Читать книгу Contemporary Sociological Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 68

The principal task of the social sciences lies in the explanation of social phenomena, not the behavior of single individuals. In isolated cases the social phenomena may derive directly, through summation, from the behavior of individuals, but more often this is not so. Consequently, the focus must be on the social system whose behavior is to be explained. This may be as small as a dyad or as large as a society or even a world system, but the essential requirement is that the explanatory focus be on the system as a unit, not on the individuals or other components which make it up.

As with the explanation of individual behavior, there are two modes of explanation of the behavior of social systems. One depends on either a sample of cases of system behavior or observation of the behavior of the system as a whole over a period of time. The analytical methods are based on statistical association between the behavior of interest and other characteristics of the social system as the context for that behavior. […]

A second mode of explanation of the behavior of social systems entails examining processes internal to the system involving its component parts, or units at a level below that of the system. The prototypical case is that in which the component parts are individuals who are members of the social system. In other cases the component parts may be institutions within the system or subgroups that are part of the system. In all cases the analysis can be seen as moving to a lower level than that of the system, explaining the behavior of the system by recourse to the behavior of its parts. This mode of explanation is not uniquely quantitative or uniquely qualitative, but may be either.

This second mode of explanation has certain points to recommend it, as well as certain special problems. Because this is the mode of explanation I will use throughout this book, it is useful to list some of the points that favor its use before turning to its major problem. In order to have a label to designate this mode, I call it the internal analysis of system behavior.