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- Title
COMMENT: ON LOGICAL FORMALIZATION OF THEORIES FROM ORGANIZATIONAL ECOLOGY.
- Authors
Hannan, Michael T.
- Abstract
This article presents the author's comments to the article, The Niche Hiker's Guide to Population Ecology: A Logical Reconstruction of Organization Ecology's Niche Theory, by Gábor Péli. Theory formalization, once positioned at center stage in sociology, currently plays little role in general sociological work. For about a decade beginning in the mid-1960s, the promise was held out that formalization--especially mathematization--would improve the quality of sociological theorizing and promote the development of cumulative theoretical knowledge about general social processes. Today, formalization lies on the discipline's periphery, as a specialized activity remote from the development and evaluation of sociological theories. This marginalization and devaluation of formalization partly reflects sociology's retreat from general formulations. But it also surely reflects an assessment that the payoff to the style of formalization prominent during the heyday of this movement had not met expectations. This is not the place to attempt a full assessment of what went wrong in sociology's fiirtation with formalization. But one thing seems clear: there was a mismatch between theories and formalization tools. The available natural-language theories were--and are--partial and imprecise; use of the formal languages, especially mathematics, demanded closure and extreme precision.
- Subjects
SOCIOLOGY; ECOLOGICAL niche; FORMALIZATION (Philosophy); FORM (Philosophy); THEORY of knowledge
- Publication
Sociological Methodology, 1997, Vol 27, Issue 1, p145
- ISSN
0081-1750
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-9531.271023