The argument Daniel Little is making here is an increasingly familiar one, but I’ve rarely encountered such a lucid formulation of it: Can we similarly “map” the spread of new political ideas and slogans during the Arab Spring? No, because the vast majority of those present in Tahrir Square were […]
Another excellent annual reflection from Daniel Little on the eighth birthday of Understanding Society. It’s one of my favourite academic blogs and certainly my favourite theory blog: This week marks the end of the eighth year of Understanding Society. This year passed the 1000 mark — the blog is now up […]
I recently interviewed Daniel Little, author of Understanding Society, as part of the research feeding into Social Media for Academics. Here are some extracts from an extremely thought provoking conversation:
One of my favourite academic blogs is Understanding Society. Written by the philosopher Daniel Little, it covers a diverse range of topics across the social sciences while continually coming back to a number of core theoretical questions that fascinate me. Reflecting on its seventh anniversary, Little offers some interesting thoughts on the role that […]
In the last couple of years, I’ve occasionally wondered whether I’m a methodological individualist. The term carries intensely negative connotations within the areas of sociology in which I spend my time. I’m certainly not an individualist in an ontological sense: I think the social world is made up of many kinds of […]
The notion of microfoundations emerged from within Marxist theory as a claim that “macro explanations of social phenomena must be supported by an account of the mechanisms at the individual level through which the postulated social processes work” (Little 1991: 196). I first encountered this idea on Daniel Little’s blog […]
In recent months I’ve been slowly working through some of Jeffrey Alexander’s work. I’m interested in what cultural sociology has to offer as I begin to try and extend my PhD research on internal conversation & biography into my planned post-doctoral work on the sociology of thinking. However I’ve found Alexander’s work […]
There’s a great post on Daniel Little’s blog which uses a critique of analytical sociology and critical realism to explore a premise which he argues they both share: ontology dictates methodology. As he frames the issue: Both groups have strong (and conflicting) ideas about social ontology, and both think that these ideas […]
The philosopher Daniel Little has written about Margaret’s Archer recent book Social Morphogenesis on his blog: Margaret Archer’s contribution to critical realism has been an important part of the recent progress of the field, and her theory of morphogenesis is key to this progress. Her recent volume, Social Morphogenesis, represents a rigorous and […]
One of my favourite academic blogs is Understanding Society. Written by Daniel Little, Chancellor for the University of Michigan-Dearborn, it covers an extraordinarily broad range of theoretical topics and sustains the rigour of serious academic writing while nonetheless being written in a relatively accessible way. I think it’s the best theory […]
