The City Year national leadership conference is taking place in Boston this week, celebrating the 25th anniversary of City Year. CY is a strong example of a social-change organization that is in the process of actually making an impact on a key social problem. CY's goal is specific and audacious: to improve the high school …
Domain of the social sciences
Is the domain of "all social phenomena" a valid subject for scientific study? Is there a place for a purely general sociology, designed to be a theory of the social everything? Sociologists from Comte to Parsons have sometimes put forward this idea, and James Coleman pursued something like this in Foundations of Social Theory. But …
Are there meso-level social mechanisms?
It is fairly well accepted that there are social mechanisms underlying various patterns of the social world — free-rider problems, communications networks, etc. But the examples that come readily to mind are generally specified at the level of individuals. The new institutionalists, for example, describe numerous social mechanisms that explain social outcomes; but these mechanisms …
Peggy Somers’ contribution to realism
Peggy Somers is an important contributor to the active field of sociological theory. And she identifies as a critical realist when it comes to understanding the logic and epistemology of the historical social sciences. Her views were extensively developed in “We’re no angels” (1998; link). The title picks up on the epistemology that she favors: …
Liquid modernity?
image: Len Stomski, River Flow Zygmunt Bauman advocates for the idea of "liquid modernity" (Liquid Modernity). This view emphasizes the fact of change within society; and it argues that change is occurring more and more rapidly in the "modern" world. Here is an observation by Bauman about the modern world: Forms of modern life may …
Morphogenesis and realist meta-theory
Margaret Archer's contribution to critical realism has been an important part of the recent progress of the field, and her theory of morphogenesis is key to this progress. Her recent volume, Social Morphogenesis, represents a rigorous and serious step forward in the project of articulating this theory as both a meta-theory for the social sciences …
The big ideas
image: Luten Baher, Musician The deluge of changes that shook Europe around 1800 -- the making of the modern world -- brought with them an explosion of big new ideas, new ways of framing the social, historical, and natural world which we inhabit. Darwin, Freud, Marx, Walras, Carnot, Poincaré, Einstein -- each brought forward one …
The social world
image: Tuileries, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Toledo Museum of Art exibition It seems self evident, barely worth remarking, that social outcomes are the result of the actions of numbers of ordinary human beings, doing things for their own particular reasons -- finding solutions to the challenges of life that confront them, taking care of themselves and their …
Social upheaval
image: Monte Carlo simulation of portfolio value We sometimes think that there is fundamental stability in the social world, or at least an orderly pattern of development to the large social changes that occur. When there are crises -- like the financial crisis of 2008 or the riots in London and Stockholm in the past …
The near future
There is a lot going on in America and the world today: climate change, increasing separation between the rich and the non-rich, entrenched poverty in cities, continuing effects of racism in American life, and a rising level of political extremism in this country and elsewhere, for starters. Add to this politico-military instability in Europe, continuing …
Understanding Society 