The Logic of Social Action
Author: Raymond Boudon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1981-01-01
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 9780710008572
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After Parsons
Author: Renee C. Fox
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Published: 2005-08-25
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 1610442156
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Esteemed twentieth-century sociologist Talcott Parsons sought to develop a comprehensive and coherent scheme for sociology that could be applied to every society and historical epoch, and address every aspect of human social organization and culture. His theory of social action has exerted enormous influence across a wide range of social science disciplines. After Parsons, edited by Renée Fox, Victor Lidz, and Harold Bershady, provides a critical reexamination of Parsons' theory in light of historical changes in the world and advances in sociological thought since his death. After Parsons is a fresh examination of Parsons' theoretical undertaking, its significance for social scientific thought, and its implications for present-day empirical research. The book is divided into four parts: Social Institutions and Social Processes; Societal Community and Modernization; Sociology and Culture; and the Human Condition. The chapters deal with Parsons' notions of societal community, societal evolution, and modernization and modernity. After Parsons addresses major themes of enduring relevance, including social differentiation and cultural diversity, social solidarity, universalism and particularism, and trust and affect in social life. The contributors explore these topics in a wide range of social institutions—family and kinship, economy, polity, the law, medicine, art, and religion—and within the context of contemporary developments such as globalization, the power of the United States as an "empireless empire," the emergence of forms of fundamentalism, the upsurge of racial, tribal, and ethnic conflicts, and the increasing occurence of deterministic and positivistic thought. Rather than simply celebrating Parsons and his accomplishments, the contributors to After Parsons rethink and reformulate his ideas to place them on more solid foundations, extend their scope, and strengthen their empirical insights. After Parsons constitutes the work of a distinguished roster of American and European sociologists who find Parsons' theory of action a valuable resource for addressing contemporary issues in sociological theory. All of the essays in this volume take elements of Parsons' theory and critique, adapt, refine, or extend them to gain fresh purchase on problems that confront sociologists today.
The Logic of Social Control
Author: A.V. Horwitz
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2013-06-29
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 148992230X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Logic of Social Research
Author: Arthur L. Stinchcombe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-07-08
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 022678858X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Arthur L. Stinchcombe has earned a reputation as a leading practitioner of methodology in sociology and related disciplines. Throughout his distinguished career he has championed the idea that to be an effective sociologist, one must use many methods. This incisive work introduces students to the logic of those methods. The Logic of Social Research orients students to a set of logical problems that all methods must address to study social causation. Almost all sociological theory asserts that some social conditions produce other social conditions, but the theoretical links between causes and effects are not easily supported by observation. Observations cannot directly show causation, but they can reject or support causal theories with different degrees of credibility. As a result, sociologists have created four main types of methods that Stinchcombe terms quantitative, historical, ethnographic, and experimental to support their theories. Each method has value, and each has its uses for different research purposes. Accessible and astute, The Logic of Social Research offers an image of what sociology is, what it's all about, and what the craft of the sociologist consists of.
The Myth of Social Action
Author: Colin Campbell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1998-07-09
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13: 9780521646369
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Myth of Social Action, first published in 1996, is a powerful critique of the sociology of the time and a call to reject the prevailing orthodoxy. Arguing that sociological theory had lost its way, Colin Campbell mounts a case for a new 'dynamic interpretivism' a perspective on human conduct which is more inkeeping with the spirit of traditional Weberian action theory. Discussing and dismissing one by one the main arguments of those who reject individualistic action theory, he demonstrates that this has been wrongly rejected in favour of the interactional, social situationalist approach now dominating sociological thought.
The Unintended Consequences of Social Action
Author: Raymond Boudon
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-01-01
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 1349043818
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Explanation of Social Action
Author: John Levi Martin
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2011-08-11
Total Pages: 411
ISBN-13: 0199773319
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why questions? What explanations? -- Causality and persons -- Authority and experience -- The grid of perception -- Action in and on a world -- A social aesthetics -- Valence and habit -- Fields and games -- Explanations explained
A Theory of Social Action
Author: R. Tuomela
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 1984-09-30
Total Pages: 554
ISBN-13: 9789027717030
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →It is somewhat surprising to find out how little serious theorizing there is in philosophy (and in social psychology as well as sociology) on the nature of social actions or joint act. hons in the sense of actions performed together by several agents. Actions performed by single agents have been extensively discussed both in philosophy and in psycho~ogy. There is, ac cordingly, a booming field called action theory in philosophy but it has so far strongly concentrated on actions performed by single agents only. We of course should not forget game theory, a discipline that systematically studies the strategic interac tion between several rational agents. Yet this important theory, besides being restricted to strongly rational acting, fails to study properly several central problems related to the concep tual nature of social action. Thus, it does not adequately clarify and classify the various types of joint action (except perhaps from the point of view of the agents' utilities). This book presents a systematic theory of social action. Because of its reliance on so-called purposive causation and generation it is called the purposive-causal theory. This work also discusses several problems related to the topic of social action, for instance that of how to create from this perspective the most central concepts needed by social psychology and soci ology. While quite a lot of ground is covered in the book, many important questions have been left unanswered and many others unasked as well.
The Explanation of Social Action
Author: John Levi Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2021-06-15
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 9780197601624
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This thought-provoking and ambitious book is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. This paperback edition includes a new preface, in which Martin connects The Explanation of Social Action to deep neural networks that are important to the study of artificial intelligence and to the development of computational social science.
Social Action Systems
Author: Thomas J. Fararo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2001-09-30
Total Pages: 334
ISBN-13: 0313074119
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Fararo studies general theoretical sociology as a time-extended tradition with three phases: classical, postclassical, and recent. Employing a process philosophical approach, the author seeks to examine these three phases in an effort to provide a synthesis of the theories that seek to lay the foundations of theoretical sociology. The author especially focuses on the work of Talcott Parsons and George Homans, two contemporary theorists whose common aspiration was to forge a theoretical foundation for sociology that would serve to unify and integrate all theories growing out of sociological research in much the same way that the theory of evolution guides and integrates all other biological theories. To begin, the author provides a history and overview of the key classical theoretical frameworks from the perspective of process philosophy, which he applies to all three phases of the study. Fararo then carefully analyzes two major postclassical bodies of general theory, namely the evolving and intertwined frameworks of Parsons and Homans from their early theories of social systems to their later divergent perspectives on foundation and synthesis in sociological theory. Finally, the discussion turns to the recent phase of general theoretical sociology, where more recent foundation strategies -- rational choice theory and generative structuralism -- are analyzed in relation to the postclassical phase of the tradition. This important and sophisticated new work is essential for all those interested in sociological theory in particular and sociology in general.
