Charles Tilly

Why are women paid less than men? Why were there riots in some northwestern English cities in 2000 but not in London? What is the significance of bloggers, or of the World Social Forum? One of the strange features of our times is that well-educated people can get by with very little idea of how to answer questions like these. Over the last few decades, we have witnessed great progress in the public's level of scientific understanding, thanks to many brilliant expositors. In history, too, some of the most original minds are also first rate communicators. Much of economics has permeated into common sense, particularly of decision-makers around the world. But sociology has faded from view. Its heyday a generation ago feels like another era. As a result, many people rely on very simple interpretive frameworks to make sense of what they see around them or on the evening news. So conflicts between Muslims and Christians are attributed to culture or history. Gender pay gaps are seen as the result of misogyny. The internet is ascribed with magical powers to turn the tables on multinational corporations or governments.

Some of the reasons for sociology's retreat from public awareness lie in the discipline itself, which took a turn towards abstract theory in the 1970s and away from observation, description and detailed historical analysis. Some of the reasons lie in the shape of professional careers which enabled sociologists to progress without having to do primary observation. Within sociology very good work is continuing to be done, and sense is being made of complex issues. But little of it is penetrating the public consciousness.

Charles Tilly is probably the outstanding contemporary exponent of an engaged but theoretically rigorous sociology. It is a symptom of sociology's relative detachment that he remains largely unknown outside academic circles in Britain, even though he is by some margin the most fertile thinker in the American social sciences, covering topics as diverse as the rise of the state in 18th-century Europe to racial inequality, political violence to the conditions for democracy in central Asia. In some ways he is old fashioned—he offers explanations and shows how some things cause other things to happen. His accounts contain real people, history and drama, and have lessons for how change might be achieved more successfully.



Like all the best sociologists, his work starts with close observation. A good example is pay inequality, which Tilly investigated along with many other kinds of inequality in his book Durable Inequality. Economists have found it hard to explain why gender pay gaps are so persistent, since in a properly functioning labour market, employers should have incentives to reward women as much as men for their skills. Tilly points out that close observation of how pay and jobs work in the real world soon shows that the most important determinant of pay is the jobs that people take. Pay differences between the sexes within the same jobs are now small (although a combination of men's greater pushiness and some lingering discrimination means they have not entirely disappeared). "Since compensation varies systematically by job more than it varies by gender within jobs, the big question we have to ask is not, 'How come individual bosses discriminate against women?' but, 'What is the process by which women stream into some occupations and men into others?'" he says.

The answers lie in processes of self-reproduction. Jobs are mainly allocated by people who are themselves already in jobs, and, whether consciously or not, they tend to favour people like themselves, sometimes because they feel more comfortable with them, sometimes as a favour. None of this need be consciously discriminatory. But wherever there is a dividing line between an "us" and a "them" (like men and women, or whites and non-whites), people will tend to erect further barriers. Some of these may be occupational, like those between doctors and nurses, which have enabled professional men to hoard opportunities for themselves. Some may be cultural boundaries, like the familiarity with high culture that has been a requirement for advancement in parts of the civil service. But the net effect is that many inequalities are "durable": they survive over long periods of time and run along simple us/them boundary lines.

In the case of hiring, Tilly argues, "The mechanism by which people get jobs almost guarantees that whatever inequalities exist outside the office reappear inside. We try to patch it up, as Michael Young pointed out, by creating meritocracies and school screening, but it doesn't compensate. Within any organisation, the people with power will tend to reproduce whatever gave them their advantages."

What can be done? Laws banning discrimination are a necessary but far from sufficient condition for change. "If you want to change the balance of opportunity, you have to plug disadvantaged groups into self-reproducing structures. So if a new workplace is set up, you ensure there is a nucleus of that group among the original hires," says Tilly. Alternatively you try to break down some of the barriers to mobility—like professional demarcations that traditionally made it hard for nurses to take on more senior roles. And if you want to improve the relative position of an ethnic minority, like the Mexicans in New York city, you direct job opportunities to their networks and "the churches— increasingly Protestant rather than Catholic—that have become Mexican headquarters in New York. The general point is that very large-scale policies on discrimination and minorities miss the level at which the crucial processes are occurring."

These processes of hoarding explain some of the dynamics of social mobility, including the recent data suggesting that relative mobility is static or declining in Britain and the US. The well-off have become better at holding on to opportunities, using private schools, tutors and cultural capital to outwit policies designed to promote meritocracy. The result may be a shift in the structure of opportunity which is invisible if you look only at the distribution of income. "Recent studies of Brazil, for example, show that it has a class structure like an hourglass with a very large bottom. In the lower part you have a system in which, over the last couple of generations, people have moved out of agriculture into low-level service and manufacturing and there is plenty of mobility. Then there's a bottleneck, much narrower than in the past, and above that there's another circulation of the educated elite, again with plenty of mobility. Below the bottleneck you have almost all the black African ancestor population. Overall social mobility hasn't changed much, but the possibility of moving from the agrarian sector into the elite has diminished drastically," argues Tilly.

A very different example of a complex social phenomenon that is commonly misunderstood is rioting. Much of Tilly's recent work has focused on this—notably his book The Politics of Collective Violence—examining the patterns common to communal violence in south India, gangs in London or genocide in Rwanda. Careful observation soon puts paid to most conventional accounts. For example, the majority of Muslims and Hindus in India have long coexisted peaceably, despite the communal conflicts that surrounded independence, undermining the claim that there is an inherent cultural incompatibility between the religions. And in India, as elsewhere, there are plenty of examples of deep historical enmities that have disappeared, or lost their potency. In Britain, for example, there are few Scottish nationalists threatening to set off bombs in London.

The study of conflict shows that although historical memories play a part, as does the struggle to secure scarce resources like land or housing, these are not enough to explain worsening conflicts. The crucial factor is that leaders, or those Tilly calls "political entrepreneurs," see it as in their interests to accentuate divides, to seize on incidents and make them symbols of a larger conflict. This is more likely if community organisations—and political parties—don't cut across communal boundaries. But even this doesn't make violence inevitable unless leaders choose to encourage it, and third parties, like the national government, do not act to dampen it down. The point is that bigger factors are insufficient to explain why conflict happens: it is in the interplay of small actions and decisions that tiny incidents either turn into conflagrations or are quietly forgotten.

For many European countries with large, and often alienated, Muslim populations, an accurate understanding of these dynamics matters intensely. "Once you have a significant Muslim population in a European city you are likely to see the creation of political entrepreneurship and the reinforcement of us/them boundaries. So people come to be defined as Muslim rather than, say, Bangladeshi. For governments and mainstream political parties, this raises the question of whether it is possible to compete with the power of those who are benefiting most from the erection of the Muslim/non-Muslim boundary by giving them stronger incentives to gain power and prestige in other ways, for example through a major political party, or through being involved in the allocation of regeneration funds."

Tilly is concerned above all with relationships between people, and how people are changed by their relationships and interactions. He has been critical of some of the official state department analyses of terrorism that focus on states of mind, such as humiliation. "When it comes to terror, the beginning of wisdom is to recognise it as a strategy… and it is one-sided, often pitting either powerless people against very powerful enemies or vice versa."

He argues, similarly, that 20th-century social thought has suffered from two common flaws. The first has been to see things too readily as systems, as in the work of figures like Talcott Parsons. "We talk about society and community as if they are real things, but they are words rather than things. To judge whether something really is a system you have to look for some attributes—such as homeostasis and co-ordination—which are generally there in organisations (and governments) but which exist only to a limited degree in national societies. Jumping too quickly to abstract words like 'society' takes attention away from the many networks and relationships which make up the reality of social life, and which often cut across national boundaries."

The other flaw has been to focus too much on individual intentions and consciousness, as economics has been particularly prone to do with a whole edifice of assumptions about individual motivation. The limits of a social science based too narrowly on individual intentions and interest maximisation can be seen in the example of what is called the "ultimatum game." An experimenter gives someone $100, and then lets them offer someone else a share of the money. If agreement isn't reached, neither gets anything. "According to orthodox economics, if I get $99 and give you even $1 you should be satisfied, since you are better off. But the fact is that neither participant in such an experiment in any country accepts such a small offer. The offers are usually in the range of 60 to 40. Sometimes they're 50/50. To understand this, it is not enough just to ask how individuals process experiences as individuals; you have to see the relationships between people and why they matter," he says.

The recent work on happiness illustrates the same point. This concern with human wellbeing is a welcome widening of the horizons of economics. All the available evidence shows that relationships—marriage, friendship, and belonging—are critically important to making people happy, and that these relationships all change who we are. Yet individualist economics has no robust concepts for understanding how people compare themselves with others, or why people form relationships.

The virtue of looking in detail at the dynamics of relationships is that it throws light on otherwise intractable issues. A good example that Tilly cites is Peter Bearman's work on US schools. "Bearman shows that in US high schools there is a hierarchy of cliques, usually with the athletic teams as the central cluster. The best athletes get the chance to dispense the most valued goods, including buildings, parties and prizes. Second, it shows that schools vary—in most, sports is most respected, but in some, academic achievement is central to the hierarchy of respect. And third, everyone's school performance depends on what the central clusters are. Kids do better academically in schools in which the central clusters are the eggheads and so on. So a lot of creative policy may come from analysing what are the clique structures of these schools and what kinds of alternative rewards might there be for teenagers to win respect. In particular, how can the most disaffected teenagers be given access to resources that would win them prestige among their peers, as an alternative to dealing drugs or stealing cars?"

Bearman's more recent work on teenagers pledging to remain virgins until marriage has given similar insights into teenage sex. If there are no pledgers in a student's community, pledging has little effect on sexual behaviour. If there are too many pledgers—more than 30 per cent—pledging also provides little benefit for the teenager. Pledging works only when it gives teenagers a sense of unique identity with a group of their peers, and it certainly does not work when it is a national policy that everybody follows.

In his most recent book, Social Movements 1768-2004, Tilly has returned to a topic he worked on in the 1980s: the rise and role of social movements. The book offers a synthetic history from 1768, the time of John Wilkes, to the era of Greenpeace. Within a few decades around the turn of the 19th century, the British campaigns against slavery and for Catholic emancipation invented almost all the forms of campaigning that have since become commonplace, from demonstrations and petitions to mass-membership organisations. The Make Poverty History campaign may represent the apotheosis of this tradition, combining as it does a global movement and close involvement in intergovernmental negotiations.

One of the many unanswered questions about social movements is the extent to which they will be transformed by the internet. There is no doubt that the internet has made it easier to organise large numbers of people and small organisations in what Howard Rheingold called "smart mobs." A few moments in the past saw ideas spread almost like a virus across national boundaries—for example in the pan-European revolution of 1848, or in 1968 and 1989. But this sort of global co-ordination has become far simpler and far more common—as in the global demonstrations in February 2003 against the US intervention in Iraq, or the campaigns around the G8.

However it would be wrong to conclude that the internet has irreversibly weakened the power of governments or big corporations. For a start, internet access remains confined to around 15 per cent of the world's population. It speeds up communication among elites, including NGO elites, but according to Tilly may lead to less communication with the disenfranchised. It may also reinforce the tendency of many modern NGOs to pursue media visibility as an alternative to their main objective—a common trap, since publicity gives the appearance of success.

It is also true that the internet has not altered the basic feature of social movements, which is that they rarely have influence except where elites are divided. Anti-globalisation demonstrations in Seattle worked, to the extent that they did, only because they strengthened the hands of the people within the World Bank or national governments who already wanted a greater focus on poverty. "Any time a mass representation of demands has had a response, there's almost always someone in the establishment who is already sympathetic," Tilly claims.

Economic change and innovation is another example of a topic that cannot be properly understood without sociology. Tilly cites a classic study of innovation carried out by Johan Murmann, one of his students. "The invention of synthetic dyes for the textile industry occurred in Britain in the 19th century. But by 1914, Germany had 95 per cent of the market even though Britain continued to be the home of the world's largest textile industry. So Britain went from being the fountainhead of innovation to being the consumer of German technology. What Murmann points out is that the separation between firms and government and universities in Britain impeded any kind of collaboration and created mutual suspicion. In Germany, on the other hand, these bodies colluded with each other and scientists made the circuit, going from buyer to university to government and so forth, cross-fertilising and helping the system as a whole to adapt."

Can sociology help us to think about politics and the strategic choices that society faces? Tilly argues that greater sociological literacy could at least clarify the nature of ideological choices. He cites the work of Robert Goodin and collaborators (The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism) who tried to analyse how different kinds of system—conservative, liberal and social democratic—performed in delivering results to their citizens. "The work drew on long-time series data from the US, Germany and the Netherlands, tracking people's fates year after year between the late 1970s and early 1990s. To avoid ideological bias, the study took as its starting point the criteria which the advocates of each system deemed to be the most important, and then observed what actually happened—to the relationship between security and competitive enterprise, for example. The conclusions of the research were pretty clear: social democracy scored better on all of the morally desirable outcomes of welfare systems than the other two.

Tilly's next book is called "Why?" It is concerned with the ways we explain such varied events as 9/11, democratic revolution in Kiev and medical malpractice, the latter an issue that particularly interests Tilly, as he underwent treatment for serious cancer two years ago. Social science generally looks for causal links or correlations. History often tries to investigate who was to blame or who deserves credit. But Tilly was struck that medical malpractice inquiries, like parliamentary inquiries or judicial inquiries, are generally less interested in whether what was done was right or wrong than with whether the rules were followed (the Hutton report was a classic example). This opens up a gulf between much of the day-to-day business of organisations and the public they serve, since the public use stories to understand things, and look for heroes and villains. Rationalist academics and policymakers disdain stories, yet by better understanding how people frame stories and then share them, we may get a much better grasp of how nations hold together, or why some political campaigns succeed and others fail.