third principle - methodological individualism - captures the idea
that in the social sciences, actors and not variables do the acting. A
mechanism-based explanation is not built upon mere associations between
variables, but always refers directly to causes and consequences of individual
action oriented to the behavior of others. A corollary to this principle states
that there exist no macro-level mechanisms; macro-level entities or events
are linked to one another via combinations of situational, individual action,
and transformational mechanisms, i.e., all macro-level change should be
conceptualized in terms of three separate transitions (macro-micro, micromicro, and micro-macro).3'
A general social mechanisms can now be defined in the following way: a
social mechanism is an integral part of an explanation which (1) adheres to
the three core principles stated above, and (2) is such that on the occurrence
of the cause or input, I, it generates the effect or outcome, 0.
We realize that this definition may seem excessively general and
abstract. But it is not so much the definition per se that is important, as the
type and style of theorizing it encourages. We believe that there is a natural
and important affinity between Robert Merton's idea of middle-range theory
and the idea of social mechanisms, in the sense that social mechanisms are
the elementary building blocks of such theories. Other types of sociological
theory tend to make only rhetorical use of the notion of social mechanism;
and this goes for grand theory (which often ignores all three principles stated
above) as well as for variable sociology (which ignores the principle of
individual action). A focus on explanatory mechanisms helps sociology to
avoid the trap of mindless empiricism on the one hand, and conventional and
empty theorizing on the other.
First version received October 1995
Final version accepted April 1996
Acknowledgements
We thank Mario Bunge, Cecilia Gil-Swedberg, Mark Granovetter,
Barbara Hobson, Ole-J0rgen Skog, Arthur Stinchcombe, Michael
Tahlin, Lars Udehn, seminar participants at the Department of
Sociology, Stockholm University, participants at the conference on
Social Mechanisms held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
June 6-7, 1996, and two anonymous referees for their useful
comments on an earlier version of this article. We owe special
thanks to Carl-Gunnar Janson for his detailed written comments,
and to Alejandro Gil-Villegas and Aage S0rensen for providing
valuable background information.
Notes
1 The term 'mechanism' is often used in sociology but in a casual
manner and hence constitutes what Merton calls a 'proto-concept'.
Merton explains: 'A proto-concept is an early, rudimentary, particu-
VOLUME 39
larized, and largely unexplicated idea (which is put to occasional use

in empirical research and, indeed, often derives from it); a concept is
a general idea which once having been defined, tagged, substantially
generalized, and explicated can effectively guide inquiry into
seemingly diverse phenomena' (Merton 1984:267).
2 Weber, for example, rarely used the term 'mechanism'
(Mechanismus) with the exception of his analysis of bureaucracy,
where it is more or less synonymous with 'machine' (see, e.g., Weber
[1921-1922] 1978:961, 967, 988; Weber as cited in Marianne Weber
1975:416-417). In Zwischenbetrachtung, Weber makes the following
statement, which sums up the situation brought about by Descartes
and Newton: 'The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical
knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment
of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism
(kausalen Mechanismus)' (Weber 1946:350; emphasis added).
3 Simmel's work is rich - and still relatively unexplored - in
suggestions on this score. A well-known example is his analysis of
the ways in which the number of actors influences the structure of
interaction. Durkheim had a powerful sense for social mechanisms
that unites the individual and the group, as his various hypotheses
in Suicide make clear. Some of Durkheim's analyses of mechanisms
are, however, marred by his functionalism, such as the argument
that society has a tendency to maintain itself in the face of attacks or
threats of dissolution. As for Weber, the work that is usually cited
apropos mechanisms is The Protestant Ethic with its argument that
the religious idea of vocation (Beruf) came to influence economic
behavior in a methodical, capitalist direction. A number of interesting mechanisms can also be found in Weber's later work, especially
in Economy and Society and The Economic Ethics of the World
Religions.
4 Merton's work on middle-range theory goes back to his critique
of Parsons at the 1947 meeting of the American Sociological
Association (see Merton 1948). Also Parsons discussed the concept
of mechanism, especially in his work from the early 1950s (see, e.g.,
Parsons 1951:201-325; Parsons & Shils 1951:125-149). Parsons'
view, however, was marred by his functionalism as well as by his
attempts at grand theory; and the function of social mechanisms was
basically reduced to that of maintaining the social system when this
was threatened in some manner. One of the first sociologists to show
more than a casual interest in the concept of mechanisms is George
Lundberg in Foundations of Sociology from 1939. Lundberg argued
for a common sense approach to the notion of mechanism, often with
functionalist overtones. (We thank Lars Ud6hn for the reference to
Lundberg's work.)
5 To this can be added a few other more general mechanisms
that were to emerge from Merton's own work as well as from
Columbia Sociology in general: the two-step model of communication, the self-fulfilling prophecy, the Matthew Effect, and the
diffusion mechanism of Medical Innovation (1966).
6 Though Merton should be praised for discussing 'social
mechanisms' in his essay on middle-range theory, it is also true
that Merton did not succeed in singling out this concept as much as
one would have wished. See in this context also Social Mechanisms:
Studies in Sociological Theory (1958) by the Swede Georg Karlsson.
Karlsson's main source of inspiration was Nicolas Rashevsky, whose
work he had come into contact with in Chicago and who Lazarsfeld
had introduced at Columbia. Karlsson explicitly rejects systemsoriented sociological theory and opts for middle range sociology
(Karlsson 1958:10, 16). His work is centered around three families of
mechanisms: 'social diffusion', 'group choice mechanisms', and
'general mechanisms of interaction'. When Karlsson returned to
Sweden, he soon changed orientation since the intellectual climate in
Swedish sociology was hostile to this type of theorizing (interview
with Karlsson on 19 September 1995).
7 Of Elster's publications so far, the place where one can find the
most complete statement on this topic is in the introduction to Nuts
and Bolts for the Social Sciences, entitled 'Social Mechanisms'
(Elster 1989:3-10). The clearest statement of Stinchcombe's views on
these matters can be found is an article from 1991 (republished in
more or less identical form in 1993). See also e.g. Sayer (1984),
Pawson (1989), and Kiser & Hechter (1991) for some recent
discussions of the role of mechanisms in the social sciences.
8 Tocqueville is a true master of mechanisms, according to Elster
(1993), who cites a number of examples from Democracy in America
and Ancien Re'gime.
9 For a furious attack on Nuts and Bolts for precisely this
reason, see Humphreys (1991).
10 Goffman writes in Behavior in Public Places: 'By the term
situation I shall refer to the spatial environment anywhere within
which an entering person becomes a member of the gathering that is
(or does then become) present. Situations begin when mutual
monitoring occurs, and lapse when the second-last person has left'
(Goffman 1963:18).
11 The word 'mechanism' originally comes from the word
'machine' (cf. e.g. Oxford English Dictionary 1989). That the
association to 'machines' and 'mechanics' is still popular among
those who write on social mechanisms is clear from the title of
Elster's book: Nuts and Bolts of the Social Sciences.
12 A famous example of a 19th century mechanism is that of
homeostasis, discovered by Claude Bernard and usually defined as a
self-regulating process through which a biological system maintains
its stability. Sociologists will recall that the term 'homeostatsis' was
coined by W. B. Cannon, whose work The Wisdom of the Body (1932)
deeply influenced Parsons. (In chemistry the same idea is known as
the principle of Le Chatelier.) Parsons may also have picked up the
idea from Cannon.
13 The problem that Hirschman addresses has to do with what
happens when an organization (including a firm) begins to decline.
According to Hirschman, two 'mechanisms of recuperation' are
usually triggered off in this situation, one that is discussed primarily
in economics ('exit') and one that primarily political scientists focus
on ('voice').
14 Hempel (1942) uses the example of an automobile radiator
cracking during a cold night to illustrate the logic of his proposal.
The general laws cited in the explanation would need to refer to how
VOLUME 39
the pressure of water changes with changes in temperature and

volume, and the specific circumstances referred to would be
conditions such as the temperature during the night and the
bursting pressure of the radiator. A proper explanation has been
proposed if, and only if, the proposition about cracking of the
radiator can be logically deduced from the sentences stating the laws
and the specific circumstances.
15 Mark Granovetter, who is a student of Hempel, disagrees
with our argument here and notes that 'If [only] correlations were
produced he [that is, Hempel] would no doubt point out that more
detailed covering laws are needed to explain the correlations'
(personal communication).
16 It should be emphasized that the distinction between 'blackboxes' and 'mechanisms' to some extent is time-bound. In the words
of Patrick Suppes (1970:91): 'From the standpoint of either scientific
investigation or philosophical analysis it can fairly be said that one
man's mechanism is another man's black box. I mean by this that the
mechanisms postulated and used by one generation are mechanisms
that are to be explained and understood themselves in terms of more
primitive mechanisms by the next generation.'
17 For the sake of clarity, it should be noted that we also include
'intentions' among the possible 'causes' of individual action.
18 In this respect, our position is closer to that of Stinchcombe
who explicitly argues against those who do not accept that one often
has to make simplifying assumptions about the units on the lower
level (e.g. homo economicus) in order to be able to generate
interesting results on the higher level. In other words, a mechanism
does not necessarily have 'to be true to be useful' - but it has to
'produce interesting hypotheses or explanations at the higher level'
(Stinchcombe 1993:27).
19 The affinity between behaviorism and structural equation
modeling was also noted by 0. D. Duncan himself: 'In [structural
equation] models that purport to explain the behavior of individual
persons, the coefficients [of the structural equation] could well take
the form of units of response per unit of stimulus strength; the
structural equation is, in effect, a stimulus-response law' (Duncan
1975:162-163).
20 Throughout his career, Coleman was a strong proponent of a
generative view of causality and he often expressed serious doubts
about the usefulness of the type of causal analysis referred to above.
Already in Introduction to Mathematical Sociology he wrote: 'Note,
however, that there is nowhere the proposal simply to engage in
curve-fitting, without an underlying model which expresses a social
process. If the data happen to fit a simple curve, this may provide an
economical statement of the data, in terms of the one or two
parameters of the distribution curve. But if there is no underlying
model with a reasonable substantive interpretation, little has been
gained by such curve fitting' (Coleman 1964:518).
21 As these terms are being used here, a 'theoretical model'
differs from a 'mechanism' in primarily two ways: (1) a theoretical
model is always formalized, something which mechanisms only
sometimes are, and (2) a mechanism is a more elementary entity
than a theoretical model; (formalized) mechanisms often constitute

the building-blocks of models.
22 Another important reason for why the causal modeling
tradition has had such moderate success in sociology is the character
of the data being used. The inductive approach adopted in this
tradition is modeled upon experimental research, but the data being
used are normally of a non-experimental kind. As emphasized by
Lieberson (1985), unmeasured selection is a serious obstacle to
causal inferences when using non-experimental data.
23 As exemplified in the work of John Goldthorpe (forthcoming),
there is an emerging consensus being established even among
empirically oriented sociologists that causality in social processes
cannot be established from quantitative analyses alone.
24 In areas such as labor market sociology, the hypotheses being
tested have furthermore usually been formulated by members of
other scientific disciplines, i.e., by economists. There are numerous
empirical tests being reported in the sociological literature of human
capital, internal labor markets, dual labor markets, and transaction
costs, all theories or hypotheses developed by economists, but
exceptionally few tests of mechanisms proposed by sociologists;
White's (1970) vacancy chain mechanism being one noteworthy
exce tion.
V
Coleman assumed that g was a function of the sociometric
ties, Granovetter assumed that it was a function of individual
thresholds, and Merton left the functional form unspecified. When
mechanisms are expressed in mathematical language they appear as
functions transforming variables. These functions can be distinguished from one another on the basis of their functional form and
values (see Hernes 1976).
their6parameter
2 A process like this might also arise in a situation where not all
actors form their beliefs on the basis of the mechanisms discussed
above. Consider the following situation: (1) I do not believe in
proposition A; (2) I know (or believe) that many others believe in A
and their belief in A will have negative consequences for me; (3)
other's belief in A will induce me to act as if A were true; and this (4)
will signal to others the correctness of proposition A. We believe that
recent instability on various financial markets can partly be
attributed to these types of processes. But also social processes,
such as the fear of magnetic fields referred to earlier, exhibit these
characteristics. If this fear threatens to undermine the property
values of houses close to power lines, houseowners (even those who
have realized that the fear is groundless) are induced to put their
houses on the market, and this 'escape' sends a signal to others that
there indeed must be some substance to the view that living close to
a power line is a potential health hazard. This threatens to further
reduce property values, and so on.
27 In addition to this belief-formation mechanism, there are of
course other action and transformation mechanisms that are
involved in Merton's, Coleman's, and Granovetter's analyses, but
these mechanisms are commonplace and tangential to the core
processes they analyze.
28 It is important to note that this form of methodological
individualism does not imply that macro-level factors are unim-
VOLUME 39
portant or somehow theoretically inappropriate when it comes to

explaining individual action. It only implies that these extraindividual entities also in principle should be accounted for with
reference to the intended and unintended consequences of individuals' past behavior (see Hedstrom & Swedberg, forthcoming (a)).
29 The logic of Coleman's argument also suggests that any kind
of continuous social action can be conceptualized as a long chain of
successive macro-micro-macro transformations, where, in many
cases, only the peaks, so-to-speak, ('macro-macro')are visible to the
researcher - but where the analytical point is precisely to explain
this cumulative social action as a result of a large number of macromicro-macro transitions.
30 Coleman's interpretation of Weber in this example has been
challenged by several authors, but this does not affect the logic of
Coleman's argument (see Swedberg, forthcoming).
31 In addition to these basic characteristics of social mechanisms, the ideal mechanism, it seems to us, should also be simple and
non-obvious.
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Social Mechanisms

Author(s): Peter Hedstrm and Richard Swedberg

282 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

Social Mechanisms 283

Merton defined social mechanisms as 'social processes having designated

3. Elster and Stinchcombe on the use of mechanisms in social science

most complete account of what he means by this concept. He enumerates five

284 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

Social Mechanisms 285

4. The concept of mechanism as used in other sciences

286 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

5. The explanatory importance of social mechanisms

Social Mechanisms 287

This generative view of causal explanations differs in important respects

The search for

generative mechanisms consequently helps us distinguish between genuine

288 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

philosopher of science and

physicist Mario Bunge (1967). Assume that we

WVhatcharacterizes a black-box explanation is that the link between input

Social Mechanisms 289

particular action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to

290 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

Generative explanations usually invoke some form of 'causal agent'

Social Mechanisms 291

abstractions also distort by their nature the descriptive account of what

6. Variables versus social mechanisms

Accordingto Coleman, this emphasis on 'causal' explanations of behavior

tradition, variables and not actors do the acting (Abbott 1992).2o

292 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

Boudon dismisses several standard representations of the mobility process as

Social Mechanisms 293

more time and intellectual energy in trying to estimate non-existing

294 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

initially false definition of a situation evokes behavior that eventually makes

Social Mechanisms 295

296 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

8. Social mechanisms: a typology

Social Mechanisms 297

mechanism. Here a number of

298 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

Figure 2. Weber's Protestant

Social Mechanisms 299

should instead aim at explanations specifically tailored for a limited range of

300 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

larized, and largely unexplicated idea (which is put to occasional use

Social Mechanisms 301

302 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

the pressure of water changes with changes in temperature and

Social Mechanisms 303

than a theoretical model; (formalized) mechanisms often constitute

304 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

portant or somehow theoretically inappropriate when it comes to

Social Mechanisms 305

Foundations, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Berlin:

306 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

Philosophique - Dictionnaire, pp. 1582-1583. Paris: Presses

Social Mechanisms 307

308 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA1996

S0rensen, A. B. 1990. Interview. In R. Swedberg, Economics and

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