Chaos of Disciplines by Andrew AbbottReview by: Freddy Winston CastroActa Sociologica, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2001), pp. 277-279Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4194890 .

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ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2001

Book Review

Andrew Abbott:

Chaos of Disciplines

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

A ndrew Abbott's work, especially that A related to the sociology of professions,

was internationally acclaimed in the late 1980s and early 90s. This was mainly the result of the publication of his book The System of Professions (1988), where his daring applica- tion of an ecological model imported from the natural sciences to the study of professional jurisdictional claims and struggles represented a relevant shift in relation to the mainstream of the day.

Chaos of Disciplines (2001) is another product of his daring theoretical importations from the natural sciences, this time from Chaos theory. The book is, like the former, backed by an excellent scholarship and by an enormous recollection of data. However, the theoretical scope of the book is broader and much more ambitious than that of the earlier publication. In Chaos of Disciplines Abbott builds system- atically upon his past work (almost all the chapters have been published elsewhere before, or have long existed and circulated in draft) in order to present an overarching fractal model of analysis, capable, according to the author, of making sense of a broad range of social phenomena.

Chaos and fractals are, as everybody knows, related concepts imported from mathe- matics and the natural sciences, and associated to the path-breaking work of Edward Lorenz, Helge von Koch, Gaston Julia and Benoit Mandelbrot. Ever since Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist and mathematician working on the problem of weather prediction, wrote about the flapping of a butterfly's wings today trigger- ing a devastating tornado somewhere in the world a month later, Chaos theory, i.e. the theory that investigates order in the midst of what appears to be completely random data, has attracted mathematicians, physicians, phil-

osophers and even social scientists. Many have seen in this work a fruitful search for a new paradigm, one capable of uniting in elegant logical, mathematical and geometric terms the fields of the natural and the social sciences. Others, of a more sceptical nature, have only seen yet another edition of both the old positivist illusion of 'one science' and of its unredeemed taste for prediction, despite the old and yet unresolved Humean problem of induction.

In the preface, Abbott informs the reader that the main insight that inspired him to write the book was his alleged perception 'that many social structures look the same in large scale and in small scale' (2001:xi). This insight, which he will further develop, particularly in chapter 6, justifies the introduction of a stream of fractal metaphors that make the backbone of the book and, ultimately, lead to the claim that both social and cultural structures, disciplines and knowledge processes, among other things (if not everything), replicate themselves in the way fractals do.

Fractals, intimately related to Chaos the- ory, are geometric shapes that are similar to themselves at different scales. Self-similarity is also one of their most outstanding properties. I think that a good pedagogic illustration of self- similarity is the Sierpenski triangle that is composed of four smaller triangles, each of which are composed of four even smaller triangles, and so on. What Abbott wishes to inform us of in this book is that most of the objects of study of the social sciences show the same pattern of self-similarity, breaking up at different levels in the way geometric fractals do, mainly replicating themselves in recurrent nested dichotomies. From Kant's analytic split- ting of knowledge into pure and practical reason to sociology's dichotomies of structure/ agency, consensus/conflict, quantitative/quali- tative, theory/empirical research, and through different opposing perspectives and methodolo- gies in history, literature, and so on, Abbott's eye perceives the structuring of a world con- stituted by fractal distinctions that powerfully reminded me, when I first read the book, of

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278 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2001 VOLUME 44

some beautiful illustrations of snow crystals that I had admired some time ago in a scientific magazine.

It is this fractal perspective that permits him to see each of the terms of the dichotomy culture and social structure as splitting into 'new' dichotomies of culture and social structure both respectively and indefinitely. The bottom line cannot be more clear: the social is a space where dichotomies like culture or structure (or workers or capitalists, if you wish) are repeatedly taken up, highlighted and differentially privileged by social scientists in different historical periods. 'But there is no real progress, no fundamentally new concept', claims Abbott, 'We simply keep recalling a good idea' (p. 17), or, in other words, we keep rediscovering the wheel through ongoing fractal cycles. This central topic will be further exemplified in chapter 3, when Abbott discusses the 'discovery' of social con- structionism in the 19 70s, after years of recurrent constructionism in the social sciences from the German idealist tradition and onwards (p. 62).

If the examples above focalize the cultural flux within disciplines, in chapter 5, 'Context of Disciplines', Abbott focalizes instead the struc- tural stability between them. Here, his 'old' ecological model, where disciplines are seen as amoebas moving in academic space, expanding and colonizing territories, being constrained or displaced by competitors, and continuously making and defending stable settlements, is articulated with the 'new' model, arguing that knowledge in social science falls in fractal distinctions that tend to go on repeating themselves, producing only an illusion of pro- gress. A central claim here is that it is the interdisciplinary cultural structure of competi- tion and criticism between disciplines that functionally stabilizes the intellectual lineages within disciplines, contravening the tendency of their internal cultural fractal divisions to proceed indefinitely and, eventually, making them lose their disciplinary identity.

The first five chapters of the book are dedicated to making these claims with the help of a massive body of information and a good number of fractal descriptions. In the last two chapters, Abbott turns to a more speculative discussion of the applicability of fractal argu- ments in the social sciences. The discussion, he warns, is meant to raise questions rather than to provide full accounts.

He then proceeds to develop his argument about self-similar social structures from a new

round of applications to gender divisions, organizations, and markets to the central question of the principles generating them. Abbott points out three basic principles: hier- archies, functional differentiation and micro- cosm, where structures are deliberately created as concentrically representative. Political, legis- lative systems are examples of the last one, in the degree that party representation is obtained at all levels (p. 170). In other words: self-similar structures can arise naturally from social processes, as in the case of functional differ- entiation, or from designed systems, as in the case of microcosm. In both cases the generating principle 'triggers' a chain of events - can you hear the flapping wings of Lorenz's butterfly? - producing self-similar structures at different levels of social reality. At this point, Abbott introduces a topic that hitherto had been absent in his discussion, namely the role of social interaction in a fractally structured world. An important claim, in this context, is that fractals frame individuals in 'similar positions' with people who, in fact, are very distant from them in social space, something that both facilitates and hampers their communication (p. 177ff.). Pierre Bourdieu had captured this particularity in the concept of homology, but Abbott shows, at least in this book, no signs of being acquainted with Bourdieu's work on the topic. In general, it can be said that his discussion is mostly limited to fractal, structural processes affecting human interaction and value judgment, but remark- ably silent about the properties which character- ize the latter. I will return to this point later. Finally, it must be said that Abbott's account of dualisms like freedom/determination, thought/ action and right/wrong as examples of self- similar structures reveals his desire to expand the range of application of his model from intellectual and empirical themes to moral, normative ones. Nothing seems to resist the power of fractal analysis.

In summary: Abbott's book is undoubtedly a daring and thought-provoking theoretical exploration of the analytical possibilities of Chaos theory and related fractal models in the social sciences. It reminds us of two important things: first, that social and cultural structures count in sociological analysis, as opposed to the illusions of subjectivist reductionism, and sec- ondly, that concepts and models imported from the natural sciences can still, as in the past, inspire new theoretical approaches to the study of social phenomena.

But Abbott's project - like any other

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Book Reviews 279

theoretical project for that matter - is far from being problem free. Its main problem is its faulty discussion of the ontological properties of the objects of study of the social sciences as different from those of the natural sciences. Societies are peopled, while physical, logical and mathema- tical structures are not, a simple fact that should have important theoretical consequences in a final evaluation of the methodological consis- tency and the alleged span of application of Abbott's fractal model. Centrally related to this, the absence in the text of a serious discussion of the role of human agency in the social world might be read as favouring a new theoretical reduction of human agency to (this time, fractal) structural factors. Only a relational study of the specific properties characterizing both human agency and socio-cultural struc- tures and their mutual relations can illuminate the important issues that Abbott takes up in his book, allowing the possibility of a new critical analysis of the generative factors behind many recurrent patterns in the social sciences, not the least that of recurrent subjectivist and structur- alist reductions.

Freddy Winston Castro Department of Sociology

Gbteborg University Sweden

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