Personal electronic communication and the Internet -- have these new technologies changed the game for collective action? Here I am thinking of email and instant messaging, but also cell phones and other personal communications devices, as well as the powerful capacity for dissemination of ideas over the web -- has this dense new network of …
Explaining technology failure
Technology failure is often spectacular and devastating -- witness Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster, and the DC10 failures of the 1970s. But in addition to being a particularly important cause of human suffering, technology failures are often very complicated social outcomes that involve a number of different kinds of factors. And this …
Processes versus structures
Comparative historical sociology seeks to provide an answer to this type of question: what causes certain kinds of large historical outcomes? And it proceeds, often, on the basis of controlled comparison of a small number of cases. Theda Skocpol's classic book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China, is a …
Chaos and coordination in social life
Much social behavior is chaotic, in that it simply emerges from the independent choices of numerous agents during a period of time. It is analogous to Brownian motion -- particles in a liquid moving in random motions as a result of innumerable bumps and pushes at the molecular level. However, there are also many patterns …
Koestler’s twentieth century
Arthur Koestler is most celebrated for his historical novel about the Moscow show trials, Darkness at Noon. And the book is indeed a deeply revealing look at the heart of totalitarianism in the twentieth century -- the more so if you do a side-by-side reading of the trial of the fictional Rubashov and the transcripts …
Micro cultures?
Is there such a thing as a "micro"-culture -- a culture that is somewhat distinctive of a particular community in a specific time and place, and different from the culture of similar communities in other places? The sorts of communities I'm thinking of might include sports teams, university faculties, union locals, church congregations, street gangs, …
Is network analysis inconsistent with agent-centered explanation?
Quite a few researchers who study dynamic social processes are making use of some of the tools of network analysis. And it is sometimes maintained that this approach is inconsistent with an agent-centered approach to social processes. Some of these researchers take the view that "it's not what is in the heads of various actors, …
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The flea market analogy
Is the flea market a helpful analogy for understanding the social world ("The Dis-unity of Science")? Does it serve to provide a different mental model in terms of which to consider the nature of social phenomena? What it has going for it is heterogeneity and contingency, and an obvious share of agent-dependency. The people who …
What was E P Thompson up to?
Let's think about E P Thompson. His 1963 book, Making of the English Working Class, transformed the way that historians on the left conceptualized "social class." But what, precisely, was it about? Whereas other Marxist historians focused particularly on the large structures of capitalism, Thompson's eye was turned to the specific and often surprising details …
Agent-based modeling as social explanation
Logical positivism favored a theory of scientific explanation that focused on subsumption under general laws. We explain an outcome by identifying one or more general laws, a set of boundary conditions, and a derivation of the outcome from these statements. A second and competing theory of scientific explanation can be called "causal realism." On this …
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Understanding Society 