Daniel Little
Alain Touraine has been one of the most prolific sociologists in France for at least six decades. Of particular interest to me is his study of the Solidarity Movement in Poland in 1980-1981. In research reported in Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980-81 Touraine (along with François Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki) undertook to …
Continue reading "Touraine’s method of “sociological intervention” applied to contentious politics"
image: Warsaw Ghetto Memorial 1948 (detail) An earlier post analyzed Wendy Lower's stunningly original treatment of a single photograph of a 1941 mass killing in the town of Miropol, Ukraine (link). The photograph captures the murder of a Ukrainian Jewish mother and her child by German soldiers and Ukrainian militiamen. After extensive investigation Lower was …
Image: residential segregation by race, NYC 2010 In Dissecting the Social Peter Hedström describes the analytical sociology approach in these terms: Although the term analytical sociology is not commonly used, the type of sociology designated by the term has an important history that can be traced back to the works of late nineteenth- and early …
One of the catechismal ideas of analytical sociology is the microfoundations model of explanation: to explain a social fact we should provide an account of the microfoundations that produce it. That means identifying the facts about individual motivations and beliefs that lead them to behave in such a way as to bring about the social …
image: Russian police arrest Moscow anti-war protester The risk to democracy in the United States is more serious than it has ever been (link, link, link). Unabashed strongman wannabes like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have made it very clear that they have no allegiance to the principles and values of a liberal democracy, and their social …
Continue reading "New thinking about how authoritarian rule works"
A recurring theme in Understanding Society is the topic of technology failure -- air disasters, chemical plant explosions, deep drilling accidents. This diagram is intended to capture several dimensions of failure causes that have been discussed. The categories identified here include organizational dysfunctions, behavioral shortcomings, system failures, and regulatory dysfunctions. Each of these broad categories has contributed …
Is it so hard to picture a United States that has succumbed to authoritarianism and the sacrifice of our basic democratic rights? Not really, because we can see this process at work in a handful of Republican-dominated state governments already. Here are just a few examples of states in which governors and legislatures are using …
Continue reading "Authoritarian steps in Red state legislatures"
Analytical sociology is, as its proponents say, a meta-theory of how to conduct social research. In their contribution to Gianluca Manzo's Analytical Sociology: Actions and Networks Peter Hedström and Petri Ylikoski offer these core principles: provide explanations of social outcomes of interest based on the mechanisms that produce them; identify mechanisms at the level of the actors …
Continue reading "Analytical sociology and contentious politics"
What motivates violence, sacrifice, and atrocity among members of the military and other armed units in times of war and occupation? Christopher Browning asks this question for the members of Order Police Battalion 101 in Ordinary Men (link), and Thomas Kühne asks similar questions in The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler's Soldiers, Male Bonding …
Continue reading "Psychology of “comradeship” in Hitler’s armies"
Morality is a part of everyday life and personal experience. It is also, of course, the subject of a large field of philosophy -- philosophical ethics. What principles should I follow in action? What kind of person do I want to be? What do I owe to other people in a range of circumstances? We …
Understanding Society 