Collection
Call for Papers: What Are the Characteristic Features of a Good Social Scientific Theory?
Any field, to the extent it is scientific, is tethered to analyses of data. In the social sciences today, data come from numerous sources; everything from interviews to experiments to anonymous web postings. Yet, without a continual tinkering and updating of our best theoretical framework(s)--or maybe revolutionizing them--our understanding of this cornucopia of data can only remain descriptive, biased, inconsistent or derivative.
The philosophy of science has long regarded certain elements to be essential to the development of a good theory. Clarity of concepts, a grounding in empirical support, parsimony, logical consistency, and testability, among other features, are frequently mentioned. But, are some of these elements more important than others? And, are there other elements too often left out or under-discussed?
In short, what, exactly, makes for a good theory in the social sciences? What components of a theory reliably maximize its insightfulness, usefulness and scope? What social scientific theories today are most generative and why? This special issue invites contributors to consider what renders a social scientific theory “useful” or “insightful” in the first place, what elements good theories tend to have in common, analyses of the field’s exemplar theories, and/or plausibly successful ways to improve our theorizing (as, for example, with the use of more, and more varied, visualizations).
Editors
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Kevin McCaffree
Kevin McCaffree is a professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas and current co-editor of the journal Theory and Society. He is the author or co-author of 5 books, author of over 40 peer-reviewed and popular science articles, co-editor of the volume Theoretical Sociology: The Future of a Disciplinary Foundation and co-editor of the book series Evolutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences (Routledge). Among other things, his work covers the evolution of infrastructure and culture, the social structure of empathy, the decline of (religious) traditions and the relationship between drug use, ideology and crime.
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Jonathan Turner
Jonathan H. Turner is 38th University Professor of the University of California system, Distinguished Professors of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside, and current co-editor of the journal Theory and Society. He is the author or co-author of 45 books and well over 250 research articles and chapters. He is primarily a general theorist but has interests in a large number of specializations within sociology and the social sciences, such as evolutionary sociology, institutional analysis, stratification, interpersonal behavior and sociology of emotions.
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Peter Hedström
Peter Hedström is Professor of Analytical Sociology at Linköping University. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has held professorial appointments at the University of Chicago, Stockholm University, University of Oxford, and Linköping University. He is a member of several academies, including the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is an internationally recognized authority in analytical sociology with publications such as Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology (Oxford 2005). He has been Editor of Acta Sociologica, and Associate Editor of American Journal of Sociology, and Annual Review of Sociology.
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Rosemary L. Hopcroft
Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, U.S. She has published in the areas of evolutionary sociology and comparative and historical sociology in journals including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Human Nature. She is the author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).
