Full Description
This book constitutes a practical guide to the important skills of both theorizing and writing in social scientific scholarship, focusing on the importance of identifying relations between concepts that are useful for explaining social entities and of producing a text that convincingly advances the theory that has been constructed. Taking as its point of departure the distinction between the research process and the reporting process - between clarifying one's ideas to oneself and writing to express these ideas clearly to others - this volume concentrates on writing when theorizing as a way of thinking, emphasizing the series of relations that exist between ontology, epistemology and rhetoric upon which successful theoretical writing depends.
Richly illustrated with practical examples, the book is divided into two parts, the first of which presents techniques for theorizing based upon visualized and logical connections of ideas, concepts and empirical patterns in both free and systematic ways, and the second part providing techniques for structuring and presenting arguments in essays, papers, articles or books.As such, Methods for Social Theory offers a toolbox for the development and presentation of social thought, which will prove essential for students and teachers across the social sciences.
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Theorizing and writing social theory
Social theory
Theorizing
Writing
Writing in the research process
Writing in the reporting process
Outline of the book
References
PART I Tools for theorizing in social science
Graphic representations
Displays and property spaces as preliminary endpoints
References
Chapter 2 Basics of displays
What is a display?
Building blocks of displays
Putting a display together
Summary
References
Chapter 3 The use of displays in theorizing
Theorizing by extending
Theorizing by mapping interaction
Stepwise theorizing
Summary
References
Chapter 4 Basics of property spaces
Constructing a property space
Hidden property spaces
Housekeeping
Labelling the types: terms
Developing existing terminology
Summary
References
Chapter 5 Reduction of property spaces in theorizing
Rescaling
Indexing
Logic reduction
Empirical reduction
Theoretical reduction
Pragmatic reduction
Summary
References
Chapter 6 Expansion of property spaces in theorizing
Substruction
More properties of existing dimensions
More dimensions
Combining property spaces
Inserting process arrows
Creating scales
Summary
References
PART II Tools for writing social science
References
Chapter 7 The Model of Argumentation: chain of reasoning, chains of argument and arguments
The rhetorical situation
Purpose
Persona
Audience
Tone
The subject matter
The model
Summary
References
Chapter 8 Examples of using the Model of Argumentation
The process of writing a social science text: an example
The (preliminarily) finished structure of a text: an example
The structure of Chapter 4, 'Basics of property spaces'
Constructing a property space
Housekeeping
Moving the model down one level
Summary
References
Chapter 9 Theorizing and writing
Research process and reporting process
Displays
Property spaces
Writing
Summary
References
Appendix: from Bergman, Ann, Jan Ch. Karlsson and Jonas Axelsson (2010) 'Truth Claims and Explanatory Claims - an Ontological Typology of Futures Studies', Futures, 42(8): 857-65
Index
