photo: Morris Engel, Dock Workers 1947 (link) The topic of how actors arrive at their choices and behavior has come up a number of times here. The rational choice model has been considered (link), and other, more pragmatist approaches to agency have been considered as well (link). Finally, a number of posts have considered the …
Social knowledge at the micro level
People engage in their social worlds on the basis of a dense set of abilities and cognitive frameworks that permit them to make sense of the interactions they encounter, and to shape their behavior in ways that work for their purposes in the setting. People are creative, adaptive social actors, and this means that they engage …
Modeling organizational performance
Organizations do things that we care about. They are generally at least partially designed in order to bring about certain kinds of outcomes, and managers continue to tinker with them to improve them. And we have very good reasons for wanting to be able to measure their performance, to introduce innovations that improve performance, and …
Emergentism and generationism
media: lecture by Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky on chaos and reduction Several recent posts have focused on the topic of simulations in the social sciences. An interesting question here is whether these simulation models shed light on the questions of emergence and reduction that frequently arise in the philosophy of the social sciences. In most …
A sense of injustice in China?
Quite a few years ago Barrington Moore explored in his book Injustice the idea that a sense of justice sometimes plays an important role in history. Here is how he put his central question: This is a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at …
Margaret Archer on social change
In Late Modernity: Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society Margaret Archer and several talented collaborators attempt to lay out a framework of thinking that will permit them to better conceptualize the nature of change the modern social world. The book continues a process of reflection and collaboration that began last year with the publication of Social Morphogenesis. Ultimately the …
The status of women in India
Sociologists are often interested in making sense of processes of change that radiate along the axes of the great tectonics of social life, including class, race, and gender. These features of social life are particularly fundamental because they denote powerful determinants of opportunity, life-course, and personal outcomes for all of us. The positions into which …
System safety engineering
source: Nancy Leveson, Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety Why do complex technologies so often fail, and fail in such unexpected ways? Why is it so difficult for hospitals, chemical plants, and railroads to design their processes in such a way as to dramatically reduce the accident rate? How should we attempt to …
Institutional logics — actors within institutions
Why do people behave as they do within various social contexts -- the workplace, the street, the battlefield, the dinner table? These are fundamental questions for sociologists -- even when they are ultimately interested in the workings of supra-individual entities like organizations and structures. And generally speaking, sociology as a research tradition has perhaps not …
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Kathleen Tierney on disaster and resilience
The fact of large-scale technology failure has come up fairly often in Understanding Society (link, link, link). There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that our society is highly technology-dependent, relying on more and more densely interlinked and concentrated systems of production and delivery that are subject to unexpected but damaging forms …
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Understanding Society 