SOME SOCIAL SCIENCE PARADIGMS

Macrotheory and Microtheory     Early Positivism     Social Darwinism     Conflict Paradigm     Symbolic Interactionism

Ethnomethodology     Structural Functionalism     Feminist Paradigms     Rational Objectivity Reconsidered

    A paradigm is a model or framework within which to view and understand some phenomenon.  Social science uses a variety of different paradigms, and this section of Chapter Two examines some of them.  To begin, macrotheory views social phenomena from a societal, international, or other high-level group perspecctive.  Karl Marx's discussion of the "class struggle" would be an example.  Microtheory, on the other hand, views social life at the more intimate level of individuals interacting with one another.

    A theme running throughout this section concerns the extent to which the social sciences can fit into the positivistic stereotype of the physical sciences.  We'll examine early commitments to that approach, and we'll conclude the section with a critique of it.  In between, we'll consider the idea of society as:  a steadily evolving civilization (Social Darwinism), as a struggle for domination (Conflict Paradigm), as the creation of meaning through interaction (Symbolic Interactionism), as a system of implicit and unspoken agreements (Ethnomethodology), or as an organism made up of contributing elements (Structural Functionalism).  In addition, we'll examine the extent to which past social scientific theories have implicitly reflected a male point of view and what society looks like from a feminist perspective.

    In all this, you will see that paradigms are never right or wrong but merely different ways of looking at society.  In that respect, they are to be judged as useful or useless in specific situations.