Trajectory Adjustment to Trajectory Improvisation: Modeling Patterns of Institutional Disintegration in Late-Soviet Russia and Contemporary Iraq

7/23/2019 Trajectory Adjustment to Trajectory Improvisation: Modeling Patterns of Institutional Disintegration in Late-Soviet R

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Trajectories of Institutional Disintegration in Late-Soviet Russia

and Contemporary Iraq

MARC GARCELON

Middleburg College

How might revolutions and other processes of institutional disintegration inform po-

litical processes preceding them? By mapping paths of agency through processes of

institutional disintegration, the trajectory improvisation model of institutional break-

down overcomes action-structure binaries by framing political revolutions as possi-

ble outcomes of such disintegrative processes. The trajectory improvisation approach

expands the trajectory adjustment model of social change developed by Gil Eyal, Ivan

Szelenyi, and Eleanor Townsley. An overview of political revolution in Soviet Russia

between 1989 and 1991 illustrates trajectory improvisation. The recent American in-

vasion and occupation of Iraq shows alternative routes to institutional disintegration,

indicating the independence of models of institutional breakdown from those of so-

cial movements. These cases illustrate both the diversity of situations the trajectory

improvisation model speaks to, and the limitation of models of trajectory adjustment,

improvisation, social movements, and invasions, illustrating why such models at best

enable what are called explanatory narratives of actual historical processes.

A political revolution destroys the institutional foundation, the sovereign backbone,

of a political order. As such, political revolutions transcend changes in state personnel

or organization that preserve established institutional boundaries.1 How, then, might

such an institutional threshold for revolutions enable analysis of political dynamicspreceding them? The trajectory improvisation model of institutional disintegration

developed here links processes of institutional breakdown to social agency by framing

political revolution as a developmental breakdown of state legitimacy among agents

nominally subject to it. The trajectory improvisation model, in turn, expands the

trajectory correction model of social change recently developed by Gil Eyal, Ivan

Szelenyi, and Eleanor Townsley (1998:3645) to include cases of full institutional

disintegration. Moreover, trajectory improvisation maps both situations destabilized

by social movements transgressing state boundaries (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly

2001), and situations where external armed force destroys a state absent an internal

social movement.Trajectory correctionhenceforth called trajectory adjustment2and trajectory

improvisation are neither theories of social movements, nor of military conquest

of one regime by another. Rather, they serve as preliminary models identifying what

causal analysis must account for in explaining sequences of institutional change on

the scale of states per se. In cases where social movements play causally significant

roles in the disintegration of state institutions, models of social movements must

1This definition of political revolution roughly follows Alexis de Tocquevilles The Old Regime and the

Revolution in France.2Trajectory adjustment implies a range of behavior, from habit to conscious deliberation to innovationand deviance, and thus is preferred here.

Sociological Theory 24:3 September 2006C American Sociological Association. 1307 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701


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256 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Non-Highly

institutionalized institutionalized

routine behavior contained agency transgressive agency improvised agency

Figure 1. The continuum of possible behaviors from an institutional perspective.

be brought to bear. But institutional disintegration absent an internal social move-

ment also occurs where state institutions disintegrate under external military assault

despite effective repression of any significant opposition movements internally prior

to military defeat, such as Nazi Germany in early 1945 and the Baathist regime in

Iraq in 2003. Finally, some historical cases of regime disintegration combine both

internal social movements and external military conflict. Take Vichy France, where

both external military force and internal resistance played causally significant roles

in the regimes fall. In such cases, both military conflict and opposition movementsmust be accounted for.

Models of social movements and interstate military conflict thus enable causal

analysis of the processes driving institutional disintegration and attempts to gener-

ate proto-institutional alternatives. Together, models of trajectory adjustment, social

movements, and military conflicts facilitate explanatory narratives of historical se-

quences of trajectory improvisation, of institutional disintegration, and regeneration.

We begin with an overview of how agency is habitually oriented to institutional or-

ders, and the various resources that agents may mobilize in different circumstances.

This leads to mapping paths of trajectory adjustment through stable institutional

fields. We next turn to situations where the institutional order of a state begins dis-integrating as some agents improvise alternative paths, some of which may lead to

the genesis of a new, alternative state order. Here, mapping the reachthe spatial

extension of a state orderclarifies a number of confusions that surround use of

micro-macro distinctions in the social sciences. Next, we turn to reconstructing

processes of state breakdown in situations where internal social movements play sig-

nificant roles, showing why various models of social change must be embedded in

explanatory narratives to enable causal accounts of institutional disintegration. An

overview of state disintegration in late-Soviet Russia between 1989 and 1991 presents

such a case. In the conclusion, a brief discussion of the American-led invasion and

occupation of Iraq beginning in March 2003 illustrates an alternative course of trajec-tory improvisation, underscoring why trajectory improvisation remains a preliminary

model, not a full explanation, of state disintegration.

MODELING AGENCY IN RELATION TO INSTITUTIONS AND VARIETIES

OF CAPITALS

Mapping how social agency modifies institutions across cases differentiates a contin-

uum of behavior from routine, on one end, to disintegrative of states, on the other.

The distinction between trajectory adjustment and trajectory improvisation captures

a full spectrum of social agency in relation to institutional orders, as in Figure 1. At

one pole lies a highly institutionalized agency, while at the opposite pole of institu-

tional disintegration lies a variety of improvised agencies.3

3In between lie contained and transgressive variants of agency; see McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly(2001:79).


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TRAJECTORIES OF INSTITUTIONAL DISINTEGRATION 257

Tracking social agency across highly routine institutional contexts presents the

clearest cases to reconstruct. The model of trajectory adjustment frames agentic use

of resources on the assumption of a large habitual component of social agency,

stemming from recognition of the habitus of agents and how it behaves. Habi-

tus designates a complex of embodied dispositions that enable routine patterns of

individual behavior without entailing reflective deliberation (Bourdieu 1984:16975).Indeed, agency is a much more inclusive term than action, as the latter implies

some degree of conscious deliberation and reflective setting of goals. That the cog-

nitive sciences have recently dismantled the actionist conception of human agency

through extensive testing of human memory, showing that a large percentage of

agency is unconscioushabitualgoes either unrecognized or occasions stubborn

resistance by rational choice theories of agency.4 At the same time, many work-

ing conceptions of agency avoid recognition of instances of action properinstances

where deliberation and planning figure prominently. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance,

downplayed the significance of reflective action, sowing confusion into reception of

the concept of habitus.5

We can clarify the relation of action to agency by mapping deliberative action as an

emergent propertya special caseof human agencyper se. Action, then, is a special

case of agency requiring a high degree of what Anthony Giddens calls reflexive

monitoring (Giddens 1984:9). This gives rise to a retrospective clarification of Max

Webers typology of action, where what Weber called traditional actionmore

accurately, habitual agencymapped habitus as described here.6 Agency organizes

resources embedded in fields cohered by various institutional constraints. Strategic

agency, then, combines particular unconscious habits with interests of given human

individuals who utilize particular resources in particular fields patterned by particular

institutional orders.Bourdieu analytically sharpened Webers distinction between material and ideal in-

terests by instead distinguishing economic from symbolic interests. This emphasizes

symbols as emergent properties of reality, materially efficacious in their own

right.7 Economic interests concern the need of agents for economic goods and or-

ganizational resources in order to get by and get along in particular institutional

contexts. Symbolic interests concern the need of agents for a minimal degree of psy-

chological continuity between individual identity and social rules of the game as

a requisite of getting by and getting along.8 Language skills serve as a limit case

4Lakoff and Johnson (1999:51348) summarize extensive experimental evidence demolishing the ratio-nal actor model of human agency. Such evidence shows [m]ost of our thought is below the level ofconsciousness (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:556).

5Bourdieu acknowledged that [t]imes of crises, in which the routine adjustment of subjective andobjective structures is brutally disrupted, constitute a class of circumstances when indeed rational choicemay take over, at least among those agents who are in a position to be rational (Bourdieu and Wacquant1992:131).

6Much confusion arose from Webers typology of action, in part because he classified habit as tradi-tional action determined by ingrained habituation (Weber 1978:25). Reformulating Webers distinctionsin terms of agency as done here avoids this problem. Moreover, collapsing Webers concept of traditionalauthority, based on that which has always been (Weber 1978:36), and his ideal type of traditionalaction, can be avoided by calling the latter habitual agency and thus demarcating models of agencyfrom the comparative-historical analysis of institutional orders.

7

The distinction between economic and symbolic interests complements Robert N. Bellahs reconstruc-tion of Durkheims sociology in terms of symbolic realism (Bellah 1973:lii). In conceptualizing symbolicrealism, Bellah further distinguished the cognitive symbolism of science from the moral-ethical symbolismof religion.

8So long as symbolic forms are conceptualized as emergent properties of reality, the acknowledgmentof the causal efficacy of symbolic forms in no way entails an idealistic methodology, despite the claimsof some like Peter Blau (1998).


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of the reality of symbolic interests, as the inability to speak a regional language

radically marginalizes individuals.

Recognition of the possibility that agents may risk social deathmay refuse to

play the game as institutionalizedfigures centrally in Bourdieus analysis of the

cultural field and his conception of the latter as the economic world reversed (Bour-

dieu 1993). The possibility of risking social death is homologous in Bourdieu to no-tions like transcendence, moral responsibility, and ethical principle in a large variety

of social thought. Take Jurgen Habermass conception of communicative action,

agency oriented to following the internal logic of argumentto valuing truthfor

its own sake, regardless of strategic consequences (Habermas 1984:10241). To pur-

sue the imperative of truth in settings strategically subordinated to maintenance of

a field of powersuch as the Soviet Academy of Sciencesis to risk social death

in this field, as many dissident Soviet scientists found out. Of course, the concept of

social death encompasses more than communicative action or moral agency,

including less ethical behavior deviating from institutional norms, such as crime.

All of this sets up the mapping of material and symbolic interests onto networksand institutional fields through application of concepts of capitals. Concepts of

economic, social, and cultural capital provide a robust way for mapping social rela-

tions in terms of resources between patterns of trajectory adjustment among agents,

and the changing institutional morphology of social fields across which they are

networked.

Economic capital maps property resources that can be monetized to some degree.

While such resources seem obvious to modern agents, they in fact presuppose a long

differentiation of property rights across the whole modern era. Social and cultural

capital, while more ancient, remain more difficult to quantify, in part because social

and cultural resources remain deeply embedded in various mutual obligations andnormative entailments from which property is now often legally detached. Practically,

this means individuals have a hard time conceptualizing social relations entailing

normative identifications in strategic terms.

To begin, social and cultural capital map assets beyond property resources

economic capitalavailable to agents in given situations. Social capital represents

the strategic value of social networks in which an agent is embedded. Indeed, the

core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value (Putnam 2000:

1819). Cultural capital captures the strategic value of past socialization and skills

embodied in an agent as habitus at a given time in the social fields in which he or she

is networked.9

Now, such agents usually negotiate fields habitually, through a roughcorrespondence between institutional routines and the habitus of agents. Reflective

action proper tends to emerge in more complex situations, supplementing habitual

agency in circumstances of challenge, stress, confusion, and the like. 10

Applying the concepts of cultural and social capital to more status-oriented soci-

eties, where monetization remains highly constrained, necessitates framing them more

broadly as types of assets. Conceptualizing social and cultural capital as subtypes

of cultural and social assets generalizes their range of applicability by historicizing

9

The concept of social capital here synthesizes ideas from Bourdieu (1986) and Putnam (2000), whilethe concept of cultural capital comes directly from Bourdieu (1986). The concept of human capital usedby Putnam collapses cultural with human capital per se by overlooking human health as a strategicallysignificant indice of biological capital.

10Habitus being the social embodied, it is at home in the field it inhabits, it perceives it immediately asendowed with meaning and interest (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:128). Thus action sometimes emergesreflectively from agency out of a practical difficulty encountered by the person.


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instances of assets along evolutionary continuums. For instance, the capitalization

of assetstheir expression in monetary terms and institutionalization as property

rightsdoes not imply the complete disappearance of nonmonetizable assets. Take

the example of the notes a speaker prepares for a presentation: These notes in them-

selves may have little or no market value, yet remain highly valuable to the speaker

herself as they aid in presentations that in turn help consolidate this speakers value inan academic environment distributing monetary resources. Other examples abound,

from the preparation of household meals to the centrality of parental work in child

rearing.

Only a continuum expresses this relation properly, as a totally monetized society

has nevernor probably can everexist. The continuum running from nonmonetary

assets, on one end, to monetizable capitals on the other, presupposes the emergence

over time of more complex networks out of less complex networks as money-relations

developed. Generic concepts thus bound continuums developing over human history.

Continuums move such concepts closer to empirical reality by employing their typi-

fying either/or distinctions heuristically to enable research along mixed lines andthe construction of fine historical descriptions of cases (Fuchs 2001:55). In the cases

at hand, the distinction between nonmonetary and monetary assets maps develop-

mental sequences in relation to an observational perspective presupposing extensive

monetization. The terms cultural and social assets not only aid the recognition

of sometimes highly misrecognized forms of power in circumstances where markets

are either absent or subordinate.11 They also enable the adaptation of concepts pre-

supposing a contemporary market context to nonmarket situations, what Max Weber

called status-oriented social worlds. 12

In sum, habitus, occasionally supplemented by more reflective action, steers agents

along institutional trajectories. Agents in turn deploy various assets in the fields inwhich they pursue strategic interests. Thus agents follow specific institutional trajec-

tories mapping the larger developmental histories of their social world, as we see

clearly when assessing the historical degree of capitalization of assets an agent

mobilizes in behaving strategically. The agentic process of routine adjustment within

stable institutions constitutes the simplest pattern of trajectory adjustment.

TRAJECTORY ADJUSTMENT ALONG INSTITUTIONAL PATHS

THROUGH FIELDS

Routines mark the prevalence of habitus reproducing stable institutions among net-works of agents. Their explanatory significance lies in a careful conceptualization

of relations between habitus as an amalgam of embodied dispositions, and insti-

tutional arrangements taken for granted in such networks. Institutions are in fact

regenerated on an ongoing basis through the habitus of agents. The task, then,

is to conceptualize the reproduction of institutional orders steering networks via

the reproduction of distinct individual habitusof individual clusters of embodied

dispositions.

11

Bourdieus ill-advised generalization of market to designate just about any strategically employablesymbolic form detaches markets from money, and mars an otherwise useful set of distinctions; see Bourdieu(1991:5257).

12Commercial classes arise in a market-oriented economy, but status groups arise within the frameworkof organizations which satisfy their wants through monopolistic liturgies, or in feudal or in standisch-patrimonial fashion. Depending on the prevailing mode of stratification, we shall speak of a statussociety or a class society (Weber 1978:306).


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Such linkages form constantly in socialization processes as agents master various

skills and, in so doing, both internalize institutional orders and alter them over time.

Indeed, the social passage from childhood to adulthood exemplifies how institutions

entail both embodied and relational aspects. The latter appear to agents as behavioral

expectations presupposing wide agentic recognition, even when this recognition

operates unconsciously, that is, habitually. Indeed, people often remain blind tohow they generate, reproduce, and disrupt institutions in daily life.

Indeed, the key to grasping how institutions work lies in fully grasping their si-

multaneously internal (bodily) and external (relational) aspects. Internally, an

institution turns out to be a set of ideas and sentiments (Bellah 1973:xlii) stabi-

lizing habitual dispositions. Externally, an institution appears as an obligatory social

relation ordering networks across space and time. We here call institutional order

observable among networks an emergent property of agents interacting over time.

As patterns of social relations, institutional orders entail internalization of rough

paradigms modified to varying degrees by agents. The habitualization of such

rough paradigms in turn steers much of social interaction. The internalization ofsuch institutional paradigms by agents steering them to routine acceptance of state

power constitutes what Weber called legitimacy. We return to legitimacy shortly. For

now, we can define an institutional order explicitly as an obligatory form of getting

by and getting along in an established social setting, an obligatory form that entails

both embodied and relational aspects.

Institutions are obligatory insofar as failure to conform to established ways of

doing things either entails some significant cost in resources, time, or status; or

provokes marginalization, sanctions, or even exclusion from the situation in which

given institutions are effective. For this reason, Emile Durkheim described patterns

of human behavior enabled by institutions in terms of moral forces (Durkheim1961:41). Such integration is only possible through socialization, which embeds pat-

terns of behavior in agents as rough paradigms that render circumstances routine

probabilistically likelyacross networks and thus steer agents over time.13 The

clarification of how such embodied institutional paradigms enable the reproduction

of relational institutional orders stands as an underdeveloped aspect of social the-

ory, an aspect that turns on clarifying the legitimacy of state power as an embodied

dispositionan institutional paradigmas we will see in a moment. The origins,

reproduction, and disintegration of institutions thus shape how personalities, groups,

networks, and organizationsincluding statesoriginate, stabilize, and disintegrate.

Conceiving institutions as obligatory patterns of getting by and getting alongamong networks presupposes the prior socialization of individuals in ways that em-

bed institutional paradigms on their bodies in the form of habitus. In this way, the

embedding of rough paradigms of expected behavior as habitus in large numbers of

agents orders the external fields through which agents network.

Institutions can be either customary or formally codified. In a customary situation,

written rules specifying expected behavior often do not exist. Such knowledge is a

matter of being raised in a given way of life and developing an intuitive sense,

a feel for the game, embodied as habitus. And indeed, through much of human

history, the vast majority of people have been functionally illiterate. The reproduction

13The idea that institutions presuppose internalized paradigms of expected behavior among agentsderives from Durkheim, Bellah (1973), Bourdieu (1984:16975), Durkheim (1961), and Mouzelis (1995:7677). The concept of such institutions as steering patterns derives from Habermas (1987:165), albeit withconsiderable modification.


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and elaboration of customary institutions has thus often been realized through rituals

understood as central to both the identity of personalities and groups.

More recent history has witnessed the rise and elaboration of formally codified

institutions, involving the written codification of expected patterns of behavior as

laws and regulations presupposing literacy. Examples of the latter are common, such

as corporate handbooks given to employees in enterprises. All formal organizationsentail such patterns of institutional steering by means of rules, codes, and the like,

and this codification in turn entails what Weber called bureaucratization. Confor-

mity to institutions enables routines in social life. Institutions are thus the primary

patterning element of human social relationships.

Agents adjust their trajectories to extant institutions, and to a much more limited

extent, occasionally succeed in having improvised patterns of behavior coopted into

an institutional order. This incrementally shifts paradigmatic exemplars of what is

expected in otherwise stable institutional orders. Trajectory adjustment thus includes

some cases of nonroutine agency that nevertheless pose no threat to institutional re-

production. Think of much culturally or economically innovative behavior in contem-porary American society. The distinction between routine and nonroutine thus

fails to distinguish situations where institutions undergo actual disintegration, from

situations where institutional orders either coopt or marginalize entrepreneurial

institutionally innovativeor disruptive behavior.

Trajectory adjustment, then, maps the process of getting by and getting along in

social fields, so long as the institutions that order a given field remain stable. This is

what routine behavior means. Here, agents deploy assets by adjusting their behavior

in line with both informal expectations and codifications of how various social fields

will be ordered over time, as illustrated in Figure 2. Bear in mind that Figure 2

represents institutions as a whole, including both individual habitus on the level ofpersonalities (institutional paradigms), and obligatory social relations (institutional

orders).

Transnational demonstration effects in the figure map the influence of events

and processes outside of a state field that link the global to the local through the

mediation of social networks.14 By orienting local dispositions to global cores,

transnational demonstration effects serve institutional isomorphisminstitutional

homogenizationon a transnational scale. 15 Yet regional media representations and

network relations mediate such transnational perceptions, underscoring the primacy

of state-society relations for patterns of trajectory adjustment and improvisation.

Thus the concept of demonstration effect allows us to situate states in relation toeach other in ways that historically and geographically contextualize processes of

trajectory adjustment in a single state.

At this point, the special role of the state as a meta-field (Bourdieu and

Wacquant 1992:18), a field of fields, emerges. First, note that the concept field

maps the boundaries of stable institutions. In modern societies, the state legitimizes

such institutions in terms of sovereignty, ideology, and law. Both popular and legal

notions of sovereignty, for instance, recognize the unique institutional positions of

states in the modern world, whose breakdown and disintegration remain closely tied

to emergent processes of trajectory improvisation. When institutional disintegration

14Transnational here signals processes operating in several national contexts simultaneously and yetautonomously from national or international institutions, such as transnational social movements or no-tions of human rights. The concept of transnational demonstration effect modifies that of internationaldemonstration effect; for the latter, see Bendix (1984:11419) and Janos (1986:8495).

15This analysis expands to a transnational perspective ideas developed by DiMaggio and Powell (1991).


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It0 It1 It2 It3

Ht0 Ht1 Ht2 Ht3

DEt1 DEt2

global spaceof state

formatio

ns= w

orldo

rderas

megafie

ld

regional space of

asovere

ign stat

eform

ation

asma

cro

fi

eld

H = habitus, including embodied institutional paragdigmsI = institutional ordersDE = demonstation effects

Figure 2. The trajectory correction model of social reproduction and social change.

occurs in ostensibly nonpolitical fields such as business, education, or the like, the

larger meta-field of a state may remain. Institutional disintegration in such envi-

ronments thus often fails to threaten erosion of state legitimacy. Thus the crisisremains localized or sectoralized.

More rarely, however, political strife metastasizes into subversion of the space of

[state] spokesmen, that is to say the political field as such (Bourdieu 1988:193). As

the legitimacy of state spokesmen disintegrates, the state as an institutional order may

disintegrate as well. From the perspective of agents, state breakdown appears as what

Habermas calls a legitimation crisis (Habermas 1975). Indeed, Webers concept of

legitimacy maps state institutions onto institutional paradigms reproduced at the

level of agents habitus. How, then, to analyze framing patterns among contending

groupsfrom control of media instruments to orchestration of political spectacles

as a state disintegrates?

FROM TRAJECTORY ADJUSTMENT TO TRAJECTORY IMPROVISATION

State disintegration generalizes disruption of routine patterns of trajectory adjust-

ment. In such cases, a process of trajectory improvisation among a limited network

of agents emerges as the centripetal force in an otherwise centrifugal situation by

serving as an alternative locus of legitimacy, an archetype of a nascent, postrevo-

lutionary (or postinvasion) political order. A relatively small network of political

entrepreneurs thus improvises a new behavioral proto-paradigm around which

larger social groups eventually adjust their trajectories, in the process legitimizingand eventually institutionalizing an alternative postrevolutionary (or postinvasion)

political order.

Figure 3 models the process of trajectory improvisation. Demonstration effects may

serve here as macrosystem shocks destabilizing a process of trajectory adjustment


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H = habitus, including embodied institutional paragdigmsI = institutional ordersDE = demonstation effectMS = macrosystem shock = signals unfavorable shift in system environmentTI = truncated institutional ordersIN = informal networksOS = organizational shells of formerly strongly institutionalized organizationsIO = institutional outcomes

TIt4

It0 It1 It2 It3 OSt4 IOt5

INt4

Ht0 Ht1 Ht2 Ht3 Ht4 Ht5

Institutional Breakdown = t4

t4a t4b t4c t4d

DEt1 DEt2 DEt3

regional space ofa sove

reignstat

eform

ation

asmacrofi

eld

global space of stateform

ations =

world

ordera

smegaf

ield

MSt3

Figure 3. The trajectory improvisation model of institutional breakdown.

that in other circumstances might disseminate them without contributing to state

disintegration. Again, this figure distinguishes relational and embodied aspects of

institutions as a whole in terms of institutional paradigms embodied as habitus, and

social relations as institutional orders.

Legitimacy stabilizes institutions through the reproduction of institutional

paradigms among agents, at the level of habitus. Agents who accept as legitimate

the exercise of power by senior figures in a hierarchy cushion the local reception of

transnational demonstration effects. Among core institutional groups, legitimacy

appears as in some way obligatory and exemplary and entails both voluntary andhabitual submission, what Weber called the normative validity of an institutional

order (Weber 1978:31). In more peripheral positions outside network cores, habitu-

ation to the exercise of authority becomes institutionalized as a routine pattern of

getting by and getting along, what Weber called the empirical validity of an insti-

tution (Weber 1978:3233). Following Stephen Fuchs (2001:28487), the distinction

between core and peripheral legitimacy captures the gist of Webers somewhat ob-

scure distinction between the normative and empirical validity of a social order. 16

Empirical analysis needs to assess who in networks displays belief in legitimate

16Fuchss version of network theory, however, puzzlingly reduces agency to observation in a way thatreifies social phenomena repeatedly. Thus, institutions instead of agents are conceived as perceiving:Institutions are the blind spots of a network, that which it perceives and does what comes naturally toit (Fuchs 2001:285).


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authority, and who merely takes it for granted as a matter of habit or accepts it out

of expedience.

Locating institutional cores and peripheries of networks maps both hierar-

chies across various fields, and the economic, social, and cultural assets available to

agents. Mapping strategic behavior in this way traces institutional constraints. As

Weber realized long ago, the degree of deviation from such constraints can only beassessed probabilistically (Ringer1997:6772). Automobile drivers, to give a trivial

example, may more likely run red lights late at night than during the day. Indeed,

without such constraints, altruistic behavior favorable to institutional reproduction

what Durkheim called solidaritydeclines.

The collapse of legitimate authority disrupts routines across networks and triggers

various responses mediated by the situations in which agents find themselves. Such a

process can be measured in terms of splits between and among holders of high state

positionscore network positions in a stateover how to deal with the deterioration

of hitherto routine political power, habitualized self-limitations on strategic behavior,

and shrinking probabilities of obedience among more peripheral agents. The pro-cess of getting by and getting along mapped by the concepts of institutions and

trajectory adjustment, in short, disintegrates.

Here, an important qualification again deserves emphasis. Trajectory improvisation

occurs all the time in institutionally stablethat is, widely legitimatefields of activ-

ity in which larger processes of trajectory adjustment prevail. But here, such impro-

visation either tends toward cooptation within stable institutional arrangements, or

leads to relative marginalization of agents as deviants of some sort. Cooptation oc-

curs frequently, indicating how institutions may incrementally change over timeand

thus generate shifts in routine expectationswithout suffering serious destabilization.

Simultaneously, marginalization also occurs frequently, as networks of agents tendto favor those who conform to institutional expectations over those who deviate too

far from them. Thus the process of trajectory adjustment includes supplementary in-

stances of trajectory improvisation that may prove significant for institutional change

over time.

Assumptions of convergence between trajectory adjustment and routine behav-

ior, and trajectory improvisation and nonroutine behavior, do not then always hold.

Certainly, trajectory improvisation by definition entails nonroutine behavior. But tra-

jectory adjustment entails supplementary instances of nonroutine agency all the time,

as just outlined. For these reasons, the distinction between routine and nonrou-

tine situations as a way of classifying social movements (Useem 1998:215) remainswanting. Indeed, routine in relation to what? Here, the concept of institution is crit-

ical, for institutions are paradigmatic for expected conduct in situations they order,

and subsequently become routinized as habitual behavior. And routines presuppose

deep internalization in the habitus of agents.

Where institutions remain stable, some instances of nonroutine behavior

sometimes called innovation in contemporary American societymay even en-

hance institutions through modification. Other improvised patterns of behavior, in

contrast, may provoke intolerance from those exercising institutional authority, or

fail to gain significant enough support from more marginal agents to alter existing

institutions. Finally, agents engaging in chronic nonroutine behavior may face radicalmarginalization through stigmatization as malcontents, incompetents, criminals, the

mentally ill, and so on.

Among already socialized adults, marginalization entails, however, certain limits.

State personnel or other prestigious agents often do not have the power to strip


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agents facing marginalization of resources like minimal linguistic capacities they can

utilize to get by and get along in more marginal contexts, contexts relatively far

removed from the network cores of institutional orders (Fuchs 2001:28487). Thus,

exceptionally murderous state leaders have attempted totalistic control through

mass exterminations, as in the Hitler and Stalin regimes. While some agents may

behave in nonroutine ways without destabilizing institutions, a different situationmanifests when the key institution of a modern social order, sovereign state power,

breaks down. This is the process mapped by trajectory improvisation.

MAPPING THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF STATE DISINTEGRATION

Social theory has long recognized the centrality of patterns of institutional disinte-

gration in states, but has sometimes bracketed the analysis of revolutions from other

patterns of social conflict (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001:6). Moreover, bracket-

ing phenomena such as social movements and revolutions at times intersects with

conceptions locating action or interaction at a micro level, and structuressuch as states at a macro level. Theda Skocpol thus avoided the micro/macro

distinction by not invoking agency at all as an explanatory variable in framing a

common pattern of social revolution in the three cases of France in the late 1700s,

Russia in the early 1900s, and China in the mid-20th century (Skocpol 1979:343).

And yet, as Nicos Mouzelis has perceptively observed, numerous summits between

heads of state serve as immediate refutations of the assumption that action is

always micro and structure is always macro. Take for instance the Yalta Conference,

a case of interaction among three individualsChurchill, Roosevelt, and Stalinin

control of considerable resources, whose decisions and interactions stretch widely in

space and time (Mouzelis 1995:16). Why not recognize that Churchill, Roosevelt,and Stalin and their face-to-face interactions operated at the macro level?

Now take the homologous example of micro-level institutions, such as authority

relations in isolated, total religious sects such as the Heavens Gate grouplet that

committed ritual suicide near San Diego in March 1997. Here we have an example of

an institutional order whose effective boundarieswhose geographic and temporal

reachremained localized at the micro level of a few dozen people and their highly

restricted habitat.17 In late- and postcommunist Russia, tiny, tightly knit grouplets

proliferated at the margins of the left and right poles of the political field, though at

times they emerged as unexpectedly significant factors in the course of events. For

instance, in 1987 and 1988, the activities of the Democratic Union (Demokratickeskiisoiuz) on the left and Memory (Pamiat) on the right gained influence out of all

proportion to their size. At the same time, the enormous centralization of political

power in the Soviet Union lent disproportionate weight to a figure like Gorbachev

situated at the operational apex of the regime as an institutional hierarchy. And if

Gorbachev in 1988 does not count as a macro-level agent, who does? 18

Refiguring level distinctions in social systems as criteria for mapping both the spa-

tial and temporal reach of an agent or institution, and its embedding in hierarchies of

17The misleading distinction between macro-institutional structures and micro interaction disregards

not only the fact that face-to-face interactions can be macro, but also that institutional structures cantake a micro form. Consider, for instance, the banal example of a national business organization thathas a number of local branches. One can view the local organization as a social system related to a moreencompassing social system at the national level (Mouzelis 1995:18).

18Mouzelis (1995:27) lists additional examples of macroactors, such as political parties, trade unions,other pressure groups, and political leaders. Giesen (1987:34647) recognizes the possibility of macroac-tors, but unaccountably limits this possibility to the special case of an omniscient voluntaristic elite.


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status and power, transforms the micro-macro problem into an empirical problem

of reconstructing how micro-level agents and institutions are related hierarchically

and historically to macro-level agents and institutions. In developing level distinc-

tions for mapping social orders, the epistemological difference between analytic dis-

tinctions among levels within and between societies, on the one hand, and ontological

assumptions that action is always micro, while structure is always macro, on theother, needs to be clarified. Locating agency at the micro level and structures

such as institutions at the macro level in an a priori fashion collapses precisely this

distinction.

Too often, predominant framings of the micro-macro and structure-action prob-

lems in contemporary sociological theory stem from a failure to adequately recognize

either macro agents or micro institutions. Opting instead for a spatial-temporal over

an action-structure framing of the micro-macro distinction unifies the various theo-

retical moves sketched above. We can now map how routines entail agents habitually

adjusting their trajectories to expected behavior in various settings, a process that

enables larger institutional reproduction. Distinguishing various meso levels interme-diate between the local and the state in the political fields of various societies in

analyzing state disintegration and the concomitant shift from trajectory adjustment

to trajectory improvisation thus proves useful. At the same time, framing the world

system as a mega level always operating in the background and transcending and

potentially penetrating all lower spatial-temporal regions allows us to situate how

demonstration effects operate across state fields.

Using a strictly geographical model of level distinctionsfrom micro to meso

to macro to megareturns attention to the central empirical focus of institutional

disintegration, the breakdown of states. While some very geographically small and

sparsely populated states have existed and continue to exist (in Micronesia, for in-stance) state disintegration usually develops as a macro phenomenon, simply due

to the geographic reach of most state institutions. The breakdown of a state, then,

entails disintegration of the field of fieldssovereign powerthat stabilize mod-

ern societies. Figure 4 maps the social geography made possible by refiguring the

micro-macro distinction along spatial-temporal lines.

The disintegration of micro institutionssuch as the bankruptcy of a small

enterpriseis often trivial from the perspective of general social reproduction and

disintegration, as it usually does not affect larger processes of trajectory adjust-

ment. The disintegration of macro institutions such as a state, however, repre-

sents another matter altogether. Such disintegration develops as a possible outcome

Mega level the level of the world system, its continental regions, transnational

trade and information flows, and global governance

structures

Macro level the level of state-sovereignty as defined in the international state-

system

Meso level the level of intra-state regions, cities, and economic sectors

Micro level the level of localities and face-to-face interactions among the

relatively powerless

Figure 4. Analytical levels of society.


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of processes of contentious politics that transgress institutional parameters initially

containing them.19 Certainly, the emergence of transgressive political processes only

occasionally culminate as revolutions, outcomes entailing the full institutional dis-

integration of a state order. But the emergence of contentious processes internal to

the geographic reach of state institutions that generate transgressive featuresnewly

self-identified political agents and innovative forms of collective agency (McAdam,Tarrow, and Tilly 2001:5)invariably precede actual revolutions. Transnational pro-

cesses of political contention, particularly international warfare, may also culminate

in regime disintegration, even where a regime manages to effectively repress the for-

mation of internal social movements. In either case, the institutional disintegration

of a state is coterminous with the generalization of trajectory improvisation proper

within a states geographic reach, for state agents often enforce the rules of insti-

tutional interaction across various fields over which state sovereignty extends. When

the capacity of such agents to bound political processes collapses, state breakdown

reaches advanced levels. Figure 1 maps this continuum from routine to disintegrative

processes.

USING TRAJECTORY IMPROVISATION TO MAP THE DISINTEGRATION

OF STATE INSTITUTIONS

The geographic reach of institutions mapped above signals why the disintegration

of states triggers a process of trajectory improvisation in ways that a simple dis-

tinction between routine and nonroutine behavior cannot.20 First we should again

note that such patterns of institutional disintegration may occur in much more lim-

ited settingsthink, for instance, of the sudden bankruptcy of a large enterprise

like Enron, or the dissolution of a college under protracted financial stress. Butthe disintegration of such organizations does not entail the larger disintegration of

other enterprises or colleges, and so the effects are often relatively modest on larger

institutional fields.

Full disintegration at the level of institutions proper usually entails significant po-

litical unrest. But even here, if an institutional order is differentiated enough, splitting

a field of power into multiple fields of power, considerable unrest does not necessarily

trigger outright institutional disintegration at the level of a state. Exemplary cases

here include the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 1950s and 1960s in

the United States, and the French student movement of 1968. These movements gen-

erated extensive changes in the American and French political orders, and yet did sowithout bringing about a disintegration of either the American or French states. In

these cases, American and French political institutions contained trajectory impro-

visation, though clashes of contentious trajectories considerably altered how these

states operated by forcing out some holders of high state offices and compelling

others to relegitimize political authority though extensive reforms.

We thus see a close relationship between movement containment, substantial re-

form, and institutional modifications of modern democratic states in the second half

19

See McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001:47) for a fuller definition of contentious politics used through-out this article. Though McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly employ a more restrictive notion of action (2001:6162), their model of contentious politics remains compatible with the broader concepts of agency andhabitus used here.

20For instance, see Bert Useem (1998), who differentiates social movements in terms of routine andnonroutine circumstances without more concretely assessing the institutional contexts in which movementsoperate.


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of the 20th century. Indeed, the institutional flexibility entailed by state capacities

to tolerate such reforms stands as a distinguishing feature of modern representative

democracies.

Outside of post-World War II representative democracies in the core of the

world system, basic conditions of political institutions help explain why social move-

ments sometimes continue to trigger regime disintegration.

21

What may appear as afairly routine process of movement mobilization through legal channels within core

representative democraciesfrom the formation of environmental advocacy groups

to attempts to organize unionsthus appear outside of these areas as much more

confrontational. In extreme cases, such as communist or other party-stateslike

the Baath regime in Iraq, overthrown by the American military invasion of spring

2003any attempt to organize independently of the party-state usually generates

swift and harsh repression. (We return to the concept of party-state below.) At the

same time, attempts to create a more authoritarian set of state institutional controls

in the United States since the tragedy of September 11, 2001, may trigger the reemer-

gence of more strife and political instability, reminding us that the consolidation ofrepresentative democracy in the core postwar democracies could erode.

Theories of social movements, then, must historically contextualize the state envi-

ronments in which they emerge. The distinctive institutional array that has allowed

postwar core representative democracies to tolerate much higher degrees of mobi-

lization than authoritarian states, for instance, deserve careful attention in carrying

out initial comparative analysis. The models of trajectory adjustment and trajectory

improvisation provide a means of doing so by bringing the state back in, al-

beit in the limited sense of contextualizing what constellation of institutions a given

state entails, and why a party-state like the Soviet Union in 1985 felt threatened

by the formation of social groups and movements seen as posing no significantthreat in postwar American, European, and, more recently, East Asian representative

democracies.

Shifts from trajectory adjustment to improvisation at the level of states proper fo-

cuses on how agents are forced by the disintegration of political institutions into

trying to improvise patterns of behavior that eventually become paradigmatic,

in the process generating an alternate political order out of relative chaos. This is

possible in part because of the fact that individuals continue to seek a paradigm

of institutional behavior even when the latter has disintegrated, what Bourdieu

called the hysteresis effect after the phenomenon of iron filings that shift in re-

lation to a magnet only after a lag of a second or more (Bourdieu and Wacquant1992:130).

Institutional hysteresis describes a situation in which paradigmatic socialization

the primary embodiment of dispositions of what is expected in various situations

on which agents relymaintains patterns of network interactions among groups of

agents even after the disintegration of a state as an institutional order. This leads

to a basic assumption about such situations that calls for further empirical inves-

tigation: namely, in a social setting where political institutions disintegrate, many,

perhaps even a majority, of agents continue to orient themselves to the now defunct

21In contexts where the political system offers multiple channels of institutionalized access to chal-lengers and where authorities react by accommodation and concessions, institutionalization will predom-inate, and radicalization may remain very limited. If, however, the regime offers few channels of access,responds by repression and is unwilling to reform, radicalization will be the dominant outcome . . . Thefundamental weakness of authoritarian systems is that they lack . . . routinized forms of conflict resolutionand mediation (Koopmans 2004:29, 39).


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institution. Only those trying to improvise an alternative political paradigma new

institutionwill be in any position to capture such disoriented behavior. Thus

while most of the time, politically rebellious networks suffer marginalization, in much

rarer circumstances, they emerge as centers of possible crystallization of alternate po-

litical institutions.

An alternative situation arises when highly authoritarian regimes collapse in theface of external military intervention, as in Iraq in March and April 2003. Here, we

see a situation where mass repression by the Baathist state prevented the formation

of social movements until the practical collapse of the regime during the invasion.

Thus a power vacuum opened in Iraq, in which groups and movements improvised

across networks in a situation polarized by guerilla warfare between the American-led

occupation and a shadowy range of opponents.

We can now situate quite diverse processes of trajectory improvisation in terms

of their causal predicates. At the same time, the very diversity of such predicates

underscores that trajectory improvisation is a model, not an explanatory theory, of

institutional disintegration. Indeed, as the triggers of processes of trajectory impro-visation are diverse, they call for the application of supplementary models finely

attuned to diverse circumstances. One possible set of triggers prior to actual trajec-

tory improvisation, for instance, lies in the mobilization of social movements. Indeed,

social movement mobilization may well play a central role in triggering the shift from

trajectory adjustment to trajectory improvisation we retrospectively call revolution-

ary situations. Trajectory improvisation triggered in part by social movements thus

must be mapped out of processes of trajectory adjustment with the aid of supple-

mentary models of such movements. Once such contextualization is carried out, the

model of trajectory improvisation captures how social assets instantiated in networks,

and cultural assets embodied in habitus, both constrain and enable perceptual shiftsin favor of rebellion in specific developmental processes.

Political processes that entail shifts from routines, to institutionally contained con-

flicts, to patterns of contention transgressing institutional boundaries, and finally,

to institutional disintegration of a state per se, cannot be understood if the devel-

opmental sequences from one phase to the next are bifurcated into routine and

nonroutine segments and treated separately as two distinct phenomena with differ-

ent explanatory entailments. Indeed, recent attempts to bifurcate the study of social

movements along lines of routine circumstances of resource mobilization, and

nonroutine circumstances of breakdown, suggest instead how the absence of a

larger model of social institutions and their disintegration may confuse issues in so-cial movement theory.22 Such a bifurcation misses how the rise of social movements

have sometimes destabilized previously stable institutions, and thus played constitu-

tive roles in the unraveling of previously routine into nonroutine situations.23

Moreover, such a bifurcation of movements entails bifurcating the developmental

analysis of the same process over time when that process marks emergence of a

revolutionary situation.

22

For recent work in social movement theory bifurcating situations in which social movements emergeinto routine and nonroutine situations, leading to distinct resource mobilization and breakdown mod-els of movements, see Useem (1998) and Buechler (2004).

23Both logic and evidence seem to suggest that the breakdown and RM [resource mobilization] theoriesexplain different kinds of collective action. Each approach deserves recognition. Also, much of interestappears to occur in some sort of amalgam between breakdown and RM processes (Useem 1991:235).For the amalgam offered here, see the following paragraph.


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For these reasons, social movements are framed here following the political

process model of social movements,24 which recognizes both that movements are

complex developmental phenomena developing recursively in relation to the institu-

tions they impact; and that such movements represent the emergence of mobilized, if

often informally organized, networks of agents, in distinction from the spontaneous

activity of crowds, riots, crimes, and the like often treated under larger and moreinchoate notions of collective action.

MAPPING POLITICAL PROCESSES OF STATE BREAKDOWN

By foregrounding the interaction of agents in networks, questions of how political

processes engender social movements intersect with questions rising from a second

relevant tendency in social movement theory, namely, identity theories of such

movements (Cohen 1985:690705). Bringing the two approaches together entails con-

textualizing political processes in relation to broader cultural contexts in order to

understand how such movements attempt to change them (Joppke 1993:1218.).

First, three initial conditions of political processes of social movements areidentified:25

(a) changes in political opportunities that alter a previously stableinstitutionally

securepolitical field;

(b) mobilizable assets among various potential opposition networks;

(c) a perceptual shift in framing processes favorable to mobilization among a

critical mass of oppositionists in such a changing political field.

Initially, then, splits at the top fire perceptual shifts among outsiders who re-

spond by mobilizing assets, triggering the formation of social movements and some-times, by extension, processes of institutional disintegration. Next, the problem of

contextualizing framing processes must be accomplished in order to explain how this

pattern develops. Here, framing techniques, control of media instruments, access to

various audiences, and orchestration of political spectaclesrallies, demonstrations,

protestsmediates the course of events, which unfold in a particular cultural con-

text.26 Agents evading, challenging, and defending established political institutions

frame processes of mobilization to themselves, to their opponents, and to larger au-

diences by bringing processes of mediation into play in order to address a political

field in ways that are culturally intelligible. 27 At this point, representations of political

supportsuch as perceived views among segments of the Russian people (narod)at the end of the 1980smay become virtual figures in a social movement. Such

representations link groups in networks through patterns of habit, identification, and

interest.

24The political process model gained its name from Doug McAdam (1982:3659), though it has beensubstantially modified in recent years. See Joppke (1993:1018); McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996);Tarrow (1998:1825); and finally McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001:1420) for overviews of the evolutionof the political process model. The resource mobilization model of social movements grew out of distinctearlier work by McCarthy and Zald (1977) and Tilly (1978), whose work subsequently converged with thepolitical process model.

25

The following adapts McAdam (1982:3659); McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (1996); and Tarrow(1998) in ways compatible with both Cohen and Joppke.26See Cohen (1985) for an extended analysis of how agents identities mediated processes of mobilization

in Western peace, feminist, and ecological movements in the 1980s. The developing political process modeleclipsed calls for a theory of new social movements.

27See Bourdieu (1991:10716, 163202), Gamson (1992), Snow et al. (1986), and Snow and Benford(1988).


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The social geography of networksmapped in terms of their internal patterns of

social closure, their spatio-temporal extensiveness, and their degree of enmeshing in

vertical lines of power and statusthus figures centrally in how the struggle for

position feeds back into secular patterns of political change. As institutional break-

down deepened at the top of the Soviet party-state in the late 1980s, for instance,

the complexity of network interactions increased rapidly as institutional cohesiondisintegrated.

Such processes unfold nationally in relation to sovereign power, though local, re-

gional, and transnational dynamics often figure prominently in their development.28

The social geography of networksmapped in terms of their internal patterns of

social closure, their spatio-temporal extensiveness, and their degree of enmeshing in

vertical lines of power and statusfigures centrally in how the struggle for position

feeds back into secular patterns of political change. The complexity of the network

interactions altering the dynamics of the destabilized situation as a whole increases

rapidly as institutional cohesion buckles, organizational controls wane, and the flu-

idity of the situation accelerates in chaotic ways. Here we face the three-fold task oftracing how agents framed the experience of state breakdown as they struggled to

influence the course of events; factoring in the impact of transnational demonstra-

tion effects into processual dynamics; and then integrating agentic perspectives into

analyses of changing patterns of social closure, latent network resources, and habitus

in key institutional domains.29

An identity-oriented political process modela contextual political process per-

spective (Joppke 1993:418)situates these analytical tasks by orienting the selec-

tion of evidence along three main lines: a change in the array of prior, institutionally

stable, political opportunities; the presence of mobilizable assets among various po-

tential opposition networks; and a perceptual shift in patterns of framing favoringrebellion. But that is all it can do. In this sense, an identity-oriented political pro-

cess approach maps an initial strategy for going about the reconstruction of how a

relatively stable political order might unravel internally, rather than a predictive

theory. What the political process model outlines, in sum, are necessary conditions

for the emergence of social movements that may trigger a larger shift from trajec-

tory adjustment to trajectory improvisation in the field of fields, the state. As the

identification of necessary conditions for social mobilization and political revolu-

tion to be possible at all still lacks any predictive applicability, the model requires

subsequent empirical analysis of the unstable situation that makes political revolu-

tion possible, and additional tracking of the dynamic relation between agency andpolitical orderor lack of it.

Due to the complexity of the processes involved with their reproduction and

transformationand the concomitant large number of potential variables involved

in their developmental trajectory and the difficulty of assigning practical criteria of

approximating many of themsocial orders have defied successful modeling on the

pattern of evolution equations, equations of simple systems in the physical sciences.

28The specification of federal-national and world levels are well understood in many contemporaryaccounts of social movements; see, for instance, Tarrow (1998:17695) on the longue duree of movement

waves.29There is a dialectical interaction between habitus and institutional position. . .

which underlies theprocess of social change: the new positions change the habitus of individuals, but individuals who arerecruited into those positions also affect the way institutions operate. It thus follows that we disagreestrongly with those who think that if the right institutions are implemented, the appropriate behaviorwill inevitably emerge . . . [R]ather . . . institutions and incumbents of institutional positions shape each otherin unpredictable ways (Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley 1998:8, 44).


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In the study of certain phenomena in the physical sciences, for instance, a system

of evolution equations with precisely quantifiable variables serves as a simplified

model for the time-varying behavior of an actual system (Kellert 1993:2). Using

such models, you ascertain sufficiently approximate values of the variables in the

system of evolution equations at a time t1 and get an accurate description of the

state of the system. Moreover, the model can be adjusted to any time tx by adjust-ing the value of the variables accordingly in ways that generate accurate predictions

of system states at tx. In this sense, the evolution equations of such a model serve

as an algorithmically compressed description of the systems possible developmental

trajectories (Barrow 1991:1416).

Such models are, however, limited by several conditions of applicability. First, the

number of variables involved in the evolution equations needs to be relatively low,

lest the complexity of feedback effects rapidly exceeds the models capacity to predict

system states with any accuracy (Percival 1991). Second, some practical criterion of

approximation of the values of the variables needs to hold, or else infinitesimally

small variations in the value of the variables at any time t will generate wildly un-predictable results, a situation of sensitive dependence on initial conditions used to

differentiate algorithmically compressible systems from what physicists call chaotic

systems.30

The chronic gap between algorithmic modeling in economic theory and the em-

pirical behavior of actual economies underscores why social systems often display

chaotic features (Waldrop 1992:1598). It makes more sense, then, to conceptual-

ize political regimes and other social phenomena as emergent social orders, than

as systems amenable to algorithmic compression.31

As an immediate consequence of this, isolation of specific causes or mechanisms

from a revolutionary process in no way serves as an explanation for why such aprocess unfolded the way that it did, for sensitive dependence on initial conditions

means that processes of change in social orders are path-dependent historical pro-

cesses par excellence. The explanation of historical processes in such systems is the

enchainment of events along a particular path (Gould 1989:27791). The analytic

isolation of causal mechanisms from the developmental context can easily obscure

precisely what is of primary explanatory significance in such historical processes.

For instance, we can always construe an act as a mechanism insofar as we ac-

knowledge act a caused outcome b. Take the example of the attacks against the

World Trade Center on September 11, 2001: one can certainly claim that the actions

of the hijackers in piloting two passenger planes into the twin towers caused thetragedy. But this would be trivial from the perspective of what interests usof what

is important from the perspective of the cultural problem situation of 2001, and in

particular the hijackers agency. What we take to be causally significant about the

behavior of the hijackers on that September day is not so much the obvious fact that

the hijackers served as causal mechanisms in the collapse of two skyscrapers, as how

their activities fit into a broader chain of events, interactions, and developmental

processes in ways that illuminate why the perpetrators did what they did and what

this tells us about the cultural problem situation in 2001.

30In the scientific literature, these two types of physical systems are specifically differentiated as deter-ministic linear systems and deterministic nonlinear (chaotic) systems; see Gleick (1987), Hall (1991),Kellert (1993), and Prigogne and Stengers (1984).

31In recent years, for instance, the principal figure in the formation of world-systems theory, ImmanuelWallerstein, has altered his framing of the global order along lines of historical complexity(1997).


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This in turn means that explanations of processes like political revolutions take the

form of explanatory narratives of such processes as a whole. Explanatory narrative

subordinates the identification of causal mechanisms to the reconstruction of a spe-

cific enchainment of events in a historical process (Abbott 1992).32 Take the story

of a chess game: though each individual move can be described as the application

of a particular rule to a given situation, the developmental course of the game asa whole can only be explained in terms of a narrative account of how prior moves,

players relative competencies, strategic miscalculations, and other factors external

to the rules constrain the path along which the game runs its course.33 Here, both

analysis of the rules of chess as a causal mechanism, and the analysis of the condi-

tions constraining individual moves, serve as means to the end of telling the story of

how the game as a complex whole develops over time, and this latter is an irreducibly

historical story.

By extension, then, explanations of political revolutions must elucidate an explana-

tory narrative telling us why a particular enchainment of events unfolded the way that

it did, and no other. A contextualized political process model of social mobilizationinitially organizes such a narrative by identifying key conjunctures along the devel-

opmental path and articulating them with supplementary analyses of background

conditionsthe process of trajectory adjustment and shifts into conditions of trajec-

tory improvisationshaping particular conjunctures when called for. And it is here

that the epistemological limits of both the political process model of social move-

ments and the larger institutional models of trajectory adjustment and improvisation

manifest.

Rather than an explanatory strategy for identifying causal mechanisms along lines

convergent with the modeling of evolution equations, such models enable explana-

tory narratives of political revolutions or military defeats of states by building upa provisional set of necessary conditions preceding patterns of social mobilization

and political revolution, or interstate warfare.34 They do so on the basis of com-

parative analyses of extant historical cases in order to set up the initial analysis

of a discrete and unique sequence of events that elucidate rapid bouts of institu-

tional disintegration and reconsolidation in a social order. 35 In cases of revolution,

the political process model and the larger models of trajectory adjustment and im-

provisation together serve as heuristic devices for initially framing case studies of

social mobilization. The political revolution itself here appears as the breakdown of

the institutional integrity, the tipping over of political stability into a process of

institutional disintegration.

32The concept of explanatory narrative derives from Andrew Abbotts narrative positivism (Abbott1992); Stephen Jay Goulds delineation of the explanatory objectives of historical sciences (Gould 1989,1995); Margaret Somerss notion of causal narrativity (Somers 1996); and William H. Sewells conceptionof eventful sociology (Sewell 1996).

33See Webers elucidation of the analytic distinction between empirical regularities, implicit norms, andexplicit rules in constructing an explanation of the course of a hypothetical card game (Weber 1977:115

24).34A variety of mechanisms of social movements are specified by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001),for instance, but the authors stress that a contingent concatenation of historical circumstances take causalpriority in applying them to particular cases.

35Relations between theoretical generalization and empirical application in cases of institutional break-down need to be kept especially clear. For instance, Skocpols limitation of the theory of social revolutionto three cases remains elusive; see tensions between statements in Skocpol (1979:6, 3637, 39).


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TRAJECTORY IMPROVISATION IN URBAN RUSSIA, 19891991

In late-communist Russia, triggers leading from trajectory adjustment to trajectory

improvisation stand out. What started out as the perestroika(restructuring) reforms in

April 1985 led to the formation of about 30,000 unofficial voluntary associations by

December 1987 (Bonnell 1990:64), in a society where such open forms of autonomous

association had been actively repressed since the Soviet Civil War of 19181920. Cru-cially, such social mobilization was concentrated among a politically disenfranchised

but socially powerful group, the specialists (spetsialisty)professionals, intellectuals,

and managerial personnel involved with applied technical workin a few large Rus-

sian cities.36 This social stratum, while constituting close to 28 percent of the Soviet

population in 1989, formed nearly 80 percent of the turnout of activists to several key

meetings of the democratic movement in Moscow in spring 1992 (Garcelon 1997b:

48).

By the time the Gorbachev leadership deepened reform during and after the call-

ing of the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988, paralysis was gripping the So-

viet elite, the partocracy (partokratiia). The Nineteenth Party Conferencein fact,an irregular Congress of the Communist Party, previously meeting every five years

since the 1961 Twenty-Second Congressfirst called for semi-free elections to soviets

(sovety) of various levels and tentatively extended political protections to voluntary

associations in an effort to mobilize sections of Soviet society against conservative

partocrats. 37 This mobilization quickly radicalized, triggering a rebellion among spe-

cialist networks during the special semi-free elections called for a new institution,

the Congress of Peoples Deputies of the U.S.S.R. (CPD USSR), in late winter and

early spring of 1989.38 The specialist rebellion, in turn, elected much more radical

reformers to the CPD USSR than the Gorbachev leadership had anticipated.

Thus, between the launching ofperestroika in April 1985, through the NineteenthParty Conference and the special election campaign of early 1989, political processes

in the Soviet state rapidly transversed the first three phases of social mobilization

and institutional turbulence mapped out in Figure 1, from the reproduction of in-

stitutional routines, to the emergence of controlled contentious politics, and then on

to institutionally transgressive mobilization. In short, between April 1985 and early

1989, a process of trajectory improvisation began to supplant more routine patterns

of trajectory adjustment. Why, then, did institutional destabilization and extensive

movement mobilization accompany the Gorbachev reform drive?

Several historical peculiarities of the Soviet state as an institutional ordera

party-state as opposed to a national, representative democracymust be broughtto bear in order to clarify the comparative rigidity and fragility of Soviet institu-

tions in comparison with postwar representative democracies in Europe and North

36See Garcelon (1997b:48) and the more extended analysis in Garcelon (2005). The category spetsial-isty follows official Soviet standards.

37Party Conferences were mini-congresses called to deal with pressing organizational or ideologicalmatters, and had not been called for decades; the Eighteenth Party Conference, for example, was heldin February 1941 (Schapiro 1971:646). The final communique of the Nineteenth Conference emphasizedthe need to conduct open elections within Party organizations in accordance with the decisions of the

Conference on the reform of the political system and the democratization of Party life. . .

[To] carry-out. . .

a reorganization of the Party apparat, introducing essential changes in its structure in accordancewith [the Conferences] decisions to separate the functions of the Party and the soviets ( Izvestiia, July 2,1988).

38Semi-free elections here designate the complex mix of direct elections, elections by social organiza-tions such as trade unions, and appointment by the central political leadership used to convene deputies;see Chiesa (1993:1426).


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America. First, a party-state fuses party and state through a dual hierarchy

created by monopolistic control of a single ruling partythe Partyover all sig-

nificant aspects of social life. All organizations thus appear formally subordinate to,

and as at least potential auxiliaries of, the Party. 39 The move of the Gorbachev lead-

ership toward tolerance of some mobilization from below, combined with its attempts

to introduce semi-free elections, were thus fundamental reforms of Soviet institutions.Second, the consequences of institutionalization of party-state arrangements over

many decades were extensive and far reaching. The disappearance of any autonomy

from what are often called civil and political society in the West is particularly impor-

tant. Soviet society thus lacked any institutionalized zones of political organization

outside the party-state, and relied on repression to break up signs of such activity.

Thus, between high appointees of the party-statein Soviet communism, the nomen-

klatura, or list-nicks appointed through a centralized file controlled by the Party

Secretariatand the domestic realm of familial relations, stood a vast, authoritarian

social realm (Garcelon 1997a:32127). In the social realm, public life was either

strictly prohibited or organized solely in a top-down fashion by the nomenklatura ortheir appointees, the apparatchiki.

The consequences of all this became manifest in the practical radicalism of the

Nineteenth Party Conference measures, which introducedthough haphazardly

elements of secret elections to hitherto compliant representative bodies (the soviets),

and expressed tolerance for voluntary association independent of the partocracy.

The senior reform elements around Gorbachev aimed to role back and decentralize

nomenklatura power while retaining day-to-day command and control of the party-

state. Such measures deeply split the partocracy and broader nomenklatura by toler-

ating rebellion in the Caucasus, particularly Armenia, and encouraging more militant

reformers both in the Soviet Union proper, and in Central European states hithertounder Soviet domination.40

All of this underlay the political rebellion among Soviet specialists during the

spring 1989 elections. Moreover, such elections were to a new institution, the Soviet

Congress of Peoples Deputies (CPD USSR), a sort of super-parliament conceived

as the new all-Union legislature. By the time of the 1989 elections, the Baltics had

joined the Caucuses as non-Russian Republics of the Russia-dominated Soviet state

in rebellion against Soviet hegemony, while radicalizing social movements rapidly

developed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

Such developments in turn served as demonstration effects further radicalizing

the now Moscow-centered specialist rebellion, and triggering a frantic counter-mobilization to the right among reactionary partocrats and their allies. In such cir-

cumstances, the Gorbachev leadership faced either radicalizing perestroika in ways

risking further institutional disintegration, or repressing the movement it had inad-

vertently triggered. Indeed, many parallels can be drawn between the consequences

of the Nineteenth Party Conference and subsequent semi-free elections to the CPD

USSR, and Louis XVIs calling of the Estates General in the face of a debilitating

39The term party-state distills conceptions from diverse totalitarian, mono-organizational, andhistorical approaches to framing things Soviets. For an overview of totalitarian conceptions of Soviet

domination in the West, see Linz (1975). A distinctive variant of totalitarian theory, drawn from dissidentMarxism, formed in East Europe in this period, best represented by Feh er, Heller, and Markus (1983). Forthe mono-organizational approach, see Rigby (1977). Kotkin (1995) presents an alternative approach toStalinist society still compatible with the concept of party-state.

40For a perceptive account of nationalist rebellions in the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Unionfrom 1987 on, see Suny (1993). Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley (1998) present comparative histories of theCzech, Hungarian, and Polish democratic movements at the end of the 1980s.


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fiscal crisis of the absolutist state in late 18th-century France. Just as a crisis erod-

ing the monarchys geopolitical position in relation to its British rival drove Louis

XVIs calling of the Estates General, Gorbachevs turn to policies of restructuring

(perestroika), openness (glasnost), and democratization (demokratizatsiia) in the

late 1980s aimed in part to reverse a decade-long decline in Soviet economic and

technological capacities relative to the core powers of the global capitalist order, inparticular the United States.41 And as in absolutist France, reform unintentionally set

in motion the destruction of the regime. Finally, in both cases postrevolutionary mea-

sures aimed at sweeping away the old order triggered power struggles and upheavals

that undermined revolutionary leaders and compromised revolutionary ideals.

Indeed, once the Gorbachev leadership opted for toleration of the specialist re-

bellion during the early 1989 campaign to the Congress of Peoples Deputies, po-

larization between reformists, centrists, and reactionaries paralyzed the party-state

as political crisis deepened across the Union. Following the first convention of the

Soviet Congress of Peoples Deputies, elite rebels occupying high positions in the

party-state backed the formation of the Democratic Russia movement (DemRossiia)to capitalize on the political opportunity created by elite paralysis and the scheduling

of further semi-free elections to a Congress of Peoples Deputies in the Russian Re-

public and local soviets in the spring of 1990. By uniting under a single opposition

umbrella a plethora of voluntary associations, self-proclaimed political parties, pro-

reform factions in the Soviet Communist Party, pro-democracy deputies in various

soviets, and opposition candidates, DemRossiia leaders hoped to seize power at the

local level.42

The historical significance of DemRossiia stemmed from two directions. First,

Democratic Russia served as the primary vector along which what was called a pa-

rade of sovereignties m

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