Analytical Sociology and The Rest of Sociology

The programme of analytical sociology brings sharp focus to fundamental issues insociology as a scientific discipline. Its practitioners offer a clear paradigm of how sociologicalexplanations ought to proceed, from individual actors to social outcomes. This essay considerslimitations of the approach as a general framework for all sociological research, however. Theessay surveys recent high-quality research by a number of sociologists and other social scien-tists and demonstrates that their explanations often do not conform to the aggregative mod-el advocated by AS. Additional philosophical arguments are provided for justifying the pointthat we can attribute relative explanatory autonomy to meso-level social structures. The essayoffers a brief description of an approach to social ontology referred to as “methodological lo-calism.”