MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE 271activity within which the stabilization of social relations takes place (Shotter 1993a; Tilly
2002) and that generate emergent “figurations” (Elias 1991) or “social arrangements” (Onuf
1998). Legitimation is therefore ongoing, never entirely finished, and never exhaustive; even
the most apparently solid set of legitimating reasons might lose their public appeal under the
right conditions.
At the same time, the local stabilizations highlighted by this prosthetic cannot simply be re-
duced to the deliberate and instrumental decisions of historical actors. Indeed, actors, too, are
endogenized to ongoing social processes, and in particular to the social processes involving the
attribution of responsibility and the delimitation of boundaries of acceptable action (P.T. Jackson
2004; Ringmar 1996). Instead of transcendental subjects speaking, or essential individuals exer-
cising full control over the meanings of their words and deeds, the prosthetic of legitimation
struggles discloses specific persons as sites in a complex cultural network of institutional, organi-
zational, and rhetorical resources (Foucault 1972).
The location of persons in this cultural network affects the agency that they can exercise. To be
more precise: In this approach, potentials for action arise from what we might call the double
failure of social arrangements to cohere on their own (P.T. Jackson 2003). First, particular con-
stellations of resources and strategies are never inevitable, but represent ongoing accomplish-
ments of practice (Doty 1997). The “fit” of particular legitimating practices with one another has
less to do with intrinsic properties of the practices themselves, and more to do with active pro-
cesses of tying practices together to form relatively coherent wholes (Laffey and Weldes 1997).
Second, cultural resources for action are always ambiguous and do not simply present themselves
as clearly defined templates for action (Sewell 1992). Instead, cultural resources provide oppor-
tunities, but actualizing those opportunities demands practical, political, and discursive work
(Neumann 1999; Tilly 1998).^14
If we keep in mind both the ideal-typical character of this conception of legitimation struggles
and the openness of the conception itself to creativity and contingency on the part of the social
actors under investigation, it should be possible to preserve both parts of the double hermeneutic
simultaneously.^15
IMPLEMENTING THE PROGRAM: MOMENTS AND MECHANISMS
Legitimation, like any social process, is analytically composed of and sustained by mechanisms
that “account for variation in how processes unfold” (P.T. Jackson and Nexon 2002, 105). Con-
crete historical outcomes are a product of the contingent concatenation of multiple mechanisms
and practices; the analytical work suggested by such a stance involves detailing how these concat-
enations come to pass and what effects they exercise (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 13; Tilly
1998). In order to explain the impact of particular legitimation practices at some particular point
in time, it is necessary to examine the specific historical context out of which they emerge, along
with the specific ways in which those cultural practices interact with one another.
But a conventional historical narrative will not suffice here. Scholarly researchers only know that
some resource or practice was important in retrospect, which is to say after it has been deployed in
a concrete context or legitimation struggle and has thereby taken on a locally specific meaning with
practical implications for the issues at hand. Therefore, one has to begin at the point at which a
legitimation struggle concretely takes place, then move “backward” in time to sketch out the spe-
cific historical context, and finally come back “forward” in time to the resolution of the concrete
legitimation struggle itself. This temporal tacking back and forth is crucial to the exercise.
The analysis of a legitimation struggle along these lines therefore involves three analytical tasks: