The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology (Oxford Handbooks) - Softcover

Social science has taken a noticeable turn, with new energy infusing the study of social mechanisms and causal processes that unite the classic micro-macro divide. The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology, edited by Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman, is an impressive effort to guide the research agendas sure to follow. The volume is a comprehensive intellectual treat and an indispensible tool for sociologists seeking to master the analytic turn. Professor Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University A fundamental reformulation of sociology, with profound implications across the social sciences. Joshua M. Epstein, The Brookings Institution, author of Generative Social Science This formidable volume puts on display an impressive array of leading scholars, each grappling with key substantive and methodological topics in contemporary sociology. The chapters provide both a masterful summary of existing research and a valuable roadmap for future investigation. Donald Green, A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University

Analytical sociology is a strategy for understanding the social world. It is concerned with explaining important social facts such as network structures, patterns of residential segregation, typical beliefs, cultural tastes, and common ways of acting. It explains such facts not merely by relating them to other social facts, but by detailing in clear and precise ways the mechanisms through which the social facts were brought about. Making sense of the relationship between micro and macro thus is one of the central concerns of analytical sociology. The approach is a contemporary incarnation of Robert K. Merton's notion of middle-range theory and represents a vision of sociological theory as a tool-box of semi-general theories each of which is adequate for explaining certain types of phenomena. The Handbook of Analytical Sociology brings together some of the most prominent sociologists in the world in a concerted effort to move sociology in a more analytical and rigorous direction. Some of the chapters focus on action and interaction as the cogs and wheels of social processes, while others consider the dynamic social processes that these actions and interactions bring about.