Daniel Little
George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton have collaborated for over ten years on a simple idea: is it possible to introduce the concept of social identity into the formal mechanics of mainstream economics? Can "identity" complement "interest" in the calculation of rational individual behavior? Their ideas were developed in several important articles: "Economics and Identity" (link), "Identity …
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James Coleman's work has had a major influence on an important strand of thinking in the social sciences since the publication of Foundations of Social Theory in 1990. He was a somewhat iconoclastic sociologist, in that his approach to social theory was grounded in an actor-centered view of the social world. He was a rational-choice theorist …
John Levi Martin's The Explanation of Social Action is a severe critique of the role of "theory" in the social sciences. He thinks our uses of this construct follow from a bad conception of social explanation: we explain something by showing how it relates (often through law-like processes) to something radically different from the thing to …
What role do subjectivities play in the composition of society? How does subjectivity influence social functioning, social structure, and social relationships? By subjectivity I mean considerations that have to do with the mental state of an observer or participant: for example, stereotypes about race or religion, propositional attitudes, attitudes towards other people, understandings of social …
image: illustration in Luiz Carlos dos Santos Azevedo, "Developing a Performance Measurement System for a Public Organization: A Case Study of the Rio de Janeiro City Controller’s Office" (link)A key talisman in discussions about the relation between "macro" and "micro" is a famous diagram by James Coleman inFoundations of Social Theory. The diagram is often …
photos: Niklas Luhman (top), Mario Bunge (bottom) One view that has been taken about the causal properties of social structures is that they are emergent: they are properties that appear only at a certain level of complexity, and do not pertain to the items of which the social structure is composed. This view has a …
What is the ontological status of social entities -- kinship systems, police departments, religious movements? And what is the status of causal powers of social entities? Do we need to "reduce" social entities to the compounds of individuals who make them up? And do we need to derive the causal properties of social entities from …
A theory of action is one component of a meta-framework for sociology. It is an organized set of ideas about what individuals are doing when they engage in interactions in the world, and what we think at the highest level of generality about why they behave as they do. Individuals within social interactions constitute the …
A period of demonstration and protest in the Chinese village of Wukan has caught the attention of world media in the past several weeks (link, link). The village is in Guangdong, the dynamic coastal province. The demonstrations began in September against major land seizures by local government in alignment with developers, and became more intense in …
An earlier post discussed Neil Gross's attempt to understand social mechanisms from the point of view of a pragmatist sociology. Gross's attempt to flesh out a pragmatist theory of action is intriguing and worthy of further exploration. So here I'll look at a subsequent article, "Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism" (2010), in which Gross extends this …
Understanding Society 