Abstract
Theory and research in sociology need to be grounded in the fundamental truth that social phenomena are constituted by the actions and thoughts of socially constituted and socially situated individuals. This truism may be described as “methodological localism.” This does not imply that explanations must proceed from individual to social; but it does imply that we need to be confident that our hypotheses about social entities and processes have “microfoundations” at the level of the actors who constitute them. The article draws out an important consequence of this set of ideas: the necessity for sociology of developing a more adequate theory of the actor—an account of the ways the individual represents the world, the things that motivate him or her, and the ways that he or she arrives at actions and plans based on these features of practical cognition. To date the most common theory of the actor in the social sciences is the rational-intentional model and its cousin, rational choice theory. However, American pragmatism offers a significantly richer framework in terms of which to understand actors and their actions. This framework emphasizes habit, practice, and creativity in the genesis of action. Contemporary sociologists such as Neil Gross, Andrew Abbott, Mark Granovetter, and Hans Joas have taken this framework seriously in their theorizing with good effect. The article concludes that sociology gains when researchers arrive at more nuanced understandings of the constitutions and situations of the actors with whom they are concerned.
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Notes
- 1.
Advocates of analytical sociology favor a version of methodological individualism identified as “structural individualism”. “Structural individualism is a methodological doctrine according to which social facts should be explained as the intended or unintended outcomes of individuals’ actions. Structural individualism differs from traditional methodological individualism in attributing substantial explanatory importance to the social structures in which individuals are embedded” (Hedström and Bearman 2009: 4).
- 2.
Sociologists in the tradition of James Coleman also pursue an “actor-centered” sociology (Coleman 1990); but their approach is grounded in rational choice theory and a more rigidly methodological-individualist perspective. An actor-centered approach that embraces the methodological localism perspective is more accepting of the inter-penetration of individual action and social influences, and has an ontology that justifies this acceptance.
- 3.
Christine Korsgaard’s writings about practical reason shed light on Aristotle’s assumptions about agency (Korsgaard 2008).
- 4.
Erkki Kilpinen offers a careful analysis of the role of the pragmatist conception of habit in sociology (Kilpinen 2009).
- 5.
The idea of action as habit seems to have more in common with another aspect of Aristotle’s theory of action, the role that virtue plays in ordinary conduct (Korsgaard 2008).
- 6.
Gross puts this approach into play in his extended sociological biography of Richard Rorty (Gross 2008).
- 7.
- 8.
Peter Hedström’s Dissecting the Social provides a key statement of the approach to sociology taken by analytical sociology (Hedström 2005).
- 9.
For more on this debate see “Analytical Sociology and the Rest of Sociology” (Little 2012a).
- 10.
As demonstrated above, Dewey is the chief source of this view.
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Little, D. (2014). Actor-Centered Sociology and the New Pragmatism. In: Zahle, J., Collin, F. (eds) Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Synthese Library, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05344-8_4
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