Toward A Concept-Driven Sociology. Sensitizing Concepts and The Prepared Mind

The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism
Wayne H. Brekhus (ed.) et al.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.001.0001
Published: 2021 Online ISBN: 9780190082178 Print ISBN: 9780190082161
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CHAPTER
Toward A Concept-Driven Sociology: Sensitizing Concepts

and the Prepared Mind 
Eviatar Zerubavel
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.013.10
Published: 14 April 2021
Abstract
This chapter argues for a Concept-Driven sociology. Concept-Driven research de es the seemingly
binary choice conventionally made between the acts of “describing” (as in inductive empiricism) and
“explaining” (as in deductive positivism), instead highlighting the acts of identifying patterns and
analyzing, which are neither descriptive nor explanatory but, rather, analytical. When conducting such
research, one’s goal is indeed identifying and analyzing socially-patterned phenomena in an e ort to
reveal their fundamental features. Such intellectual endeavor can be called social pattern analysis. As
one might expect, in Concept-Driven scholarship, concepts constitute the metaphorical “lenses”
through which researchers access the empirical world, their role de ned primarily in terms of
attentional sensitization. Ultimately, Concept-Driven sociology presupposes certain cognitive skills
that anyone can cultivate. In fact, it involves several such skills — namely focusing, generalizing,
“exampling,” and analogizing — that have actually been tacitly utilized by various sociologists yet
never explicitly analyzed from a strictly methodological standpoint.
Keywords: Concept-Driven sociology, Concept-Driven research, socially-patterned phenomena, social

pattern analysis, attentional sensitization, sociologists, concepts
Subject: Social Theory, Sociology
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
Sociologists often exaggerate the conventional distinction between “theory” and “methodology,” as is so
pronouncedly embodied in the arti cial curricular split between “theory” and “research methods” courses
in many sociology programs. Following in the footsteps of Emile Durkheim, who masterfully integrates the
two in The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 1895/1982), I nevertheless consider it a false distinction
(Zerubavel 1980:32), using the composite term theoretico-methodological to convey the actual inseparability
of “theory” and “methodology” from each other.
There are two e ectively antithetical ideal-typical ways of conducting sociological research. On the one
hand, there is a data-driven style of scholarship in which projects begin with the researcher identifying a
particular body of data associated with a particular social group (family, movement, organization), setting
(school, factory, neighborhood), or event (political demonstration, economic crisis, natural disaster). On
the other hand, there is a theory-driven style of scholarship, in which projects begin with the researcher’s
particular theoretical concerns. As the founder of symbolic interactionism, Herbert Blumer, wrote in a paper
explicitly titled “The Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism,”
[t]he possession and use of a prior picture or scheme of the empirical world under study … is an

unavoidable prerequisite for any study of the empirical world. One can see the empirical world only
through some scheme or image of it. The entire act of scienti c study is oriented and shaped by the
underlying picture of the empirical world that is used. This picture sets the selection and
formulation of problems, the determination of what are data, the means to be used in getting data,
the kinds of relations sought between data, and the forms in which propositions are cast.
(Blumer 1969:24–25, emphasis added)
The distinction between those two ideal-typical approaches to research is often articulated in terms of the
di erence between inductive (“bottom-up”) and deductive (“top-down”) modes of reasoning that, in their
extreme form, respectively promote strictly empiricist projects and “pure” theory. The very notion of those
two ideal-typical modes of reasoning underscores the two e ectively antithetical kinds of theoretico-
methodological “pull” that those two styles of conducting research present to scholars, a far more
signi cant “pull” than the one conventionally presented by so-called quantitative and qualitative
epistemologies.
Although I have never been attracted to data-driven, fact-gathering scholarship (Zerubavel 1979:xv), nor
have I ever accepted the premise that it necessarily follows that I should therefore be testing existing
theories. Defying such a supposedly binary choice between inductive empiricism and deductive positivism, I
have thus come to identify a third style of social inquiry that is theoretically—yet not necessarily “Theory—
driven. And I have come to characterize such an approach to scholarship, one that I have been using for the
past forty- ve years in both my research and teaching, as concept driven (see also Zerubavel 1980:28–29).
Concept-driven research de es the seemingly binary choice conventionally made between the acts of
“describing” (as in inductive empiricism) and “explaining” (as in deductive positivism), instead
highlighting the acts of identifying patterns and analyzing, which are neither descriptive nor explanatory but,
rather, analytical. When conducting such research, one’s goal is indeed identifying and analyzing socially
patterned phenomena in an e ort to reveal their fundamental features. I therefore call such an intellectual
endeavor social pattern analysis (Zerubavel 2007).
Sensitizing Concepts
As one might expect, in concept-driven scholarship, concepts constitute the metaphorical “lenses” through
which researchers access the empirical world, their role de ned primarily in terms of attentional
sensitization. E ectively “sensitizing” researchers’ attention (Zerubavel 1980:31), they thus help give them
a general sense of what they might nd relevant to attend to by suggesting “where” to look. Sensitizing
concepts, as Blumer so aptly dubbed them, thus provide researchers with “a general sense of reference and
guidance in approaching empirical instances …. [They] suggest directions along which to look …. [T]hey rest
on a general sense of what is relevant” (Blumer 1954:7; see also Blumer 1931:518, 526–28; Van den
Hoonaard 1996). Like magnets attached to their minds, they guratively “attract” empirical data to their
awareness, thereby helping them collect many they would have probably overlooked otherwise.
Over the years I have indeed managed to study many phenomena that had traditionally been relatively
neglected in sociology (distinctions, social rhythms, conspiracies of silence, default assumptions, historical
narratives, visions of genealogical “relatedness”), such academic “invisibility” being only a function of
traditional conventions of sociological relevance. As Marcel Proust put it quite bluntly, “[t]he only true
voyage of discovery” may very well be “not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes” (Proust
1923/2006:657)! Indeed, like eating the fruits of the proverbial tree of knowledge for Adam and Eve, it is the
gurative eye-opening (Zerubavel 2015:84) function of the sensitizing concepts I use that has allowed me to
access those otherwise academically invisible fruits. “[A] new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly

not perceived to come into view (Meyer et al. 2010:ix, emphasis added).
Such conceptual magnets were very helpful, for example, when I was writing The Fine Line (Zerubavel
1991/1993), to which for many years I was referring in my mind as “my boundaries book.” By using the
concept “boundary,” I thus developed a heightened sensitivity to the numerous mental distinctions we
make. Having essentially primed myself to notice any form of boundary, from the time I started thinking
about writing the book and the time I completed it ten years later, I in fact generated hundreds of
distinctions-related observations. And the meager number of such observations I have generated in
comparison since then—a thirty-year period during which my “boundary” magnet has e ectively been
deactivated—only further attests to the formidable role of attentional sensitization in concept-driven
research.
Focus
Although every researcher faces the fundamental epistemic dilemma regarding what s/he should attend to
and what s/he can e ectively ignore, concept-driven sociologists are exceptionally conscious of the selective
manner in which they attend to social reality, essentially directing their attention to only a few selected
aspects of the groups, situations, or events they study (Simmel 1917/1950:11; Zerubavel 1979:xvi), which
also implies an equally conscious e ort to purposely “disattend” (Zerubavel 2015:60) others. That is made
possible, of course, by the mental act of focusing (Zerubavel 2015:2). After all, even in the “hard” sciences,
“[t]he operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory … are not what the
scientist sees—at least not before … his attention [is] focused” (Kuhn 1962/1970:126, emphasis added; see also
Fleck 1935/1979). The conscious e ort to approach the groups, situations, or events one studies selectively
is therefore a necessary precondition for staying “focused.”
Given concept-driven sociologists’ fundamentally theoretical orientation, the focus of their attention, of
course, is pronouncedly thematic (see also DeGloma and Papadantonakis 2020). After all, even if their study
happens to be situated in a speci c setting, it is not necessarily a study of that setting. Although my doctoral
dissertation study, for example, “took place in a hospital, it was never intended as a study of the hospital,
since its … focus was clearly the temporal structure of social organization rather than hospital life”
(Zerubavel 1979:xvii; see also Zerubavel 1981/1985:x–xi):
I knew before I entered the hospital that my intention would not be to produce an exhaustive
ethnography of hospital life, but, rather, to isolate its temporal aspects only, in order to study the
temporal structure of social organization. If I presumed to innovate in any way, it was certainly not
in my selection of the setting to be observed, but, rather, in my choice of the analytical perspective
from which to observe it …. I [thus] focused my observations on only one aspect of hospital life,
namely, its temporal structure, deliberately ignoring … the history of the hospital, its national
reputation, the quality of its patient care, its architectural design and spatial organization, its
nances, the religious and ethnic makeup of its sta , and so on. I was interested in learning about
the social organization of the hospital and the social interaction within it only insofar as it
contributed to further my understanding of its temporal structure.
(Zerubavel 1979:xvi–xvii, emphasis added)
Concept-driven sociology, in short, implies a thematically focused kind of inquiry. It is particular theoretical
“themes,” therefore, that guide researchers’ attention as they look for “theoretically relevant” (Glaser and
Strauss 1971:183) data.

Although e ectively promoting a theoretically driven kind of inquiry, however, I am by no means
advocating here the notion of “pure” theory, devoid of any empirical “meat.” But in sharp contrast to
grounded theory, for example, which initially proceeds from the empirical to the theoretical, concept-
driven research initially proceeds from the theoretical to the empirical. Unlike grounded-theory
practitioners, concept-driven sociologists establish their theoretical concerns (but not conclusions) before
they even start collecting their data. It is their pronouncedly thematic focus, in other words, that drives the
empirical part of their research.
In short, concept-driven researchers start collecting their data only after having committed themselves to a
particular thematic focus (Zerubavel 1979:xvi; 1980:30–31) in the form of a concept-related topic. After all,
they “are in the business of studying sociological topics, not people …. Their job is to make a set of integrated
observations on a given topic and place them in an analytical framework” (Schwartz and Jacobs 1979:289,
emphasis added). As such, they study whiteness rather than whites, liberalism rather than liberals, poverty
rather than the poor. Establishing such focal commitment thus constitutes the very rst step in their inquiry.
Choosing that topic is the most critically consequential part of a concept-driven research project, as it
provides researchers a general sense of attentional “direction” (Zerubavel 1979:xvi), thereby helping them
notice patterns that might have never emerged as the result of mere perception (Zerubavel 1980:31). I could
not have collected the data I later used in The Fine Line, The Elephant in the Room, Taken for Granted, Time
Maps, and Ancestors and Relatives, for example, had I not rst committed myself to focusing my attention
“thematically” on distinctions, conspiracies of silence, default assumptions, historical narratives, and
visions of genealogical “relatedness.”
The Prepared Mind
John Locke notwithstanding, the researcher’s mind is not a tabula rasa, and even what might seem like a
chance observation can in fact “enter” it only if s/he is actually mentally prepared for it (Kantorovich
1993:113; see also Fleck 1935/1979:92, 99). As Louis Pasteur famously put it, “[i]n the elds of observation
chance favors only the mind which is prepared” (Pearce 1912:941). It is their epistemic readiness, in other
words, “the mind prepared to utilize scienti c imagination,” that actually allows researchers to “grasp the
opportunity o ered by ‘chance’ observation” (Pearce 1912:944).
Consider, for example, the discovery of the asteroids in the early nineteenth century. Strictly perceptually,
after all, given the state of eighteenth-century telescopy, they could have de nitely been spotted much
earlier. Yet it was the surprise discovery of Uranus in the 1780s, the rst “new” planet to be discovered in
several millennia, that epistemically prepared an entire generation of astronomers to the very possibility of
spotting additional ones (Kuhn 1962/1970:116). Only their new attentional sensitivity, indeed, can account
for the rather rapid discovery of some of the largest asteroids by three di erent astronomers between 1801
and 1807 (Zerubavel 1997:45–46).
By the same token, although it was the socially naive question “Daddy, what’s Thursday?” posed to me by
my then-three-year-old daughter that was the actual spark that inspired me to write The Seven-Day Circle
(Zerubavel 1985/1989:1), I might not have even noticed it had I not been epistemically prepared prior to
that, having read The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966), not to take culturally rei ed
social conventions for granted (Zerubavel 1985/1989:138–41; Zerubavel 2016). By the same token, although
it was watching a double-bassist play the typically inattended bass lines of a Bach Brandenburg Concerto
that sparked my decision to write Hidden in Plain Sight (Zerubavel 2015:ix–x), I might not have paid any
special attention to them had I not been epistemically prepared for almost thirty years prior to that, having
read Harold Gar nkel’s (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, to think sociologically about “the background”
we typically take for granted and thereby inattend (Zerubavel 1981/1985:19–30).

As one examines the actual process by which a mentally “unprepared” mind is transformed into an
epistemically “ready” one, it becomes quite clear that in the initial stages of the project, the researcher’s
focus of attention is often still de ned in terms of vaguely formulated, “hazy” mental constructs
respectively characterized by Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979:23–27) and Robert Merton (1984:267) as mere
proto-ideas or proto-concepts. Far from being fully formed, such “pre-ideas” (Fleck 1935/1979:23–27) are
e ectively inarticulable, yet even at that early stage of the study they already guide researchers’ attention in
terms of “where” to look for empirical manifestations of the social patterns they conceptually identify.
As the project proceeds, however, through a process of conceptual “incubation,” such early pre-ideas
gradually become mentally crisper, as the initial sensitizing proto-concepts become increasingly sharper
and thus more explicitly articulable. Such epistemic “ ne tuning” occurs, for example, as the researcher
keeps reading (preferably widely rather than con ning oneself to a prefabricated, almost formulaically
lumped cluster of texts conventionally canonized as “the literature”) and thinking as well as begins writing.
And it also occurs, of course, as s/he begins to collect data. Although in concept-driven research the process
of theorizing begins before researchers start to collect their data, by no means does it stop there.
Thus, for example, when I was collecting the data for Patterns of Time in Hospital Life, it was my early
theoretical interest in the still only vaguely de ned “social organization of time” (Zerubavel 1976) that
nevertheless tacitly guided my decision what to consider relevant to my study and therefore attend to,
thereby sensitizing me to many time-related social patterns I would have most likely missed without it.
Thus, for example, it was my initially vague proto-concept “temporal coordination” that helped sensitize
me to the way doctors and nurses organized their lunch breaks, vacations, and days o (Zerubavel 1979:61–
62, 72–73), and my equally vague early theoretical interest in the moral aspect of punctuality that helped
me notice the way they responded to latecomers (Zerubavel 1979:27–28, 56, 130). I would have most likely
also failed to note in which kinds of situations they referred to their watches and in which ones to the
hospital wall clocks, had I not already been theoretically sensitized to the di erent functions of timepieces
(Zerubavel 1979:95–96, 108–09).
By the same token, it was my early theoretical interest in continuity that sensitized me to various
institutional e orts to ensure the continuous coverage of hospitalized patients such as doctors’ morning
rounds and nurses’ change-of-shift reports (Zerubavel 1979:27, 54–55), and my still-vague interest in the
temporal delineation of professional responsibility that likewise sensitized me to otherwise-trivial events
such as calling an o -duty nurse at home (Zerubavel 1979:53). And I would have probably never paid
attention to doctors’ and nurses’ actual time-measurement and time-reckoning vocabularies (and thereby
also to disputes between nurses and patients over whether “There are still three persons ahead of you” is a
proper answer to the question “When will the doctor see me?” [Zerubavel 1979:90–91]), had I not already
been proto-conceptually sensitized to what I only later came to explicitly refer to as “temporal reference
frameworks” (Zerubavel 1979:88–94).
Equally revealing, in this regard, was my heightened attentional sensitivity to doctors’ and nurses’ response
to situations that deviated from the hospital’s typically regular and therefore socially expected temporal
order. Consider, for example, the case of an in-patient unit whose attending physician would routinely
arrive at 10:00 for his daily conference with his medical team following their routine morning round, which
was usually completed by 9:30. One morning the round was still not over a few minutes past 10:00, when the
resident and intern suddenly saw the attending arriving at the unit. Both of them immediately glanced at
their watches, evidently trying to “make sense” of the cognitively incongruous coincidence of their
morning round and the attending’s arrival, two events that were normally segregated in time (Zerubavel
1981/1985:25). I would have probably never even noticed, much less paid special attention to, such an
otherwise trivial incident had I not already been sensitized to the initially vague proto-conceptual notion of
“temporal regularity” (Zerubavel 1981/1985:12–30).

The same epistemic dynamic seems to operate even when the data one collects are only quasi-
experimentally “observable.” Thus, for example, when writing The Elephant in the Room (Zerubavel 2006), I
found the concept “open secret” particularly helpful in heightening my attentional sensitivity to (thereby
allowing me to almost “hear”) virtually inaudible conspiracies of silence. I likewise found “the background”
an extremely useful sensitizing concept when exploring in Hidden in Plain Sight (Zerubavel 2015) what we
habitually disregard as irrelevant. That was also true of the concepts “historical continuity” and “historical
discontinuity” when I was analyzing in Time Maps the social construction of historical narratives (Zerubavel
2003:37–54, 82–100), as well as of the “bloodline,” “roots,” and “side branch” metaphors when analyzing
visions of genealogical “relatedness” in Ancestors and Relatives (Zerubavel 2011:20, 55–56, 66, 80, 83–84,
86, 95–97, 103, 120, 126–30).
In fact, such an epistemic dynamic operates even when what one collects is the conspicuous absence of
certain data! Thus, for example, when I was writing Taken for Granted, using the concept “unmarked”
helped sensitize me to our otherwise elusive conventional notions of ordinariness and normality, which we
habitually take for granted and thereby assume by default. That explains my heightened attentional
sensitivity to our tacit non-use of culturally redundant and therefore semiotically super uous terms such as
working dad, female nurse, and openly straight, in sharp contrast to our common use of their pronouncedly
“marked” counterparts working mom, male nurse, and openly gay (Zerubavel 2018:1, 4–6, 9, 15, 19). It also
explains my heightened sensitivity to the added quali ers in “marital rape,” “reverse discrimination,” and
“white-collar crime” (Zerubavel 2018:96, 28), as well as to the way we conventionally distinguish
“alternative” medical practices from those we consider simply “medicine” (Zerubavel 2018:59).
Furthermore, sensitizing concepts are in fact very helpful even in strictly conceptual projects that involve
no actual data. Thus, for example, when trying in Social Mindscapes to call attention to the suprapersonal
dimension of the way we think in an e ort to lay the foundations for a sociology of thinking (Zerubavel
1997), it was Durkheim’s notion of the “impersonal” aspect of human cognition (Durkheim 1914/1973) and
Fleck’s notion of “thought communities” (Fleck 1935/1979:45, 103) that sensitized me to our indisputably
social norms and traditions of perceiving, attending, classifying, and remembering (see also Zerubavel
2019). At the same time, however, it was Pitirim Sorokin’s (1943) notion of the “sociocultural” sensibility
separating the social from the natural sciences that heightened my attentional sensitivity to cognitive
conventions that, while de nitely suprapersonal, are nevertheless by no means universal (see, for example,
Zerubavel 1997:9–10, 54–55, 73–79, 105–08). Those three sensitizing concepts, along with Alfred Schutz’s
notion of “intersubjectivity” (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Schutz and Luckmann 1973), thus played a
critical role in my coming to appreciate the way we think not only as individuals and as human beings but
also as social beings.
Attentional Socialization
Needless to say, the concept-driven manner of collecting data is very di erent from the way sociologists are
conventionally trained in social-research-methods courses to approach their objects of study. And while it
de nitely requires considerable rigor, it is focal rigor, e ectively requiring researchers to commit
themselves to a particular conceptual focus (rather than a particular statistical sampling procedure, as in
survey research, or “ eld,” as in ethnographic research) and thereby stay thematically focused.

In cultivating a focused mind, so to speak, concept-driven sociologists very much resemble birders,
mushroomers, pearl divers, deminers, and security baggage screeners. After all, as part of their professional
socialization, they all cultivate the mental skill of spotting gure-like “targets” by di erentiating them
from their background-like surroundings in which they are embedded (Zerubavel 2015:24–27). Only by
undergoing a process of professional attentional socialization (Zerubavel 2015:63–69) and thereby acquiring
a “sociological imagination,” indeed, do sociologists come to develop the distinctly sociological attentional
sensitivities that allow them to envision social movements, labor markets, power structures, and in uence
networks. And as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Zerubavel 1997:49–50), such socialization also takes
place at the level of particular “schools” or “paradigms” within sociology.
In fact, in the graduate courses I teach, I include in my syllabi every week not only a list of the actual
readings for that particular class but also a list of major concepts I want the students to speci cally attend to
in those readings, not unlike the way students in special “appreciation” courses are instructed by expert
attentional mentors (Zerubavel 2015:64) what they should speci cally attend to when looking at a painting,
listening to a piece of music, watching a lm, or tasting a glass of wine. Thus, for example, for one of the
“Classical Theory” classes where we discuss the work of Georg Simmel, the list of readings for that week is
preceded by the following list of concepts: “social interaction, forms of sociation, social circles and social
networks, multiple a liations, divided and undivided commitment, social mobility, and social
marginality.” By the same token, for my “Cognitive Sociology” class on the social organization of attention,
the list of readings for that week is preceded by the following list of concepts: “the social organization of
relevance and noteworthiness, attentional communities, attentional traditions, norms of attending and
disattending, attentional socialization, attentional deviance, attentional battles, joint attention, joint
disattention, co-denial, conspiracies of silence, agenda-setting, and foregrounding.” No wonder, indeed,
that many of my students have in fact chosen to launch concept-driven doctoral dissertations revolving
around concepts such as intercultural interpretation (Collins 1985), intellectual snobbery (Brodsky 1987),
the social construction of kinship (Gricar 1991), beauty as a vocation (Wolfe 1994), integrated and
segmented identities (Nippert-Eng 1996), the politics of ambiguity (Foster 2000), the social construction of
parity (Purcell 2001), liminality (Isaacson 2001; Saeki 2017), sociomental “connectedness” (Chayko 2002),
marked and unmarked identities (Brekhus 2003), cognitive design (Watson 2005), sociocognitive myopia
and hyperopia (Simpson 2006), abstinence-based identities (Mullaney 2006), the temporal management of
identity careers (Howard 2008), hyphenated identities (Germana 2012), “sexpectations” (Friedman 2013),
cognitive “awakenings” (DeGloma 2014), mnemonic engineering (Yeh 2018), backhanded compliments
(Malyk 2014), temporary selfhood (Stein 2019), “doing” identity (Campion 2019), and including and
excluding (Peña-Alves, in progress).
As exempli ed by the above list, concept-driven sociology presupposes certain cognitive skills that anyone,
I believe, can cultivate. In fact, it involves several such skills—namely focusing, generalizing, “exampling,”
and analogizing—that have been tacitly utilized by various sociologists yet never explicitly analyzed from a
strictly methodological standpoint.
In other words, although never comprehensively articulated yet (for some partial attempts, though, see
Zerubavel 1980; Zerubavel 2007), concept-driven sociology nevertheless presupposes an implicit
methodology that, if it can only be made explicit, can in fact also be taught to others. Making the mental
processes underlying concept-driven scholarship more explicit is indeed the very reason why I wrote my
most recent book, Generally Speaking: An Invitation to Concept-Driven Sociology (Zerubavel 2021).

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