The safety net in Michigan

Poverty in the United States has increased measurably in the past ten years, and this is particularly visible in the state of Michigan. (Here is a webpage provided by the Michigan Department of Human Services with some basic information on poverty in the state.)  State departments of human services and non-profit organizations alike are being stretched by the need for poverty-related services -- food assistance, childcare, heating assistance, job training, and the like. So how good a job are we doing to ensure that poor people in the United States have reasonable access to the necessities of life?In general, the answer to the question seems mostly to be -- not a very good job. The amount of money available for services to the poor is...

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,poverty

Microfoundationalism

detail: Lynn Cazabon photoThe philosophy of social science encompasses several important tasks, and key among them is to provide theories of social ontology and social explanation. What is the nature of social entities? What is needed in order to substantiate a claim of social causation? What constitutes an acceptable social explanation?The concept of microfoundations is relevant to each of these domains. A microfoundation is:a specification of the ways in which the properties and structure of a higher-level entity are produced by the activities and properties of lower-level entities.In the case of the social sciences, this amounts to:a specification of the ways that properties, structural features, and causal powers of a social entity are...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_structure,holism,localism,microfoundations

What is the philosophy of history?

When philosophers have written about “history”, they have often had different and even incompatible goals in mind. One tradition of philosophers, generally pre-twentieth century and generally from continental Europe, have wanted to contribute to answers to large questions about the nature of history as it presented itself over time as a compound of individuals, actions, nations, and civilizations: Does history have a direction? Does history have meaning? Is there a plan to history? Do civilizations rise and fall? Is materialism or idealism the better framework for understanding the movement of history? G. W. F. Hegel, for example, wanted to discover the underlying rationality within history. This approach to the study of history is often referred...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,history,philosophy

Mental illness, big pharma and agent-based simulation

The New York Review of Books has an absorbing two-part piece by Marcia Angell on mental illness, psychiatry, and big pharma (link, link). (The NYRB Facebook page provides a good way of following the NYRB.)  Angell provides an in-depth discussion of books by Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. There has been an explosion in the numbers of patients diagnosed with a list of mental disorders, and there has been an explosion in the profits associated with the drugs prescribed in treatment of these disorders as well. It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they...

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Posted in: CAT_aggregation,science

Alternatives to analytical sociology

I've now spent a fair amount of time in the past month on the micro-macro link and the foundations of analytical sociology (AS). It is worth taking stock to consider how this approach relates to other important methodologies in sociology and the social sciences more generally.To start: I've generally found the strictures of "microfoundations" and "agent-based explanations" as representing ontological constraints on sociological explanations rather than guides for empirical research. The constraints require, essentially, that all our explanations of social processes and causal connections need to be compatible with providing plausible micro-level accounts of how they work. This is somewhat analogous to the philosophy of atomism in pre-Socratic...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_disciplines,microfoundations

Esser's sociology

Sociology in Germany seems to be particularly prolific today, and this extends to the contributions that German sociologists are making to the sub-discipline of analytic sociology. One of the leaders who has played a key role in this active field is Hartmut Esser. Esser's Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen 3. Soziales Handeln (2002) is particularly important, but it hasn't been translated into English yet. (Here is a link to the second volume of this work on Google Books, and here is a link to Soziologie Allgemeine Grundlagen (1993).) So Esser's contributions are not yet as widely known in the US sociology world as they ought to be. (Here is a short Wikipedia entry on Esser in German (link).)One of Esser's primary areas of empirical research...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_disciplines,rationality,reductionism

Marx an analytical sociologist?

In an earlier post I gave a brief sketch of the emerging field of analytical sociology, and summarized its foundations around three premises: microfoundations, rational social actors, and causal mechanisms.Marx is often thought to be a "structuralist" thinker, highlighting large social processes and entities such as the mode of production, the economic structure, and social class (for example, by Althusser andBalibar in Reading Capital). However, I argued in The Scientific Marx (1986) that a careful examination of Marx's economic writings reveals something quite different. I argued, first, that Marx embraced the idea that social explanations require microfoundations.Marxist social science commonly has advanced macro explanations...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_aggregation,Marx,microfoundations,rational choice theory

Dissecting the social

The past dozen years or so have witnessed the emergence of a distinctive approach to the social sciences that its practitioners refer to as "analytical sociology." Peter Hedström's Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology (2005) serves as a manifesto for the approach, and Pierre Demeulenaere, ed., Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, and Peter Hedström and Peter Bearman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology provide substantive foundations for several areas of research within this approach.  And the European Network of Analytical Sociologists provides an institutional framework within which research approaches and findings can be shared (link).Hedström describes...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_mechanisms,localism

Abbott on mechanisms

Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedberg's Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (1998) announced to the world the power of social mechanisms as a foundation for social explanations. It was based on a conference on this approach in Stockholm in 1996, and the volume includes contributions by outstanding authorities such as Thomas Schelling, Jon Elster, Aage Sorensen, and Arthur Stinchcombe (among others).One person whom it does not include is Andrew Abbott. Abbott did indeed participate in the conference, but his contribution was not included in the volume when it appeared in 1998. The article did appear subsequently, however, in a special volume of Sociologica in 2007, with discussions by Delia Baldassarri, Gianluca Manzo, and...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_agency,methodological individualism