Nonetheless, I wager that it will not explain very much. This could do for social science what ‘big data’ has achieved in meteorology and medicine. It’s simple: collect all the information we possibly can on all manner of variables - social, economic, political, historical, and be sure to include environmental conditions (people rarely riot during winter time) - create a ‘big data’ dataset, and start the supercomputers churning. If we really want causally to explain protests and disorder, we should hand the problem over to mathematicians who are good at detecting patterns and spotting aberrations, however rare their occurrence. When Spilerman (1970 1971 1976) examined not just those cities that suffered disorder, but a wide range of cities, he found that economic deprivation, inequality, and other ‘usual suspects’ failed to explain why some erupted in violence and others didn’t. In the 1960s, American cities were repeatedly convulsed by rioting. Yet, sadly, deaths following contact with the police are not so uncommon some of these deaths are intensely controversial, but still they only rarely result in rioting. It may seem intuitively obvious why the electrocution of two youths who sought sanctuary from pursuing police in an electricity substation was likely to ignite the banlieues of many French cities. The problem is that if the phenomenon demands multi-factorial explanation, then all the case studies in the world simply won’t cut it. There is no shortage of factors that authors intuitively regard as important. We are all agreed, I think, that the causation of social phenomena is complex and demands multi-factorial explanations. Many of them invoke the ‘usual suspects’ of economic conditions - globalisation, recession, public expenditure cuts, and so forth - as creating pre-dispositions for the occurrence of protest and rioting. Frequently, the contributions to this special edition implicitly attempt to do precisely that. Explaining something - protest and disorder - at the level of causality involves finding that concatenation of conditions that enhance the likelihood that protest and disorder will occur and in the absence of which it will not. Long ago, a pioneer of sociology, Max Weber, drew a distinction between explanations at the level of causality and at the level of meaning. I was stimulated, challenged, and enraged by the articles in equal measure - I even agreed occasionally. Amongst my reading this summer was the special edition of Policing and Society devoted to contemporary rioting and protest. The academic long vacation offers the opportunity to catch-up on some reading and reflect upon it.

Social phenomena examples