Social theory—some basic concepts, ideas

Ways of knowing—epistemology

• Religious experience
• Trial and error
• Direct sensory experience
• Socially mediated, ‘constructed’ knowledge
• Science

Science generates knowledge based on logic, evidence, and often intuition, using agreed-upon standards for doing inquiry/research to generate that knowledge.

How does knowledge in science accumulate?

• Incrementally.
• Quickly, in a revolutionary sense
• Theory is language of scientific knowledge
  • usually expressed as relationships between variables.
  • For instance, Karl Marx, class conflict (IV) and historical change(DV). Often cause-effect relationships.  For instance:
    • People’s political views tend to become more liberal as they acquire more formal education;
    • People’s political views tend to become more liberal as they age;
    • People tend to make more money as they acquire more formal education;
    • People’s political views tend to become more conservative as they make more money.
    • (Obviously, cause and effect is not always linear ….)
• Different levels of theorizing:
  • Meta theory (e.g., feminism, Marxism),
  • grand theory (e.g., anthropologist Marvin Harris’ cultural materialism),
  • middle-range theory (e.g., Durkheim’s theory of suicide),
  • working hypotheses (the students who come to exam study sessions are often those performing best in class).

But what is it?

• Sociologist George Ritzer in our text defines theory as a ‘set of interrelated ideas that allow for the systematization of knowledge of the social world, the explanation of that world, and predictions about the future of the social world.’
• More simply put: Knowledge generated by structured inquiry that attempts to explain and/or predict social phenomena.
• Think of it as a form–a very rigorous form used by the community of scientists, mostly–of storytelling.

The abstract and concrete

• A sunset–how would you paint it: as you see it, or including only some fundamental aspects that maybe aren’t even immediately recognizable as a sunset? Theory involves levels of abstraction.
  • Price of gasoline vs how demand for petroleum affects foreign policy
  • peasant rebellions–how can we explain/predict them?
  • How did we get a planet of nation-states?

Issues that have captured sociologists’ imaginations:

Oh my. No end to this. That’s one aspect of what makes Sociology so broad, but so interesting.

• Rise of individualism (rational choice theory, symbolic interactionism)
• Nation-states (Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Joel Migdal)
• Origins of markets, capitalism, industry (Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim)
• Democracy (Weber, Alexis de Tocqueville)
• Global inequalities (Marx, Immanuel Wallerstein)
• Power (C. Wright Mills, Michael Mann, Steven Lukes, William Domhoff, Michel Foucault, Patricia Hill Collins)
• Historical change (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Marvin Harris, etc.)
• Modernity (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Michelle Foucault)
• Socialization (George Herbert Meade, Charles Cooley, Sigmund Freud, Albert Bandura)

How to communicate theories?

• Sets of hypotheses, statements about the social world
• Often expressed as relationships between variables – cause and effect
• Use of language, specificity
• Supporting evidence/research
• Publication venues (books, journals)—less ‘mainstream’ theories may be less likely to achieve mainstream notoriety. However, fast food enterprises (well-described by Ritzer’s concept of McDonaldization) lay out the dangers of conferring privileged status on mainstream or ‘received’ views to the exclusion of alternative explanations. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, ‘All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.‘

How to evaluate theories?

• Test them (examine logic, evidence, sampling issues)—by theorists themselves, or by their other theorists researchers
• Test of time
• Peer review, criticism
• Parsimony (explaining the most with the least)

In any case, a theory, to be of some value to social science, needs to demonstrate that it has some explanatory power.

Politics

• Why might theories be threatening (e.g., Galileo, sexual orientation, evolution)?

• Can we predict where we’ll find dictatorships or democracies?
• Do out-of-wedlock births and lack of marriage cause poverty?
• Can we predict who will become the next president in the U.S?
• Where will the U.S. engage militarily?
• What will happen to global inequalities and poverty?
• What will happen to EOU in the next 10 years?
• Who will win the Super Bowl?
• What will be the most profitable investments in the next 5 years?
• Will globalization lead to a clash of civilizations (and WWIII)?

Some basic concepts related to theory

• Epistemology—study of knowledge, ways of ‘knowing’
• Deterministic versus probabilistic
• Role of logic and evidence—disciplined inquiry, research
• Testability – if you can’t test it, it may be a great set of ideas, but how can you go about disproving them?
• Accumulative, incremental (with occasional ‘revolutions’)—deductive approach (working from theory toward observation, testing theory)
• Grounded theory—inductive (working from observation toward generalization—developing theory)
• Relationship between inductive and deductive research
• Micro versus macrosociological approaches, different levels of theorizing
• Orientation (e.g., multicultural theories, racism, feminism)—in other words, theorizing from different groups’ perspectives produces different kinds of knowledge
• Positivism—an ontological view that theory is derived from empirical observation, and is universal in nature
• Social constructionism—what is studied by theorists is itself a product of social forces, not some objective phenomenon.
• Emic and etic perspectives—Emic stresses the lived perspective of the researched; etic stresses often more complex milieu that may be necessary to put the subject’s circumstances in context