Cultural Belonging, Structural Location and Human Action

Sociological theorizing is likely to change dramatically in the near future, moving from focusing on conceptualization onto explanation. Central to a new theoretical movement will be a spelling out and an elaboration of a core sociological mode of explanation, common, with variations, to most schools of sociology. In a comparison with rational choice models, the specificity of sociological explanations of action and its outcomes is found to reside in their treatment of actors, in contrast to situations, as systematically variable. The variability of actors as the key explaining variable is then spelled out in terms of the varying cultural belonging and structural location of actors. The promise of composite models of rational choice and cultural-cum-structural determinations is also pointed to.