Lesson 1: Empirical-Analytical Approaches in the Social Sciences

Rational Choice Theory

Rational choice theory (RTC) is a powerful tool in making sense of why people act or behave in the way they do. Nonetheless, it is not a comprehensive theory that can fully account for one's behavior or action. According to Elster 1989 (in Ward 2002,65),"(t)he essence of rational choice theory is that "when faced with several courses of action, people usually do what they believe is likely to have the best overall outcome."

Herbert Simon

Drawing on the work of Herbert Simon on bounded rationality, some rational choice theorists question the highly implausible assumptions of RCT about the rational capacity of individuals.

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism is a sociological framework that focuses on the different meanings individuals attach to objects, people, and interactions as well as the corresponding behaviors that reflect those meanings and/ or interpretations.

George Herbert Mead

Mead's central concept is the self,"the part of an individual's personality composed of self-awareness and self-image."

Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom

Macrolevel Approaches in the Social Science

Structural funtionalism is a framework for building a theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts  work together to promote solidarity and stability.

Robert Merton

Robert King Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick; 4 July 1910 – 23 February 2003) was an American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science. He is considered a founding father of modern sociology.

Institutionalism

New institutionalism or neo-institutionalism is a theory that focuses on developing a sociological view of institutions — the way they interact and the way they affect society. It provides a way of viewing institutions outside of the traditional views of economics by explaining why and how institutions emerge in a certain way within a given context. One of the institutional views that has emerged has argued that institutions have developed to become similar (showing an isomorphism) across organizations even though they evolved in different ways, and has studied how institutions shape the behavior of agents (i.e. people, organizations, governments) (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983).