Daniel Little
The philosophy of social science is one of the smaller sub-disciplines of philosophy, and many universities have only a single course in the subject. In contrast to larger fields such as ethics or epistemology, the philosophy of social science involves a much smaller part of the intellectual spectrum and audience within the field of philosophy. …
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Methodological localism emphasizes two ways in which actors are socially embedded. Actors are socially situated and socially constituted. Socially situated. In any given situation individuals are embedded within a set of social relations and institutions that create opportunities and costs for them. They have friends and enemies, they have bosses and workers, they have neighbors and …
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SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS Macrohistorical Dynamics Network 38th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association Chicago, IL 21-24 November 2013 Submission Deadline: 15 February 2013 "Organizing Powers" We invite you to take part in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 38th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 21-24, 2013 in Chicago. …
I had the opportunity to have lunch with Mayer Zald in July last summer, a few weeks before his death. Our conversation was wide-ranging, but one segment in particular warrants publishing here. In this segment I asked Mayer how he thought about the connections among social psychology, organizational behavior, and social movements theory in the …
Continue reading "Mayer Zald on his development as a sociologist"
Mayer Zald helped to shape the field of organizational behavior in the United States, beginning with his time as a faculty member at Vanderbilt and continuing through his long career in sociology at the University of Michigan. In 1971 he published an early version of some of his thinking on this subject in a short …
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We celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 21. Here is a curated set of film clips that serve to recall the major challenges of inequality, segregation, and violence that faced the African American community in the Jim Crow racial system of the 1940s and 1950s. These videos capture some of …
I've advocated in earlier posts for two related ideas: the idea of actor-centered sociology and the idea of methodological localism. The first idea recommends that sociologists couch their research and theories in terms of more specific and nuanced theories of the actors whose thoughts and actions make up the social processes of interest. The second …
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If we want to have a more adequate theory of the actor (link), we need to broaden our understanding of the factors and capacities that affect action. The categories of personality and character are both relevant to the ways in which we understand how people behave in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. So a theory of …
Source: Gilles Mora and Beverly Brannan, FSA: The American Vision; photos by Dorothea Lange We often think that some historical periods have deep effects on the personalities and character of individuals who came of age and lived adult life during those periods. This implies that specific cohorts of people may have distinctive personality features that differ …
Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition provided an alternative model for thinking about society. We can think of social institutions as partially designed and selected for their organizational properties; so they are different from proteins and planetary systems. Simon is also an important contributor to the study of complexity. So his new chapter …
Understanding Society 