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Andrew Abbott on the practice of theorising

From this weirdly detailed Sociological Job Rumours AMA:

What kind of an effect does all this have? I don’t know. It probably does not influence my core thinking much. In fact, I haven’t read any other theorist systematically since the early 1980s. Once you begin to develop your own way of thinking about things, other theorists’ work seemed to require a lot of translation time (into your own system) for relatively little reward. It is more efficient to think things up on your own. Of course, such a position is only for someone like me, who has a desire to develop a coherent logic, whereby all of my work makes sense as part of a single common project. Most sociologists don’t need to worry about that, because personal consistency is not the only meaningful criterion for a scholarly life; moving across fields and paradigms provides interconnections that the discipline needs, for example. But for people like me, other people’s theoretical work gets in the way of the consistency we seek. I do however read immense amounts of non-theoretical material – history, literature, empirical work from sociology, anthropology, political science. I read that to find examples, to think through empirical cases I need to theorize, to test my arguments, and so on.

The way I see it, doing social theory is a bit like being a composer. There are composers who borrowed ideas, motifs, and even larger bits from others, and who in that borrowing transformed the borrowings in astounding directions. G. F. Handel is usually considered to be the great example of this procedure. I’m not like that. When I was younger I learned theorizing by working my way through some of the theory classics in excruciating detail, reworking the logic, testing the inferences, etc. I was like J. S. Bach copying and reworking Vivaldi concerti as a personal discipline. But now I just do my own stuff – write my own music in my own way.

Perhaps my insistence on personal consistency is a bad idea – I could end up like Paul Hindemith, producer of a monumental and consistent body of work that is so recognizable that after five or six measures it can be easily identified. Many people find it boring, perhaps because of its consistency and idiosyncrasy. But it worked for Hindemith, and that would be good enough for me.

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