Die analytische Soziologie: Soziale Mechanismen, DBO-Theorie und Agentenbasierte Modelle

Within the analytical sociology, Peter Hedström — professor at School of Social Sciences of the Singapore Management University — developed an approach to come to valid explanations of social phenomena. In this article, his approach will be described and critically assessed. The approach is based on the micro-macro view in sociology. With the assistance of the so called DBO-theory, certain social mechanisms are formulated on the micro- and macro levels to come to a sufficient (middle-range) theory for the explanation of social phenomena. To investigate the validity of the theory, agent-based models are calculated.