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: 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 …
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 …
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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 …
image: "Mapping the SS Concentration Camps," Geographies of the Holocaust (Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds.) The complex realities of the Holocaust are now more than seventy-five years in the past. And yet the history, causes, and variations of this nightmare period have not yet been adequately understood (link). An excellent recent …
It is really important for people to understand that ChatGPT is not a valid source of academic content or references. And it is not just useless because it makes occasional "errors" -- it is unreliable all the way down as a source of knowledge. Remember how ChatGPT works. It is a Large Language Model, trained …
An earlier post considered the question of how to assess the quality of ChatGPT as an academic writer. One particular concern shared by professors in humanities and social sciences is whether ChatGPT will lead to "AI-plagiarism" in which students substitute ChatGPT sessions for their own work. This particular worry seems unjustified at present, but there …
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I've taken the view that the hoopla about ChatGPT is overblown, and that the texts generated by large language models in response to "prompts" are nothing more than strings of sentences, without coherent meaning. But now that I've spent an evening playing with the tool, my opinion is changed. I'm frankly amazed at how informative …
[Jamie Morgan accepted my invitation to contribute a guest post to Understanding Society on the topic of the varieties of realism in the philosophy of social science. Jamie is Professor of Economic Sociology at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward Fullbrook. He has published widely in the fields of economics, …
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Understanding Society 