I ran across a book by Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg I hadn't read before in a Dijon bookstore, L'acteur et le système: Les contraintes de l'action collective (French Edition). (Yes, in France they still have great academic bookstores!) It was the book's title that caught my eye -- "actor and system". Crozier and Friedberg's premise …
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 …
Continue reading "Methodological localism and actor-centered sociology"
Character and history
How do features of character play into the fabric of history? The first has to do with psychology, motives, and agency; the second has to do with large events and processes. So how might a better understanding of the domain of individual character contribute to better historical understanding? When we talk about a person's character, …
Actor-centered sociology and agent-based models
Actor-centered sociology (ACS) begins in the intuition that social processes begin in the interactions of socially constructed individuals, and it takes seriously the idea that actors have complex and socially inflected mental schemes of action and representation. So actor-centered sociologists are keen not to over-simplify the persons who constitute the social domain of interest. And …
Continue reading "Actor-centered sociology and agent-based models"
Ostrom’s central idea
Elinor Ostrom was a very important contributor to the theory of public rationality and the institutions that underlie cooperation, and she was most deserving of the recognition that accompanied her receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. Her passing today is a sad loss for the academic world. Her key contributions were included …
Causal narratives about historical actors
A common kind of causal narrative employed by historians is to identify a set of key actors, key circumstances, and key resources; and then to treat a period of time as a flow of actions by the actors in response to each other and changing circumstances. We might describe this as "explanation of an outcome …
Continue reading "Causal narratives about historical actors"
Scenario-based projections of social processes
As we have noted in previous posts, social outcomes are highly path-dependent and contingent (link, link, link, link). This implies that it is difficult to predict the consequences of even a single causal intervention within a complex social environment including numerous actors -- say, a new land use policy, a new state tax on services, or a sweeping …
Continue reading "Scenario-based projections of social processes"
Fresh thinking about government
The eminent neo-Confucian scholar Tu Weiming argues for the importance of bracketing our Western-centric ideas about society, progress, and justice when we think about our global futures. (Here is an interesting article by Tu titled "Mutual Learning as an Agenda for Social Development"; link.) So for a moment let us put aside the familiar rhetoric …
The politics color wheel
The problem of mapping or classifying people's political attitudes is more complicated than it looks. Placing people on a spectrum from left to right is convenient but over-simple. It assumes that there is a single dimension of political difference, ranging from conservative to liberal, and that everyone can be placed somewhere along that spectrum. But …
Real Utopias
It is worth thinking a bit about the intellectual project of envisioning a utopia. By definition, a utopia is a vision of a social order that is profoundly different from the real historical circumstances and institutions in which we live. It would correct important flaws in the social world we currently inhabit. It is a social …
Understanding Society 