Credit and Blame

by Charles Tilly

In his eye-opening book Why? , world-renowned social scientist Charles Tilly exposed some startling truths about the excuses people make and the reasons they give. Now he's back with further explorations into the complexities of human relationships, this time examining what's really going on when we assign credit or cast blame.


Everybody does it, but few understand the hidden motivations behind it. With his customary wit and dazzling insight, Tilly takes a lively and thought-provoking look at the ways people fault and applaud each other and themselves. The stories he gathers in Credit and Blame range from the everyday to the altogether unexpected, from the revealingly personal to the insightfully humorous--whether it's the gushing acceptance speech of an Academy Award winner or testimony before a congressional panel, accusations hurled in a lover's quarrel or those traded by nations in a post-9/11 crisis, or a job promotion or the Nobel Prize. Drawing examples from literature, history, pop culture, and much more, Tilly argues that people seek not only understanding through credit and blame, but also justice. The punishment must fit the crime, accomplishments should be rewarded, and the guilty parties must always get their just deserts.


Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Credit and Blame is a book that revolutionizes our understanding of the compliments we pay and the accusations we make.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction

196 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian renowned for his pioneering contributions to the study of social change, state formation, and contentious politics. A prolific scholar, Tilly authored over 600 articles and more than 50 books, shaping disciplines ranging from sociology and history to political science. His research was grounded in large-scale, comparative historical analysis, exemplified by his influential works Coercion, Capital, and European States, Durable Inequality, and Dynamics of Contention.
Tilly began his academic career after earning his doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, where he studied under noted figures like George C. Homans and Barrington Moore Jr. He taught at several major institutions, including the University of Michigan, The New School, and ultimately Columbia University, where he held the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professorship of Social Science.
He developed a distinctive theoretical approach that rejected simplistic, static models of society, instead emphasizing dynamic processes and relational mechanisms. Tilly’s theories of state formation, particularly his provocative comparison of war-making and state-making to organized crime, remain central in political sociology. He also played a key role in the evolution of historical sociology and the relational sociology movement, especially through his collaborations and influence on the New York School.
A leading theorist of social movements, Tilly outlined how modern protest became structured around campaigns, repertoires of contention, and public displays of unity, worthiness, numbers, and commitment. His work with scholars like Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam further redefined the field by linking social movements to broader political processes.
Tilly received numerous honors, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as multiple honorary doctorates. His legacy endures through awards bearing his name and through continued influence on generations of social scientists.

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, although not as much so as his earlier Why? about the four kinds of explanations and how they're used to create, confirm, modify, or end relationships.

Credit or blame is based on change in value, agency, responsibility, and competence.

p20 Far beyond the assignment of credit and blame, people ... typically package their social experience in stories: explanatory narratives incorporating limited numbers of actors, just a few actions, and simplified cause-effect accounts in which the actors' actions produce all the significant outcomes.

p21 Stories matter greatly for social life [because]: 1) Stories vary from one relationship to another. 2) they rework and simplify social processes so that [they] become available for the telling; "X did Y to Z" conveys a memorable image of what happened. 3) They include strong imputations of responsibility, and thus lend themselves to moral evaluations.

p39 Porter Abbott argues that narrative is "the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time."

p66 "Tournaments, honors, promotions, and networks all build justice detectors" to award credit. In some cases to move people across the barrier of "them" to "us". p104 The blame equivalents (in order) are cascades of blame, shunning to expulsion, demotion or degradation, and shaming. p109 "When ordinary people look for justice .... they commonly call for contingent retaliation. But that intuitively attractive call contradicts four competing justince principles: incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation, and restoration."

p119 "More so than the giving of credit, assigning blame can easily become a persistent, destructive habit. Many a friendship, partnership, or marriage breaks up over the assignment of blame. But when carried out successfully through retaliation, incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation, and/or restoration, blaming brings struggles to an end."

[Harald · Rating 4 out of 5]

In recent decades psychologists have analyzed how we make errors in attributing causal relationships between events and actors. Too often we blame individuals for accidents and disasters in cases where there are multiple actors and systemic triggers that are beyond any individual's control. Charles Tilly takes the reader beyond this point (or rather chooses to ignore it) to discuss how we actually assign credit and blame. He constructs a model of justice detectors that includes factors such as agency, competence, and responsibility that he finds that people use to calculate appropriate amounts of blame and credit.
Tully draws his findings from stories and anecdotes, but also from American court cases. In this way this book provides a stimulus to thinking about how we reward people like ourselves and build and maintain an us-them attitude towards the people we blame. In the latter case blaming may have a disastrous effect on democratic society.

[Dedrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing was well focused on this particular topic, but as I have already studied psychology I found parts of it redundant with some of my learning.