AGAINST GRAND THEORIES: A (CAUTIONARY) TALE OF TWO DISCIPLINES

The history of sociology is littered with optimistic proposals for the development of theory, none of which amounted to much. This chapter explains this history in terms of the meta-theoretical ideas that motivated this optimism, and why they failed.

2010

2019

Contemporary Philosophy and Social Science, 2019

No matter how different sociological ontology, epistemology and methodology are, they pull together reasoning the social world for a better human understanding. So of their diverse theoretical paradigms and perspectives that developed over the time, make sociology a distinct discipline. But so far, their internal contradictions and dualism remain unresolved, and rather invites challenges for the future prospect of world sociology. The challenge is not how they thrive humans on different or diverse universe of meanings but to see their cross-boundaries of meanings. Our study also reveals that now the foundationlism-the theoretical narratives of Durkheim, Marx and Weber (DMW) have been reconstructed and regained with a fresh lease of life in the sociological world. But the proponents for such original building blocks are not always visible protagonists. However, in this context, the neo-functional theorists buttress structural functionalism with some radicalism whereas the critical theorists juxtapose the conflict theoretical perspectives uncovering many missing dimensions of exclusions of sociological marginal and minorities.

Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research

Something happened to sociological theory in the last half of the 20th century. Those who practice science have become specialists and those who present grander visions of the social universe have become antiscience. Among theorists committed to the epistemology of science, a new timidity is evident; and despite the high quality of their specialized work, it lacks a big vision about big processes that cut across big amounts of time. Obviously, we are overstating the case, because there have been some interesting efforts at grand theory, but still the term "grand theory" now carries negative connotations as something that failed scholars like Talcott Parsons once did, a half century ago. Yet, despite this fact, sociological theory continues to worship the graves of Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim, who thought big and who presented sociology with grand theories. Thus, it appears that we like our early masters to be grand theorists, but in the age of specialization, we stand in their shadows rather than on their shoulders. In this chapter, we argue for a return of grand theory. It is time to consolidate specialized theories and recapture the vision of the last century where everyone-from Comte and Spencer, through Marx, Weber, and Simmel to Pareto and even Mead-was concerned with explaining big processes with grand theories. CONNECTING THE MICRO AND MACRO Theory is "grand" when it seeks to explain a large social landscape, or in a more contemporary vocabulary it tries to link macro-and micro levels of reality. Much sociological commentary over the last few decades has been concerned with the "gap" between the micro and macro, with only a few really trying very hard to fill this gap theoretically (Alexander et al., 1986). Indeed, for all their antiscience and critical rhetoric, postmodern theorists have been more grand than those committed to the epistemology of science. They are more in tune with the vision of the early masters, but unfortunately, they often poison their own soup with a vocabulary to choke on, with antiscience rhetoric, with relativism, and with critique. Still, at least someone is thinking big. Grand theory, therefore, must be about a full range of social

2017

With Le métier de sociologue. Préliminaires épistémologiques (translated into English under the title: The Craft of sociology. Epistemological preliminaries in 1991), Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron provide an epistemological introduction to contemporary sociology. First published in 1968 (second edition, 1972), this is an edited collection of texts in the history and philosophy of sciences, which relates to a class given by Bourdieu and his colleagues at the Ecole pratique des hautes études, but the book first aims to establish more soundly the scientific legitimacy of the discipline, by situating sociology within the continuum of the natural sciences, particularly physics and biology. The Craft of sociology constitutes an important moment in the struggles inside the French, but also the international, field of sociology. It serves as an epistemological critique of positivism (dominant in the 1960s), recalls the relevance of the novel conceptualisa...

This essay provides a basis for examining the basic ontological, explanatory, and theoretical characteristics of social scientific knowledge, with special application to sociology. The philosophy of the social sciences is the field within philosophy that thinks critically about the nature and scope of social scientific knowledge and explanation. The essay considers some of the ways that philosophers and social scientists have conceptualized the nature of social phenomena, and argues for an ontology based on socially situated individuals in interaction. The essay examines several features of social explanation, focusing on the idea of a causal mechanism. It argues that social explanations come down to a claim about social causation, and social causation in turn should be understood in terms of a hypothesized causal mechanism connecting one set of social facts with another. The essay turns finally to several issues of epistemology. How are social science hypotheses and theories to be tested empirically? And what are some of the limitations of positivism and naturalism as theories of social science knowledge? The essay closes by returning to ontology in a consideration of methodological individualism and holism.

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2019

This paper addresses a key moment in the development of sociology when its status as a science was criticised from within by ethnomethodologists (Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel), post-Althusserian Marxists (Barry Hindess) and Michel Foucault. These criticisms seemed to come from different sides, but they converged in arguing their positions from the point of view of a proper conception of science through which mainstream sociology was found wanting. Neither secured its own position and each had a similar legacy of a form of interpretivism hostile both to scientific sociology and its critical project. The paper situates this moment and its legacy where both correspondence and coherence criteria for sociological knowledge claims come to be undermined.