Dave Elder-Vass's arguments for the real causal powers of social structures have been considered here several times (link, link). Elder-Vass's recent book, The Reality of Social Construction, addresses this subject from a different point of view. Here he is interested in the question of the collision of social realism and social constructivism, generally thought of as being …
Path dependency and contingency
Historical outcomes are rarely determined by some set of antecedent conditions. Instead, the outcome that occurs is the result of an extended series of events and conditions, each stage of which is subject to substantial contingency and conjunctures. This is most visible in the occurrence of large, dramatic events like stock market crashes, peasant uprisings, …
Problems with causal mechanisms
There are a couple of problems with the theory of causal mechanisms that will be difficult to address. Jim Mahoney raises a general concern in "Beyond Correlational Analysis" -- there is no consensus about how to define a mechanism. But there are more specific problems as well. One is the issue raised by Johannes Persson …
Thinking poverty in the inner city
I find the question of how other people think to be one of the most interesting angles we can raise about the social world. By "thinking" I mean breaking down the world of experience into useful categories, reasoning about cause and effect among these items, and organizing one's activities around how he/she understands the world. …
How things work
Social scientists have a set of abstract goals in approaching their work. They want to formulate specific research questions about limited aspects of the social world and then arrive at empirical and explanatory insights into those matters. They look for the evidence of social structures and systems, regularities of social behavior in populations and groups, …
The social world as morphogenesis
Critical realism has progressed far since Roy Bhaskar's early writings on the subject in A Realist Theory of Science. One of the most important thinkers to have introduced new ideas into the debate is Margaret Archer. Several books in the mid-1990s represented genuinely original contributions to issues about the nature of social ontology and methodology, including …
European philosophy of social science
There is an active and extended group of scholars in Europe with a very focused concentration on the philosophy of the social sciences. A good cross-section of this community gathered in Rotterdam Monday and Tuesday this week for a small conference on social mechanisms at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (link). These are …
Does the microfoundations principle imply reductionism?
My philosophy of social science has always and consistently maintained the idea that social facts depend on the activities and beliefs of individuals. There is no social "stuff" that exists independently from individual actors. I have encapsulated that idea in the form of the "microfoundations" principle: any claim about the characteristics or causal powers of …
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Macro causes of European fascism
Michael Mann's book Fascists makes use of causal claims at a range of levels, from the macro to the micro, to explain the emergence of European fascism. Here is a passage that highlights four macro-level causes of fascism: The interwar period in Europe was the setting that threw up most of the self-avowed fascists and saw them …
Social hierarchy and popular culture
There is some interesting work being done on the sociology of taste these days. I'm thinking specifically of a literature that has developed around the idea of "omnivorousness" and social status. Richard Peterson initiated much of this discussion in 1992 with an article in Poetics entitled "Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and …
Understanding Society 