Читать книгу Contemporary Sociological Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 75

The two other components of the type of social theory under consideration, through which the transition from macro to micro and the transition back to the macro level occur, can be conceived of as the rules of the game, rules which transmit consequences of an individual’s action to other individuals and rules which derive macro-level outcomes from combinations of individuals’ actions. How a theory might encompass this can be seen by examining somewhat more deeply the three-part paradigm for explaining macro-level phenomena, which consists of type 1, type 2, and type 3 relations: the macro-to-micro transition, purposive action of individuals, and the micro-to-macro transition.

For many macro-level relations this paradigm provides precisely the appropriate imagery. The relation between improving economic conditions and revolutions, used as an example earlier, illustrates this appropriateness. But in other cases what is to be explained at a macro level is not a relation between one macro-level variable (such as change in economic conditions) and another (such as revolutionary activity). Instead, a macro-level phenomenon is to be explained, such as stock price volatility, for example. […]

This is a macro-level phenomenon, and the theoretical task is to account for it by going down to the level of individual actions and coming back up to the macrosocial level, as suggested in [Figure 5.2]. In this case the explanation might consist of a system involving micro-level actions, their combinations, the feedback from those combinations that affect further micro-level actions, followed by further combinations, and so on, producing the bubble of speculation and then the bursting of the bubble.

This example illustrates a more general situation, in which the theory describes the functioning of a system of action from which the three types of relations are not easily separable. Although such explanatory systems involve both individual-level actions and system-level behavior, they are not appropriately conceived of as the linking together of relations of these three types. Relations of the sort described by Figure 5.1 or Figure 5.2 are ordinarily best thought of as macro-level empirical generalizations which might be predicted as deductions from a theory. The theory which can generate such relations as specific propositions may be thought of as a theory of individual action together with a theory of how these actions combine, under specific rules, to produce systemic behavior.