709775

research-article2017
STXXXX10.1177/0735275117709775Sociological TheoryMears

Symposium: “What is Good Theorizing?”

Sociological Theory

Puzzling in Sociology:
2017, Vol. 35(2) 138­–146
© American Sociological Association 2017
DOI: 10.1177/0735275117709775
https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275117709775

On Doing and Undoing st.sagepub.com

Theoretical Puzzles

Ashley Mears1

Abstract
One typical way to motivate a sociological argument is to present the research question as
a puzzle. Unlike in physical sciences, sociologists work backward to construct theoretical
puzzles from their data. Sociologists risk puzzling for puzzles’ sake, and in so doing, they
reify categories and concepts that are not necessary or useful to their empirical material
at hand. This essay examines mostly qualitative sociologists’ conventions for puzzling and
suggests alternatives rooted in thick description of empirics.

Keywords
puzzles, theorization, writing

I’ve been puzzled by sociological puzzles for some time, since my entry to graduate school,
where I promptly learned that good sociological research must deliver a theoretical contribu-
tion and that said contribution will typically solve an important puzzle. Much of graduate
training involves teaching students the conventions of puzzling. At its most romantic, culti-
vating puzzlement increases one’s curiosity about the social world (Abbott 2004:118). More
cynically, puzzling is a routine motion made to signify one’s position in the literature, hook
a reader’s attention, and, ultimately, signal that one has mastered the conventions of making
theoretical contributions. The sociologist ends up unraveling a puzzle to show that she has
one—puzzling for puzzles’ sake—although she presents otherwise, as if these mysterious
puzzles existed all along.
What is a puzzle? The puzzle denotes something unexplained by existing theories (for
a pedagogical example, see McDonnell 2015). A puzzle is an explanandum, a conundrum
about the social world that upsets our expectations or for which there is no ready explana-
tion (Luker 2010:55). Burawoy (1991) and other ethnographers using the extended case
method seek out puzzles in the form of “silences” or shortcomings in the literature, which
they amend with empirical facts (p. 14). The puzzle requires an explanation, and it invites
theorization.

1Department of Sociology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Ashley Mears, Department of Sociology, Boston University, 100 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
Email: mears@bu.edu
Mears 139

In his critique of nuance, Healy (2017:121) defends “good theory” as that which “seems
to produce correct explanations for things.” Healy’s paper is iconoclastic in its rejection of
something most of us think is important for explaining the social world—nuance, with an
explicative, no less—but it relies on orthodox sociological thinking in how it puts down fine-
grained, accurate description and exalts parsimonious, abstract theory. Pitting explanation
against description, and subsuming the value of empirical details beneath an abstract frame-
work, constrain our ability to accurately capture a varied and changing social world.
Rather than get into the nuances of Healy’s own paper, I will use his critique as an invita-
tion to a broader discussion of how we link theory and data and the conventions for doing so
that predominate in sociology. Puzzling has evolved into a ubiquitous disciplinary conven-
tion in sociology. It is a part of our genre, as indispensable as an overture to a classical opera.
This essay is an inquiry into the origins, varieties, uses, and abuses of constructing theoreti-
cal puzzles. This reflection is based on my experiences as a qualitative sociologist with a
preference for ethnographies, and I borrow from writing guides in sociology and beyond.
Let me immediately note that I am clearly a fan of puzzling. I have used the term puzzle
to foreground my findings in 5 of my 13 journal article publications. I even used paradox in
one of those. Puzzling has served me well. However, I suggest that routinized use of puzzles
can undermine the very relevance of sociological research that puzzling presumably is
intended to provide. In the following, I discuss puzzle-building strategies and their origins,
the practice of deductivising puzzles in our scholarly presentations, and the perils of uncriti-
cal puzzling.

Puzzling Varieties, Uses, and Abuses

We might think of hard and soft puzzles, and here I limit my examples to papers that use the
actual term puzzle in their set-up. A soft puzzle is a research gap: our knowledge of some-
thing is incomplete, and that might puzzle a lot of people. It may be a folk puzzle, that is,
some form of collective behavior that is puzzling to nonparticipants, like dating practices in
the United States, which Europeans find quite perplexing (Krause and Kowalski 2013). Soft
puzzles are oddities; they are curious phenomena from a culturally relative viewpoint, not
quite a theoretical puzzle, but rather, a topical one.
A harder puzzle, one that takes more mastery to solve, will reveal a theoretical deficiency.
Hard puzzles expose shortcomings in our explanations, that is, our explanations cannot
account for some empirical puzzle that exists in the world. Kuipers (2015), for example,
masterfully constructs a theoretical puzzle out of globalization scholarship, which fails to
explain why national differences persist in television translations. Indeed, it is puzzling that
in a highly globalized media industry, the hit 1990s U.S. TV sitcom The Nanny airs in Italy
as La Tata and in France as La nounou d’enfer (literally, “the nanny from hell”) and both
have totally different jokes and meanings. One stream of institutional theory predicts that
with globalization, we should see more cultural homogenization among “world society”;
another stream would expect television translations to depend on local market, technologi-
cal, and national conditions. Given these possibilities, Kuipers constructs an unresolved
theoretical puzzle looming behind this strange business of The Nanny.
Sometimes, a research project begins with a clear and striking puzzling fact, as when
Abbott (2004) noticed during his study of psychiatrists that status rankings within profes-
sions were different from status rankings by those outside. To borrow from Healy’s account
of nuance, this could be called an Actually Existing Puzzle in the world, an empirical curios-
ity that really exists.
But such strikingly puzzling facts rarely present themselves to the researcher right away;
it takes effort to find them in the field and in the literature. A clever puzzle-maker does some
140 Sociological Theory 35(2)

maneuvering, putting empirical facts together in tension, based on how she construes exist-
ing theoretical predictions. Turco (2010), for example, using interviews with men and
women in the leveraged buyout industry, poses the puzzle that some low-status token work-
ers are better off than others. Much previous research on gender and race discrimination
suggests that low-status numeric tokens fare equally poorly at work; in leveraged buyouts,
however, black men do a lot better than black women. Because our theories of tokenism are
inadequate, Turco constructs an Actually Existing Puzzle from the empirical world of lever-
aged buyouts. She then creates a theoretical puzzle that exists only in the journal article
world: Why doesn’t tokenism penalize everyone equally? Such puzzles reveal shortcomings
in our repertoire of current explanations, due to incomplete data from, say, limited compara-
tive datasets (see, e.g., Fishman and Lizardo [2013] on the puzzle of divergent tastes among
comparable democracies), limited temporal variation (see, e.g., Chan [2009] on the puzzle
of why market embeddedness changes over time in the Chinese insurance industry), or new
social or economic conditions (see Mears [2015] on the puzzle of consent to exploitation in
the nightlife economy).
Finally, a puzzle can take the form of a paradox, that is, a proposition so contradictory as
to border the absurd but which, upon investigation, proves to be true. Working with Catherine
Connell, I constructed a theoretical puzzle from the paradoxically larger earnings of women
over men in the “display work” fields of fashion modeling, stripping, and porn acting, in
which men earn consistently and significantly less than women (i.e., 200–1,000 percent
less), inverting the otherwise stable 20 percent wage gap that has advantaged men in nearly
every occupational category for the past three decades (Mears and Connell 2016). How is it
simultaneously true that a consistent wage gap favors men in the labor market, and yet men
in display work make so much less than women?
Be it hard or soft, puzzling can establish a warrant for research, which is a particular chal-
lenge for qualitative scholars whose findings risk being discarded as mere banal description
or anecdote unless they can demonstrate a need for the study in the first place (Katz
1997:392). Puzzling is a way of casing, of determining what kind of case one has (Tavory
and Timmermans 2009). Timely deployment of a puzzle provides an excellent roadmap to a
paper, informing readers of not only what we intend to write about but why they should read
it. These are all great uses of puzzles.
But there is a downside to puzzling. Just like nobody can tell you mathematically how to
ride a bike, there are no clear instructions for making puzzles. Puzzlement is not just a matter
of knowledge, says Abbott (2004), but also of taste. Puzzling is scattered in different classes
on methodology and theory, and in real life it boils down to learning-by-doing and borrow-
ing from successful colleagues. This leads to repetition of thought patterns and ritualization
in the way we place puzzles within presentations of research, particularly in the way scholar-
ship wraps inductive findings in theoretical puzzles, potentially deductivising dynamic
research processes into classical positivism.

Puzzling across Sciences

Puzzling has deep roots in U.S. academic writing conventions. It is a standard bullet point in
the how-to guides of academic writing centers across the United States. For instance, Yale
offers a list of the top “motivating moves”:

1. The truth isn’t what one would expect, or what it might appear to be on first
reading.
2. The knowledge on the topic has heretofore been limited.
3. There’s a mystery or puzzle or question here that needs answering.
Mears 141

4. Published views of the matter conflict.

5. We can learn about a larger phenomenon by studying this smaller one.
6. This seemingly tangential or insignificant matter is actually important or
interesting.
7. There’s an inconsistency, contradiction, or tension here that needs explaining.
8. The standard opinion(s) need challenging or qualifying.
—Yale Center for Teaching and Learning1

The puzzle, listed here as number 3 but invoked in numbers 1, 4, 7, and 8, is described as
a kind of trick, a maneuver to address the “so what” question in such a way that the theoreti-
cal contribution has an added element of importance. Puzzles help researchers accomplish
the unexpected: surprise!
My anonymous peer reviewers seem fond of such moves, as they too reproduce these
conventions, with critiques like, “Why wouldn’t we expect this?” or, “This is not surpris-
ing.” If reading a piece of research is meant to feel like opening a gift-wrapped present, the
best way to deliver surprise is by wrapping the results in a puzzle.
To elicit surprise is to hook a specialized form of attention from a specific audience, that
is, to invoke significance from the right people, who have been trained at the right places,
who can recognize the importance of the puzzle by virtue of socialization into a certain set
of knowledge producing habits (Brubaker 1993). One hopes this audience will be surprised
and delighted that the puzzle has been named and solved in one neatly packaged journal
article.
In other disciplines, puzzling is quite banal. It is the main way of accumulating knowl-
edge in what Kuhn (1962) describes as “normal science.” Through puzzling, these scientists
are looking for discrepancies in an otherwise coherent intellectual framework, making incre-
mental changes to their shared paradigm, and uncovering observational or experimental
error. In normal science, scientists rarely make major paradigm breakthroughs. Rather, they
work out small problems as one might toil at a jigsaw puzzle.
Kuhn’s jigsaw analogy offended a lot of scientists, who saw themselves as aiming for big
and important scientific breakthroughs. Typically, however, scientists anticipate their
research findings, and they contribute small accomplishments through solving rather pre-
dictable puzzles. “The man who succeeds,” Kuhn (1962:48) writes, “proves himself an
expert puzzle-solver, and the challenge of the puzzle is an important part of what usually
drives him on.”
Of course, sociology is not a paradigmatic science in Kuhn’s sense (Timmermans and
Tavory 2012). There is a reason why Kuhn draws most of his examples from natural sci-
ences. Consider medicine. A typical medical article reports on a case that does not fit our
expectations: The case shows anomalies that alter standard diagnostic procedures, or a
patient has an unexpected reaction to standard treatment. A puzzle is built in from the begin-
ning; researchers need not waste time constructing one, because it is right there, in the
empirics.
Social science, on the other hand, with its plurality of methods, schools of thought, and
interpretative frameworks, was a fragmented field even before poststructuralist, cultural,
cognitive, and other turns. Sometimes, we build deductively on one another’s previous find-
ings, like the medical researcher. But most of the time, we lean on puzzling as a lifeline of
relevance in the face of confusion from outsiders and even ourselves. Puzzling has become
ever more important in light of the diminishing relevance and funding for social sciences
and humanities. A good puzzle bounds the work within a subfield, and it helps editors and
reviewers say, “Yes, this is good sociology.”
142 Sociological Theory 35(2)

Although Kuhn builds predominantly on natural sciences, social scientists can take some-
thing important from his metaphor. The puzzles sociologists construct require disassembling
and reassembling descriptive material so that the social world fits into a theoretical jigsaw
with disciplinary appeal. The skillful puzzle-master constructs such a puzzle so as to decon-
struct it in one stroke.

Deductivising the Puzzle

Upon constructing a worthwhile puzzle, the researcher surely already has the data to unravel
it; the answer to a sociologist’s puzzle is found in its very posing. Regardless, in journal
articles and conference presentations, the puzzle almost always precedes the sociologist’s
methodology and findings. We put the puzzle up front, like the academic writing guide told
us to do, even when this misrepresents what has been a long and data-driven process. This
move “deductivizes” what are mostly inductive, or at least abductive, research processes
(Timmermans and Tavory 2012).
Consider that in 2015, the new editorship of the American Sociological Review released
guidelines for reviewers of ethnographic manuscripts, outlined in short form here:

1. Clarity of Statement of Major Research Goals. To be publishable in ASR, qualitative

and ethnographic papers must be driven by clearly stated, theoretically relevant
research questions. . . .
2. Appropriateness of Ethnographic or Qualitative Methods for the Research Question
3. Clear Description of the Data Analysis Process
4. Clear Description of Case Selection Logic and Research Design
5. Data: shows causal processes or mechanisms, or providing a meaningful picture of an
interesting phenomenon. How successfully does the author provide a vivid, “whole
picture” description?
—“Suggested ASR Reviewer Guidelines for Ethnographic and Qualitative Papers,”
  July 20152

The trouble is, this chronology follows a routinized and assumed relation between theory
and method that just isn’t typical of qualitative work. It’s probably not even typical of quan-
titative work. For the most part, quantitative researchers present their nested hypotheses
within the first few pages of a paper, laying out the significance of what they will test so as
to build up a tension in the puzzle posed from the very first lines. Most of the time, these
hypotheses are conceptualized after the data have revealed the significant variables. In a
brilliant turn of phrase, Stark recounts doing the preliminary quantitative analysis for a net-
work science paper, and, deep into some longitudinal data on social networks and foreign
investments, his co-author Vedres excitedly says to him, “You’re doing ethnography of the
data” (Harrington 2010; Stark and Vedres 2006). The linearity with which hypotheses pre-
cede findings distorts the relationship between theory and data in quantitative and qualitative
work, deductivising it to be much cleaner than it really is.3
Deductive research, most closely associated with the extended case method in ethnogra-
phy (Burawoy 1991), begins with theory and uses empirics to infer broader claims aimed at
generalizable phenomena. Following Merton (1959), we “search” for a problem or a puzzle
by beginning with a big theoretical question (“How are different social institutions interre-
lated?”) and move to a smaller, specifying question (“How are ascetic Protestantism and
modern capitalism interrelated?”). Puzzles emerge first and foremost from theoretical
engagement.
Mears 143

In contrast, the inductive approach, or grounded theory, developed by Glaser and Strauss
(1967) for ethnographers, privileges empirics over preexisting concepts and narrative. Here
the researcher stays skeptical of preformed beliefs that precede observation, always looking
for new facts to challenge what could develop into theories (Charmaz 2006). This approach
aligns with Charcot’s statement that “theory is good; but it doesn’t prevent things from exist-
ing” (in Freud et al. 1966:139). Here, puzzles emerge from data.
This binary between facts and theory, personified here via Merton and Charcot, is a stale-
mate. Caught between this swinging pendulum, we arrive at abductive analysis, refined by
Timmermans and Tavory (2012) and rooted in the pragmatism of Pierce. Abductive analysis
emphasizes an openness to and a search for surprises in empirical observations and in the-
ory: “Often, the process of puzzling through the data not only will create a new puzzle but
may actually construct a new game with new rules for thinking about the relationship
between different pieces,” thus generating new theory (Timmermans and Tavory 2012:177).
The puzzle is now a target moving all over the place between theory and data.
Yet in sociological writing and presentations, we present the work deductively. When we
use a puzzle, we open our papers with some theoretical assumptions about how the world
works (which we already suspect are insufficient), we profess to design a project to test or
explore these theories, and we show that, surprise!, our case resolves a theoretical puzzle.
We make it look as though the puzzle existed a priori of our own efforts.4 But of course,
the puzzle and, for that matter, the research question itself are often “discovered” as the
researcher is knee-deep in data. I am hardly the first person to make this observation. This is
a consistent point in sociology writing guides (e.g., Becker 2007). Abbott (2004:116) notes
that “one of the odd qualities of social science is that we often start a project with only a rela-
tively general interest in an area. Finding the real puzzle and finding its solution occur
together as we go forward.” Finally, Luker (2010:61) concurs that in most projects, the
research question itself becomes clear only toward the end of data collection.
Indeed, everyone knows that the ethnographer’s puzzle is discovered as part of the data-
gathering process. Ethnographers need time and patience to sort through the details, differ-
entiate between different perceptions of events, and wander through false starts and dead
ends. In her study of sex work in Ho Chi Minh City, Hoang (2015:xi) writes in the acknowl-
edgments that she “assembled and reassembled the empirical puzzle over the course of nine
years,” and she thanks a number of people for help in that endeavor. Such a process of
assembly and reassembly of puzzles involves the collaborative effort of the author, her crit-
ics and colleagues, and random audience members in workshops, colloquia, and confer-
ences. Puzzling then evolves further through multiple rounds of revision steered by reviewers
and editors.
The final casing—or if you have finesse, the puzzle at which you arrive after this arduous,
lengthy, and collaborative process—motivates the paper, as though it were there all along,
opening the article with a gripping question that needs urgently to be solved. Social science
doesn’t just import the scientific method (Luker 2010); we also bear the imprints of classical
positivism and its authority in our writings. Empirical facts get transubstantiated into a theo-
retical puzzle, until behold!, the miracle of scientific investigation leads us onto the surpris-
ing research journey.

Unraveling Puzzles
Researchers aim to discover and faithfully render empirics, while simultaneously discover-
ing a theoretical puzzle that their empirical material can solve. These two things, I reckon,
are often at odds. Puzzling has become an art in itself, much like the interpretation of data,
144 Sociological Theory 35(2)

but is it an art for art’s sake? There is a danger that by fetishizing puzzles, we may construct
and then unravel categories and concepts that are not always necessary or useful to the
empirical material at hand. Might it be better to just dispense with all the puzzling and cut
straight to that faithful rendering?
Puzzling may encourage us to try on ill-fitting theories and concepts that are better dis-
carded. In the search for inadequate theories to build up as puzzles, we reify constructs and
concepts that do not bear a necessary relation to the facts under study. Consider, for example,
neoclassical economic orthodoxy and its intellectual cousin, rational choice theory, against
which the new economic sociology defined itself as an emerging field in the 1980s. Many a
sociological inquiry into economic action since the 1980s has led with the “puzzle” that
empirical data show humans are not being rationally calculative, or atomistic, or purely self-
interested. I began many a graduate school paper along these lines: “Why don’t economistic
predictive models apply in this case?” The answer, that humans are social beings, not theo-
retical ones, was quite obvious to me and everyone else in a sociology program, and yet we
continue puzzling through empirical material to put social flesh on the bones of homo eco-
nomicus, as though this skeletal construct were not always an abstracted model of social life.
As a result, sociology ends up in a very long dialogue with neoclassic economic theory,
posing a lot of unnecessary theoretical puzzles based on models that could not very well
explain, and were never intended to describe, actual social behavior. This results in posturing
toward theory, performing a notion of scientific inquiry that portends to test certain theories
about the world when we already know better.
Rather than performing reverence for “good theory” as “correct explanations for things”
(Healy 2017:121), we could instead foreground thick and accurate descriptions of the social
world as the most significant contributions researchers could make. Fine-grained description
and compelling stories are in fact as good as, if not better than, explanations, because the
quest for explanation necessarily reifies dominant categories of thought and taken-for-
granted social factors. “Social factors are the particular products of professional social sci-
entists,” who are often striving to establish new types of theoretical frameworks, writes
Latour (1988:161). Social scientists take these social factors and, usually with some effort,
put them into competing dialogue with one another, spending a great deal of time squaring
different pieces against one another. Coming back to Kuhn’s metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle,
one may end up with a crafty piece of theoretical handiwork after assembling lots of oddly
shaped interlocking pieces of other sociologists’ ideas. But like the picture of a wild land-
scape promised on the back of the puzzle box, the completed picture may or may not bear
any sound relation to a scene in real life. All of the self-referential explanation carefully
crafted onto stories to give them relevance beyond mere story-telling results, in the end, in
irrelevance.
The problem with puzzling is that it privileges a version of “good theory” as explanation
over thick description. Could not thick description itself be a valued starting point for sociol-
ogy, rather than a method in pursuit of solving some fetishized puzzle? Perhaps we might
dispense with this posturing toward “good theory.” Just move it aside for a moment. A dif-
ferent starting point would begin with the premise that good sociology captures interesting
and important things happening in the world: thick description, a faithful rendering of details,
and textured accounts of how people experience the world, that is, “a vitality phrased”
(Geertz 1988:143; see also Desmond 2014). Only after providing these accounts of what is
happening in the world that we have discovered, does it make sense to move to macro-level,
with generalizable insights and explanation.
Such writing is easier to do in books than in articles, where authors have more space and
more leeway with reviewers. Most recently, Desmond’s Evicted: Power and Profit in an
Mears 145

American City stands out for narrating tensions and puzzles that build up to a crescendo of
macro-level implications only in the very last chapter. Ethnographic articles could also be
presented as inductively as their data are generated, without importing the chronology of
scientific method. Take, for example, Chambliss’s (1989) paper on the routine construction
of excellence, published in this journal. Chambliss opens with the case of Olympic swim-
mers and his interest in learning about excellence through them, and on the very first page,
five paragraphs into the text, he takes us into the ethnographic methods. Next, the findings
describe in rich detail the minutia of swim practices, competitions, and poolside conversa-
tions, and by the time you realize you are almost done with the paper, only in the last quarter
of the text, are you thinking about generalizable insights to organizational behavior, arts
careers, even academia. It is written in such an intuitive way that the reader grasps the “so
what” out of the empirics alongside, it seems, the author. These examples cut against the
current formulaic model of sociological writing that, especially in ethnographic work, does
not reflect the research process.
Through fetishizing and deductivising puzzles, what begins as an effort to make descrip-
tion relevant and interesting becomes a conventional and irrelevant homage to “good the-
ory.” By raveling and unraveling each other’s puzzles, what starts out as a quest for relevance
risks ending up as the very opposite.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Gokhan Mulayim, Emily Barman, Nicole Fox, and Vladimir Petrovic for inspiration and feed-
back on this essay.

Notes
1. Last accessed March 21, 2017 (http://ctl.yale.edu/writing/undergraduate-writing/writing-handouts).
2. Last accessed April 2, 2017 (http://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/ASR/review_guide
lines_ethnography.pdf).
3. Guides to quantitative research also present “tricks” to constructing puzzles before data collection, such
as looking for flaws in prior research or extending previous findings to new populations or a different
time period (Firebaugh 2008).
4. This insight emerged in conversations with Gokhan Mulayim and his reflections on this specifically
American way of constructing sociological theory.

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Author Biography
Ashley Mears is an associate professor of sociology at Boston University. She researches gender, culture,
and economic life. She is the author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model (University of
California Press, 2012). Her forthcoming book (Princeton University Press) is an economic anthropology of
VIP consumption.