Abstarct
For the last 50 years, sociological theory has been trying to “solve” the riddle of how to connect theoretically the micro and macro realms of social reality. For many years, I argued that this riddle would solve itself with the development of more formal theorizing across a wide variety of phenomena, ranging from face-to-face interaction through groups, communities, organizations, and social categories to institutions, class systems, societies and inter-societal systems. As I look back on the past four decades, the discipline has made enormous strides in theorizing virtually all phenomena in the social universe. Surprisingly, we continues to beat itself up over the lack of progress in explanatory theory but, in fact, there has been a great deal of theoretical cumulation since, say, the height of Parsonsian theorizing of the 1950s and early 1960s to the present. It is this cumulation that has given me the confidence (some would say “arrogance”) to write a set of volumes like Theoretical Principles of Sociology.
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Notes
- 1.
This last point is more my view than Lawler’s Thye’s, and Yoon’s.
- 2.
Selection pressures arise from both macro- and micro-level forces; they represent problems of adaptation that individuals or corporate actors must address, or suffer the disintegrative consequences, whether these be breaches in encounters at the micro level of reality or, for example, failures to produce enough food for a population at the macro level. Societies have evolved by humans’ ability to respond to selection pressures that require new kinds of sociocultural formations, but there is never any certainty that these pressures will be effectively met, as the dust-heap of past societies in history documents or as breakdowns in encounters and the meso units in which they are embedded also attest.
- 3.
This wiring occurred as a consequence of the conversion of the original mammals that ascended the arboreal habitat from olfactory dominance to visual dominance in sense modalities. The neurological capacity for language, then, evolved for reasons having nothing to do with language; this capacity was simply an artifact of converting the brain to visual dominance in how it sees and interprets sensory inputs. See Geschwind (1965a, b, 1970) as well as Geschwind and Damasio (1984).
- 4.
A pre-adaptation is a structure that evolves under selection pressures having little, if anything, to do with its subsequent functions. For example, as noted above, the capacity for language emerged for reasons other than language production, and hence represented a preadaptation because the structures in the brain generating these linguistic capacities could be subject to further selection at a later date in time, ultimately leading to late hominin and human abilities to use language.
- 5.
See: Lawler 1992, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2006; Lawler and Thye 1999, 2006; Lawler, Thye, and Yoon 2000, 2006, 2008; Lawler and Yoon 1993, 1996, 1998.
- 6.
The proximal bias applies to positive emotions that tend to be attributed to the actions of self or immediate others, whereas the distal bias pushes negative emotions away from self and others toward distal targets such as social units. The key question is how to break the hold of the proximal bias by having attributions for experiencing positive emotions target more distal social units.
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Turner, J.H. (2010). The Micro Basis of the Meso and Macro Social Realms. In: Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6225-6_9
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