During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanations 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 mechanismbased 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 of mechanisms has been used in the social sciences. The final part discusses recent developments in analytical sociology, covering the nature of sociological explananda, the role of theory of action in mechanism-based explanations, Merton's idea of middle-range theory, and the role of agent-based simulations in the development of mechanism-based explanations.
In this article it is argued that the search for 'social mechanisms' is of crucial importance for the development of sociological theory. With this concept - which is occasionally used in the sociological literature but has received little systematic attention - attention is called to an intermediary level of analysis in-between pure description and story- telling, on the one hand, and universal social laws, on the other. While the search for universal laws and grand theory has a great deal of appeal, we do not believe that this type of theorizing is likely to foster the development of a useful body of explanatory theory. Drawing on the heritage of Robert Merton and James Coleman, it is argued that the essential aim of sociological theorizing should be to develop fine-grained middle-range theories that clearly explicate the social mechanisms that produce observed relationships between explanans and explanandum. We provide a tentative typology of social mechanisms, and we illustrate our argument by showing that three well-known theories in sociology- the self-fulfilling prophecy (Robert Merton), network diffusion (James Coleman), and threshold-based behavior (Mark Granovetter) - all are founded upon the same social mechanism.
This book deals with analytical sociology, an approach for understanding the social world. Analytical sociology explains important social facts such as network structures, patterns of residential segregation, typical beliefs, cultural tastes, and common ways of acting. It does so by detailing in clear and precise ways the mechanisms through which social facts are brought about. This introductory chapter discusses some of the fundamentals of analytical sociology, with particular emphasis on two interrelated aspects: the explanatory principles guiding the approach and the type of explanatory factors being evoked. It first describes what is meant by a ‘mechanism‘ and a ‘mechanism-based explanation’ before turning to structural individualism, a methodological doctrine according to which social facts should be explained as the intended or unintended outcomes of individuals’ actions. It also present various examples to make the abstract principles more concrete and concludes with a brief overview of the book’s organization.
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