Suchergebnisse

The following papers represent a selection from presentations made to the Theory Session of the 1995 Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association in Washington, D.C. The papers document the broad diversity of styles and topics of sociological theorizing. While this diversity appears to many as an impediment to science and paradigmatic closure, others celebrate it as a sign of intellectual liveliness and excitement. Without taking sides in this debate, one can appreciate the range of the papers published here, and one may even discern some commonalities, such as the attempt to bridge the gaps between various ideological camps and perspectives. If anything, what holds this collection together is a willingness to engage a variety of arguments, and to listen to what other schools of thought have to offer. In my view, this is the foremost task of theory today, for theory is uniquely equipped to detect unity in diversity. Without this effort, sociology is in danger of disintegrating altogether.

Three epistemologies—pragmatism, positivism, and hermeneutics—are sociologically explained as the ideologies of different groups doing various kinds of scientific work. These ideologies are shaped by the material conditions and social structures of scientific work in different areas of the sciences. Pragmatism is the ideology of research fronts that constantly produce change and innovation; positivism is the ideology of normal science with its routinized practices and high task certainty; hermeneutics is the philosophy of choice in loosely coupled textual fields with a high level of decentralization.

The current debates on metatheory in sociology do not account for the fact that metatheorizing, as a distinct intellectual activity, is unequally distributed throughout the sciences. As a reflexive and critical subspecialty, metatheory and metasociology are more likely to routinely accompany work in loosely coupled and highly controversial disciplines. The theory of scientific organizations explains the propensity for metatheorizing as the outcome of weak and conversational fields that rely mostly on texts to support their discourse.

Recent microsociological reductionisms claim that societal and organizational macrostructures can be "reduced to," "explained in terms of" or "translated into" the dynamics of elementary interaction systems. Two critical lines of argumentation challenge this claim. First, neofunctionalist systems theory is drawn on to show that reductionist strategies fail to acknowledge the emergent differences between types of social systems and thus run into difficulties in the analysis of macrostructures. A model of boundary maintenance operations in interaction systems illustrates this point. Second, a more internal critique of the logic of reductionism suggests that microsociology does not provide the "foundations" for macrosociology but that micro- and macrosociology should peacefully coexist as equally legitimate ways to make sense of different aspects of social reality.