Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms

Pierre Demeulenaere is Professor of Sociological Theory and Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

• Introduction Pierre Demeulenaere; Part I. Action and Mechanisms: 1. Ordinary rationality: the core of analytical sociology Raymond Boudon; 2. Indeterminacy of emotional mechanisms Jon Elster; 3. A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences Dan Sperber; 4. Conversation as mechanism: emergence in creative groups Keith Sawyer; Part II. Mechanisms and Causality: 5. Generative process model building Thomas J. Fararo; 6. Singular mechanisms and Bayesian narratives Peter Abell; 7. The logic of mechanismic explanations in the social sciences Michael Schmid; 8. Social mechanisms and explanatory relevance Petri Ylikoski; 9. Causal regularities, action and explanation Pierre Demeulenaere; Part III. Approaches to Mechanisms: 10. Youth unemployment: a self-reinforcing process? Yvonne Åberg and Peter Hedström; 11. Neighborhood effects, causal mechanisms, and the social structure of the city Robert J. Sampson; 12. Social mechanisms and generative explanations: computational models with double agents Michael W. Macy with Damon Centola, Andreas Flache, Arnout van de Rijt and Robb Willer; 13. Relative deprivation in silico: agent-based models and causality in analytical sociology Gianluca Manzo.

'Demeulenaere`s volume is the most important contribution in the discussion on social mechanisms and merits the attention of all social scientists working on the subject.' C. Mantzavinos, Professor of Philosophy of the Social Sciences, University of Athens