Agent-based models are increasingly important in social science research. They have two obvious apparent virtues: they can model complex macrosociological phenomena without strong assumptions about agents and without analytic solutions for models, and they seem to instantiate the methodological individualist program in a concrete way. We argue that the latter claim is false. After providing schematic accounts of ABM models and a first introduction to ways in which to characterize individualist explanations, we work through six conceptions of individualist explanations that (...) are decreasingly "less individualist" and argue that ABM-based explanations in the social sciences are not inevitably individualist in any of these senses. ABMs allow for explanatory relations among social entities and properties in the model environment and they are silent on what basic agents are, allowing social entities and properties to play basic explanatory roles. (shrink)

The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptualized. De Haas recently provided a powerful critique of the current literature highlighting some important flaws that recur through it. In particular, migration systems tend to be identified as fully formed entities, and there is no theorization as to how they come into being and how they break down. The internal dynamics which drive such changes are not examined. Such critiques of migration systems relate (...) to wider critiques of the concept of systems in the broader social science literature, where they are often presented as black boxes in which human agency is largely excluded. The challenge is how to theorize system dynamics in which the actions of people at one time contribute to the emergence of systemic linkages at a later time. This article focuses on the genesis of migration systems and the notion of pioneer migration. It draws attention both to the role of particular individuals, the pioneers, and also the more general activity of pioneering which is undertaken by many migrants. By disentangling different aspects of agency, it is possible to develop hypotheses about how the emergence of migrations systems is related to the nature of the agency exercised by different pioneers or pioneering activities in different contexts. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 413-437 DOI 10.1558/jcr.v11i4.413 Authors Oliver Bakewell, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford Hein De Haas, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford Agnieszka Kubal, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 11 Journal Issue Volume 11, Number 4 / 2012. (shrink)

The existence of a firm can be seen as a necessary condition for the existence of stakeholders. However, in the stakeholder literature, the firm has remained a relatively underdeveloped and fuzzy construct. In this essay, we examine how the firm has been conceptualized (explicitly or implicitly) in earlier research and suggest that, at least in stakeholder thinking, the firm can be considered as having an emergent nature. We elaborate this idea by building on the resent philosophical discussions of emergence and, (...) as a result, propose the emergentist stakeholder model of the firm. (shrink)