There is a great deal of important international work underway today within the philosophy of social science on the general topic of social ontology. How do social structures relate to the actions of socially situated actors? How does causation work in the social realm? Can we say anything rigorous about the nature of "levels" of the social …
Is “soccer” an extended social thing?
Some social entities are compact and well bounded -- FEMA as a federal emergency bureau, the IBM Corporation, the Southern Poverty Law Center. In each case we can identify the people, institutions, and powers that constitute the entity. But what about social configurations that don't have this degree of coherence? Can we nonetheless regard these …
Supervenience of the social?
I have found it appealing to try to think of the macro-micro relation in terms of the idea of supervenience (link). Supervenience is a concept that was developed in the context of physicalism and psychology, as a way of specifying a non-reductionist but still constraining relationship between psychological properties and physical states of the brain. Physicalism …
The ontology of power
There have been quite a few posts on the concept of power over the years in this blog (link). This continues to be an intriguing subject for me. Fundamentally the question of the moment is this: how does "power" fit into a social ontology of the kinds of things that exist in the social world? …
Character and authenticity
image: Molière's Tartuffe, Comédie Française When we judge that a person has acted on the basis of character in a given situation, we are implying a judgment about his or her inner constitution, and we are judging that the action derived "authentically" from the individual's underlying traits. Character and authenticity go hand in hand. So what …
The heterogeneous social?
image: screenshot from video, "A Bird Ballet" I've argued in several places that we need to think of the social world as being radically heterogeneous (link, link, link). There are multiple processes, things, structures, and temporalities at work, and what we perceive at a moment in time in the social world is a complex composite of these …
Social embeddedness and methodological localism
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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Mayer Zald on organizations and bureaucracy
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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Methodological localism and actor-centered sociology
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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Character and personality
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 …
Understanding Society 