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  1. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach.Margaret S. Archer - 1995 - Cambridge University Press.
    Margaret Archer develops here her morphogenetic approach, heralded in Culture and Agency (CUP, 1988), and applies it to the problem of structure and agency, that is, how we both shape society and are shaped by it. Her aim is to capture the interplay between these two processes rather than collapse them into one, as has been the case with the traditional competing individualist and collectivist methodologies. The morphogenetic approach offers a new understanding of social change and poses a direct challenge (...)
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  • Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research.Iddo Tavory & Stefan Timmermans - 2014 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Stefan Timmermans.
    In _Abductive Analysis_, Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans provide a new navigational map for constructing empirically based generalizations in qualitative research. They outline an accessible way to think about observations, methods, and theories that nurtures theory-formation without locking it into predefined conceptual boxes. The authors view research as continually moving back and forth between a set of observations and theoretical generalizations. To craft theory is to then pitch one’s observations in relation to other potential cases, both within and without one’s (...)
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  • The institutional logics perspective: a new approach to culture, structure, and process.Patricia H. Thornton - 2012 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by William Ocasio & Michael Lounsbury.
    Introduction to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Precursors to the Institutional Logics Perspective -- Defining the Inter-institutional System -- The Emergence, Stability and Change of the Inter-institutional System -- Micro-Foundations of Institutional Logics -- The Dynamics of Organizational Practices and Identities -- The Emergence and Evolution of Field-Level Logics -- Implications for Future Research.
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  • Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences.Peter Hedström & Petri Ylikoski - 2010 - Annual Review of Sociology 36:49–67.
    During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea (...)
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  • Methodological individualism.Joseph Heath - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    (1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. It involves, in other words, a commitment to the primacy of what Talcott Parsons would later call “the action frame of reference” (Parsons 1937: 43-51) in social-scientific explanation. It is also sometimes described as the claim that explanations of “macro” social phenomena must (...)
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  • A Realist Theory of Science.Roy Bhaskar - 1975 - New York: Routledge.
    Now acknowledged as a classic in the philosophy of science, A Realist Theory of Science is one of the very few books to transform not only our understanding of science, but that of the nature of the world it studies. The book has inspired the multi-disciplinary and international movement of thought known as critical realism. Re-issued with a new introduction.
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  • The Social System.Talcott Parsons - 1951 - Routledge.
    This book brings together, in systematic and generalized form, the main outlines of a conceptual scheme for the analysis of the structure and processes of social systems. It carries out Pareto's intention by using the "structural-functional" level of analysis.
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  • The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency.Dave Elder-Vass - 2010 - Cambridge University Press.
    The problem of structure and agency has been the subject of intense debate in the social sciences for over 100 years. This book offers a solution. Using a critical realist version of the theory of emergence, Dave Elder-Vass argues that, instead of ascribing causal significance to an abstract notion of social structure or a monolithic concept of society, we must recognise that it is specific groups of people that have social structural power. Some of these groups are entities with emergent (...)
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  • Historical explanation in the social sciences.J. W. N. Watkins - 1957 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 8 (30):104-117.
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  • Cultural rules and material relations.Douglas V. Porpora - 1993 - Sociological Theory 11 (2):212-229.
    This paper attempts to synthesize the Winchian stress on constitutive rules with the Marxian stress on material relationships by developing the concept of emergently material social relations. Such relationships, it is argued, arise from the constitutive rules that constitute a group's way of life. Although such relationships thus are derivative from the conscious rule-following behavior of actors, nevertheless they have an objective existence independent of actors' specific awareness. It is argued that such material relations are an important mechanism beyond the (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Thin Explanations: A Review of The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. [REVIEW]Charles Crothers - 2013 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (2):257-267.
    The Oxford Handbook provides an extensive and innovative review of developments in Analytical Sociology (AS) which is a theory program which seeks to develop ‘thin explanations’ of social phenomena by understanding their micro-foundations through explicitly developed models and then tracing through the broader consequences of these actions and interactions for aggregate social patterns. The volume covers the key characteristics of this approach in terms of ontology and epistemology and then assays recent developments across over two dozen areas of application: each (...)
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  • A Realist Theory of Science.Roy Bhaskar - 1976 - Mind 85 (340):627-630.
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  • Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge.Mario Bunge - 2004 - University of Toronto Press.
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  • Reduction, explanation, and individualism.Harold Kincaid - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (4):492-513.
    This paper contributes to the recently renewed debate over methodological individualism (MI) by carefully sorting out various individualist claims and by making use of recent work on reduction and explanation outside the social sciences. My major focus is on individualist claims about reduction and explanation. I argue that reductionist versions of MI fail for much the same reasons that mental predicates cannot be reduced to physical predicates and that attempts to establish reducibility by weakening the requirements for reduction also fail. (...)
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  • The two theses of methodological individualism.Leon J. Goldstein - 1958 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 9 (33):1-11.
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  • New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science: The Heterogeneous Social.Daniel Little - 2016 - New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.
    An accessible introduction to the latest developments and debates in the philosophy of social science.
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  • A Realist Theory of Science. [REVIEW]J. B. R. - 1980 - Review of Metaphysics 33 (3):619-620.
    First published in 1975 by Leeds Books Ltd., this second, revised edition adds only a short, twelve page Postscript and an Index. The former replies to reviews of the original edition by clarifying the use of two key terms, by commenting on its principal weaknesses, and by indicating the direction of further work required by the position advocated.
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