Concept‐Driven Sociology

Abstract

Excerpted from my book Generally Speaking, this paper introduces “concept‐driven sociology,” a special way of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. As such, it examines the methodological process by which we can “distill” generic patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a “generic sociology” that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, we need to collect our data in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi‐culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross‐contextual commonality, concept‐driven sociology tries to reveal formal “parallels” across seemingly disparate contexts. The paper features the four main types of cross‐contextual analogies concept‐driven sociologists tend to use—cross‐cultural, cross‐historical, cross‐domain, as well as cross‐level—disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences.