Suchergebnisse

In a book titled Le retour de l'acteur (The Return of the Actor), French sociologist, Alain Touraine, writes that "the object of sociology is to explain the behavior of actors by the social relations in which they are placed … . It is the relation, not the actor, that we must study." In this paper, I follow up on the prescriptions of that view of sociology's mission. I illustrate the empirical results of statistical analyses based on network models of event data for the years of high working-class mobilization (1919-20, the "red years") and Fascist counter-mobilization (1921-22, the "black years") in Italy. The data were collected from a newspaper on the basis of a "semantic grammar," the simple linguistic structure centered around subjects, actions, objects and their attributes. That structure, which has at its core Touraine's concern with social actors and relations, allows investigators to go "from words to numbers." The analysis of those numbers confirms the historians' view of that period, the dramatic shift in patterns of collective behavior from the "red years" to the "black years." The analyses also provide some preliminary evidence on the explanatory power of various social science theories of mobilization and of Fascism. More broadly, the paper explores some of the epistemological consequences of relying on story grammars and network models as tools for the collection and analysis of narrative data.

In Le Retour de l'acteur (The Return of the Actor), French sociologist Alain Touraine writes that "the object of sociology is to explain the behavior of actors by the social relations in which they are placed." Presented here are the empirical results of statistical analyses based on network models of event data for the years of high working-class mobilization (1919/20, the "red years") & fascist countermobilization (1921/22, the "black years") in Italy. Data were collected from a newspaper on the basis of a "semantic grammar," the simple linguistic structure, which has as its core Touraine's concern with social actors & relations, allowing investigators to go "from words to numbers." The analysis of those numbers confirms the historians' view of that period, the dramatic shift in patterns of collective behavior from the "red years" to the "black years." The analyses also provide some preliminary evidence on the explanatory power of various social science theories of mobilization & of fascism. More broadly, some of the epistemological consequences of relying on story grammars & network models as tools for the collection & analysis of narrative data are explored. 6 Figures, 46 References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper illustrates some linguistic and statistical tools that can be profitably used by historians and social historians in the study of events (such as strikes, demonstrations and other types of collective conflict). More specifically, the paper shows that "semantic grammars" provide rigorous tools for the collection of rich event narratives. Semantic grammars structure information around the "canonical form" of the language: noun phrase/verb phrase, or subject, action, object and their modifiers (e.g. time, space). The fact that semantic grammars can be easily implemented in a computer environment using relational database systems (RDBMS) makes feasible the practical application of such powerful coding schemes. The data that computer-based semantic grammars make available are richer, more flexible and more reliable than those delivered by more traditional content analysis methods. They are also very well suited for the application of new tools of data analysis such as network models. Both semantic grammars and network models are fundamentally concerned with actors and their actions, with agents and agency. As such, these linguistic and statistical tools should draw sociology closer to history, traditionally much more concerned with issues of agency. I illustrate the power of both the linguistic and statistical tools using data that I collected from some 15,000 newspaper articles on the 1919-1922 period of Italian history, a period characterized by widespread working-class mobilization (1919–1920, the "red years") and fascist counter-mobilization (1921-1922, the "black years").

In this paper I explore the questions of why and how sociologists should be interested in narrative. The answer to the first question is straightforward: Narrative texts are packed with sociological information, and a great deal of our empirical evidence is in narrative form. In an attempt to answer the second question, I look at definitions of narrative, distinguishing narrative from non-narrative texts. I highlight the linguistic properties of narrative and illustrate modes of analysis, paying close attention to both the structural properties of the text and its subtle linguistic nuances. I guide the reader through a detailed analysis of a short narrative text. I show how linguistics and sociology interplay at the level of a text.