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The role of stories in sociological explanation

From Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions pg 13:

First, stories may assume a central subject of narrative and follow it, or they may chronicle the creation and dissolution of such a subject. Stories proceed by joining a series of specified situations with links that describe the successive resolution of each situation. These links are usually drawn from a limited set of basic models for why things occur in society—functional, historicist, evolutionary, and so on. Underlying these links is often a single simplifying assumption about why events occur, such as the self-interest model. In putting these links together, social stories take a variety of approaches to the order of events—making it sometimes essential to their outcome, sometimes irrelevant, sometimes partway in between. They also take a variety of approaches to issues of convergence and divergence—some of them recounting the emergence of a steady state like “full professionalization,” others the development of oscillation or imbalance.
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