Daniel Little
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 …
Continue reading "Methodological localism and actor-centered sociology"
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 …
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 …
The social world is not like the natural world. Nature is composed of things, forces, and geometries that have strong determining regularities whose interactions can be formulated with mathematical precision. There are problems of indeterminacy in physics, of course; but fundamentally we can rely on the material properties of steel, the magnetic properties of the …
A key premise of complexity theory is that a population of units has "emergent" properties that result from the interactions of units with dynamic characteristics. Call these units "agents". The "agent" part of the description refers to the fact that the elements (persons) are self-directed units. Social ensembles are referred to as "complex adaptive systems" …
Almost the first words of Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory include this intriguing statement: This somewhat austere book can be read in parallel with the much lighter Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998), Paris ville invisible, which tries to cover much of the same ground through a succession of photographic essays. It's available online …
In 1918 Thorstein Veblen wrote a surprising short book about the administration and governance of American universities, The Higher Learning In America. What is most surprising about the book is its date of publication. The critique he offers might have seemed familiar in 1968, whereas it seems precocious in 1918. A key element of Veblen's diagnosis …
What is involved in deliberating within an activist group? This isn't quite as simple a question as it might appear. Deliberation has to do with a discussion among a number of people aimed at arriving at a degree of consensus about facts, policies, and strategies. But it grades off into several other collective activities: contention over power …
Deleuze's theory (metaphor?) of assemblage as a way of thinking about the social world is an intriguing one. Fundamentally the idea is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology for the social world that proceeds from "atoms" to "molecules" to "materials". Rather, social formations are assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn …
Is it possible to draw a few conclusions on the topic of methodological individualism after dozens of years of debate? (Lars Udehn's Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning is a great study of the long history of the debate over this issue. It is unfortunate there isn't an affordable digital edition of the book. Joseph Heath's entry …
