For an integrative theory of social behaviour: Theorising with and beyond rational choice theory

Most sociologists are not content with merely relating macrosocial phenomena to preceding macrosocial causes in their causal explanations of social phenomena. Instead they are seeking to provide (non‐reductive) microfoundations with which they can corroborate and make understandable the connection between macrosocial phenomena. In order to do so a theory (or theories) of human action is required. One such theory, rational choice theory (RCT), has long been viewed with strong suspicion in sociology. I show such suspicion to be partially justified. RCT cannot be a general theory of social behaviour. Nonetheless, there are important insights in various versions of RCT that should not be discarded. In order to improve upon RCT and move toward a more unified or integrative theory of action social‐psychological research has to be taken note of. I demonstrate how dual‐process theories and the research on heuristics can help sociologists move beyond RCT without contradicting some of its more basic insights.     

社会学与伦理学的争执:涂尔干的道德科学

要把握社会学的根本问题,对其基本思维方式进行辩护和反思,我们应将它置于它曾经努力挣脱的学科体系中,并把它视为对现代伦理学的一种回应。本文通过检讨涂尔干和列维-布留尔的道德科学对伦理学的两点批评来触及社会学的基本主张。针对伦理学把自己理解为一门立法科学的定位,社会学强调只有从对道德事实的实证研究入手,才能为人们的社会生活提供有效的规范。针对伦理学把实现人的本性作为道德的目的的观点,社会学主张从社会功能出发来界定道德。可以从这场争论中看到社会学如何试图通过对经验现实,特别是非西方民族的宗教和社会形态中的合理性的把握,突破西方人文主义传统的典范地位,进而为人们构想现代社会和道德提供不同的思想资源。     

“燕京学派”的知识社会学思想及其应用：围绕吴文藻、费孝通、李安宅展开的比较研究

本文比较了吴文藻、费孝通和李安宅对知识社会学的引介与消化,以及在此指导下的经验研究,基于此尝试论证三人分别开拓了三种知识社会学的经验研究路径。吴氏以曼海姆的知识社会学为主要依据,主张知识与知识人受限于社会本体论,走向实践改造社会的国家主义。费氏一直到1950年代之前似乎在曼海姆与韦伯之间摇摆;到晚年则尝试从新儒家出发,提出社会科学应借鉴诠释学,关注“心”的问题,从而重新接近张东荪的知识社会学。李氏原先引介曼海姆最积极,后来转向吸收张东荪的思想而走向韦伯,认为应该更全面地考察整个知识系统在社会中沉淀的不同层面。通过上述比较,文章尝试指出,社区研究可能需要与知识社会学结合,才能将我们对国家与社会的理解推至更深处。     

超越嵌入性范式：金融社会学的起源、发展和新议题

金融处于当代社会生活的核心，可视为一种社会现象。自M.韦伯开始，古典社会学已论证了社会学研究经济和金融领域的正当性。随着美国新经济社会学的兴起，社会学学者在新经济社会学框架下，以“嵌入性”为理论起点，从社会结构和社会建构两个理论维度研究了金融现象。欧洲学者则挑战了美国新经济社会学的嵌入性范式，为我们提供了研究金融现象的新视角。在新技术和全球化背景下，社会学能从更多角度对金融领域展开研究。     

The Market as an Object of Sociological Investigation

Sociologists often complain that economists produce distorted pictures of the economy and society, and in particular that they exaggerate the role of market relations. The representatives of sociology justly point out that, in addition to the market, other economic structures affect affairs of state and of households. Indeed, the market itself is presented by traditional economists in an excessively abstract manner or one derived from obsolete historical models. However, a sociologist can pose the question differently. Rather than reproaching economists and engaging in merciless criticism of market models, would it not be better for sociology to attempt to work out its own, specifically sociological understanding of what the market is? Especially as one paradox of economic theory is precisely the absence of a substantive theory of the market [1, pp. 342-44]. We might add that in Western economic sociology a new branch, market sociology, is gaining momentum. A number of directions are under development: the sociology of industrial markets [2], the sociology of the labor market [3], the sociology of international markets [4], and so on. This article presents an approach offered by economic sociology to the study of markets in Russia, some of the postulates of which are discussed in [5]. First, let us examine the empirical aspects of the problem.¹     

A sociological formalization of Searle's social ontology

John Searle's theory of social reality is among the most influential accounts in the history of philosophy. His theory also implicates concepts and issues of foundational interest to sociologists, including social structure, institutional differentiation and the relationship between linguistic performativity and institutional reality. Despite this overlap with sociological theory, and despite some sustained attention from sociologists (e.g., Lukes, 2007 ), no formal theoretical model of Searle's work exists within sociology. This paper reviews the core concepts of Searle's theory before concisely describing and then formally modelling their propositional structure. Though the overlap of Searle's approach with classical and contemporary sociological theory is discussed throughout, the paper concludes with a specific argument about his proper assimilation into sociological theory vis‐à‐vis Durkheim, Bourdieu and Giddens.     

Usury and the problem of exchange under capitalism: a late-nineteenth-century debate on economic rationality

Examining the ambiguous concept of usury, this article retraces political battles over the epistemic framings of the everyday economy in the nineteenth century. It takes a comparative approach to the legal and economic debates on usury in the Habsburg and the German empires in the wake of the economic crisis of the late 1870s, when new laws against usury were introduced. In the respective debates, diverging political interests and class attitudes pitted different conceptualizations of economic exchange against each other. At stake were the diverse forms of commensuration and valuation scales in received credit practices. The new legislation on usury centred on the notion of a usurer’s victim who supposedly was incapable of rational economic action and thus in need of civilization. By way of conclusion, this article relates the story of nineteenth-century usury legislation to current debates among historians on capitalism and the emergence of the economy as a bounded entity. It argues for more analytical attention to historical conflicts over modes of exchange as they came to the fore in the debates on usury, and discusses the implications of this perspective for the history of economic liberalism.     

The Meaning of Meaning in Sociology. The Achievements and Shortcomings of Alfred Schutz's Phenomenological Sociology

Phenomenological sociology was founded at the beginning of 1930s by Alfred Schutz. His mundane phenomenology sought to combine impulses drawn from Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and Weber's action theory. It was made famous at the turn of 1960s and 1970s by Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Berger & Luckmann's social constructionism. This paper deals with the notable accomplishments of Schutz and his followers and then proceeds to a shared shortcoming, which is that the phenomenological approach is unable to understand meaning in any other way but as actors's knowledge. Therefore, phenomenological sociologists are forced to describe the actor's interpretations of meaning as transparent to the actor him/herself, even if they sometimes make heroic attempts to escape the limitations of the phenomenological conception. The limitation is apparent in Husserl's and Schutz's definition of meaning as a “reflective intentional act”, Garfinkel's use of the term “accounting” to refer to a signifying effect, and the way Berger and Luckmann describe their social theory as “sociology of knowledge”. Today, similar confusions are present in Michael Polanyi's “tacit knowledge”and in Giddens' structuration theory.     

“官场+市场”与中国增长故事

本文运用和拓展了“官场+市场”理论,重新解析中国独具特色的经济增长机制以及政府与市场的互动模式。地方官员之间围绕着辖区经济发展的官场竞争嵌入在不同辖区企业之间的市场竞争之中,而辖区企业参与的市场竞争又嵌入在官场竞争之中。作为一种分析框架,“官场+市场”的理论贡献在于揭示了政府与市场的良性互动、政企的有效合作必备的三个条件,即内部的政治激励（“把事做对”）、外部的市场约束（“防止做坏事”）和必要的信息反馈（“做对的事”）。中国“官场+市场”的增长模式在总体上提供了这三个关键条件,在最积极的意义上实现了辖区内政治企业家与民间企业家精神的结合,政治精英与经济精英的结合,中国历史悠久的官僚政治传统与西方国家市场经济传统的结合,为我们揭示中国增长之谜开辟了新的视角。     

论操作化：当代社会科学哲学的启示

“操作化”是实证主义社会学研究方法的核心概念,目前许多社会学家对它的理解都源于以语言图像论为代表的传统社会科学哲学。语用学转向后的当代社会科学哲学则推翻了语言图像论,指出语词的意义并不在于它所对应的客观对象,而在于语词自身的实践用法及其相应的生活形式。这种观点为社会学家们提供了对于操作化的重新理解,也为超越目前社会学方法论的二元对立提供了可能。     

求职过程的微观分析：结构特征模型

本文将人力资本理论、地位获得模型和劳动力市场分割理论置于中国社会转型背景下的微观求职过程，研究经济地位与社会地位获得影响因素的差异性。研究发现，在控制了其他特征结构变量之后，教育回报率显著下降，显示了结构性因素的重要性；先赋性与自致性因素对社会地位与经济地位获得有不同的影响；体制分割下，先赋性与自致性因素对求职结果的作用强度有着显著差异。     

社会学的想象与想象的社会学:帕森斯、米尔斯社会学研究进路比较论要

帕森斯的社会理论和米尔斯的社会研究是“二战”后美国社会学的两条重要且独特的研究路径。帕森斯倡导社会科学中的一般理论研究,核心在于理论和经验的互惠发展的动力学,意在促进社会科学的积累性发展,但确立统一的社会科学无异于建立一种不可能实现的“学术巴别塔”。米尔斯强调的基于社会学想象的社会研究纲领,实质上是一种政治导向的社会研究,最终难免落入学术和政治的双重“想象”困境。研究范式的差异,导致他们对其身处的美国社会作出了判然有别的研究论断。进而言之,这种差异的背后隐含着研究者对现代性问题的不同态度以及政治立场上的深刻分歧。     

Explaining Violence ‐ Towards a Critical Friendship with Neuroscience?

The neurosciences challenge the ‘standard social science’ model of human behaviour particularly with reference to violence. Although explanations of violence are interdisciplinary it remains controversial to work across the division between the social and biological sciences. Neuroscience can be subject to familiar sociological critiques of scientism and reductionism but this paper considers whether this view should be reassessed. Concepts of brain plasticity and epigenetics could prompt reconsideration of the dichotomy of the social and natural while raising questions about the intersections of materiality, embodiment and social action. Although violence is intimately bound up with the body, sociologies of both violence and the body remain on the surface and rarely go under the skin or skulls of violent actors. This article argues for a non‐reductionist realist explanation of violent behaviour that is also interdisciplinary and offers the potential to generate nuanced understandings of violent processes. It concludes that sociology should engage critically and creatively with the neuroscience of violence.     

马克斯·韦伯：基于社会动力学的思考

德国社会学创建的年代正值经典（自然）科学处于顶峰的时代。在唯科学主义观念的影响下,社会科学研究领域,尤其是社会学方面一度盛行因果一元论的决定论。为了改变此种状况,韦伯把“价值分析”引入社会学研究,设立了因果性说明与意义理解两种研究进路。这不仅弥补了方法论的不足,而且还形成了文化意义的社会动力学。凭借此种方法,韦伯最终较为合理地解释了西欧不同地区以及东西方的文化差异和社会现代性变迁问题,并为后人发明“轴心文明”概念和深化这一视角奠定了基础。     

Rethinking Politics for a Green Economy: A Political Approach to Radical Reform

Because the process of achieving a green economy is bound to be political, it is important how politics is understood. This essay employs a three-dimensional model of politics (functional, constitutive, performative) in developing an approach to radical reform that accentuates political potentialities—understood in terms of debate, open exchanges of differing opinions. By exploring a central tension between the formal economy (associated with administrative and policy arenas in modern society) and the informal economy (associated with the enhancement of community), the argument concludes that achieving a green economy involves a key role not simply for the rational economic individual or the cooperative community member, but also for the citizen.     

Epistemological problems and the personality and social system in social psychology

If we understand social psychology to be an area where sociology and psychology overlap, or more precisely where we try to explain interaction on the basis of psychological and sociological propositions and concepts, we have singled out a field that should be quite challenging not only in theory and method but in the fundamental questions it raises for both sociology and psychology. Actually, the discipline is not that well integrated and is constituted by such disparate approaches as reinforcement theory, field theory, role theory, small group theory, game theory and psychoanalysis. Many sociologists have abandoned the field altogether. Nor have the proponents of these sub-fields made much effort to consolidate, integrate or reconcile their methodologies. Epistemological questions have been notably absent and only now have arguments from the philosophy of science point of view reemerged to revive the critical and potentially fruitful methodological discussions of earlier theorists (F. Allport; Lewin; Mead; Simmel) and their more recent followers (Homans; Malewski). After considering epistemological problems dealing with the generality of theory and explanation, behavioristic vs. action approaches, operational and model structural implications, we want to argue for a better understanding of social system variables besides those of the personality system and of system theory in general. In our discussion we use examples from the area of sport because it composes a complex system, that is not too difficult to observe at the same time that it shows in relative clarity all of the different levels of an action system. It has, furthermore, many features of an almost experimental design in a natural field. In so far it is a model area to allow due consideration for our demand that social psychology rediscover the method of field studies. This will help to reverse the trend characterized by a general neglect of theory that has resulted from behavioral dogmatism and the expedience of research pragmatism based mostly on two-variable linear models. This is not to say that we disfavor rigorous research design and data analysis - to the contrary. We just want it to be done in the context of broader theoretical concerns and in clear recognition of the pitfalls of operationalism and the merits of action theory.     

情感社会学：研究的现状与趋势

近年来,情感已成为社会学中一个相对新颖的主题。学者们对情感的研究兴趣日益浓厚,相关的论文和书籍也越来越多,情感社会学理论初见端倪。事实上,许多古典社会学家与当代的社会学家在其理论建构中都曾提及情感。比如迪尔凯姆曾分析过宗教式情感对团结的作用;韦伯的四种行动类型之一就是情感行动,他还指出科层制发展得越完善,就越容易去除所有个人的情感因素;在霍曼斯的理论中,情感是一种可以用来交换的社会资源;戈夫曼也曾分析过互动中的“脸面”与羞耻感。当然,这些社会学家对情感的分析是在其特定的研究背景下产生的,并未对情感做过系统的…     

Introduction: social policy, economic growth and developmental welfare

Although the notion of developmental welfare is not new, it is only in recent times that its central premises have again attracted attention in social policy circles. Since developmental welfare offers an opportunity to challenge the neo-liberal claim that social expenditures harm the economy, and that economic development requires retrenchments in state welfare, more information about this approach is needed. This article discusses the developmental welfare approach with reference to neo-liberalism's current hegemonic influence on social policy. It traces the historical evolution of developmental welfare, discusses its theoretical implications and outlines its practical proposals.     

Sociotropes, Systematic Bias, and Political Failure: Reflections on the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy

Objectives . Economic models of politics typically make two assumptions about voters: first, their motives are egocentric, not sociotropic; second, their beliefs are rational, not subject to systematic bias. Political scientists have presented strong evidence against the first assumption (Mansbridge, 1990), but have become increasingly willing to accept the second (Page and Shapiro, 1992; Marcus and Hanson, 1993). This article tests these two assumptions, then explores the tests' broader implications. Methods . I use the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy to test for egocentricity of motivation and rationality of belief. Results . Both standard assumptions fail for the case where the economic approach would seemingly be most relevant: economic beliefs. Conclusions . This is not necessarily cause for greater optimism about the efficiency of democracy: sociotropic voters with biased economic beliefs are more likely to produce severe political failures than are selfish voters with rational expectations.     

The three basic paradigms of macrosociology: Functionalism,neo-Marxism and interaction analysis

Macrosociology is probably the least developed part of sociology. While macroeconomics is a well-organized body of knowledge which can be and is actually presented in textbooks which include a set of logically articulated topics, a treatise in macrosociology typically has the same appearance as philosophy texts; its chapters include presentations of A. Comte's, Durkheim's, and Weber's sociology, just as a philosophy text includes chapters on Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, etc. Why is this so? My contention in this paper is that the primary explanation for the difficulty experienced by sociologists in their attempt to give macrosociology a firm foundation derives chiefly from the coexistence in sociology of three basic paradigms which can scarcely be reconciled with one another. A second and complementary reason is that, while among these three paradigms: functionalism, neo-Marxism and interaction analysis, the third one is probably the most fruitful, at least potentially, although it has attracted less attention among sociologists than the others. In the present paper I will primarily refer to contemporary Western sociology, that is, to sociological works written after the Second World War and produced in Western countries.