Typification, Typologies, and Sociological Theory

Typification, perceiving the world and structuring it by means of types and typologies, is depicted as an essential and intrinsic aspect of the basic orientation of actors to their situations. It is important for structuring the “self,” conceptualizing “roles,” and as a necessary feature of institutionalization and the development of social structure. Two basic orders of types are distinguished: the existential type, developed by participants in social systems, and the constructed type, formulated by the social scientist for purposes of explicating those social systems. All typification is viewed as consisting in the pragmatic reduction and equalization of attributes relevant to the particular purpose at hand for which the type has been formed, and involves disregarding those individual differences of the typified objects that are not relevant to such a purpose. It is asserted that types and typologies are ubiquitous, both in everyday social life and in the language of the social sciences. It is held that despite the omnipresence of typologizing in social inquiry it remains a relatively “underdeveloped” aspect of methodology generally. It is noted that a primary function of types and typologies is to identify, simplify, and order data so that they may be described in terms which make them comparable. An exploration of selected theoretical and methodological issues is conducted with respect to the construction and utilization of typologies, emphasizing problems of nominalism versus realism, ethnomethodology, social morphology, specification of the operations performed in the construction of types and the relation to general social theory, with particular reference to the social system as a construct.