Social Mechanisms

In this article it is argued that the search for 'social mechanisms' is of crucial importance for the development of sociological theory. With this concept - which is occasionally used in the sociological literature but has received little systematic attention - attention is called to an intermediary level of analysis in-between pure description and story- telling, on the one hand, and universal social laws, on the other. While the search for universal laws and grand theory has a great deal of appeal, we do not believe that this type of theorizing is likely to foster the development of a useful body of explanatory theory. Drawing on the heritage of Robert Merton and James Coleman, it is argued that the essential aim of sociological theorizing should be to develop fine-grained middle-range theories that clearly explicate the social mechanisms that produce observed relationships between explanans and explanandum. We provide a tentative typology of social mechanisms, and we illustrate our argument by showing that three well-known theories in sociology- the self-fulfilling prophecy (Robert Merton), network diffusion (James Coleman), and threshold-based behavior (Mark Granovetter) - all are founded upon the same social mechanism.