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Micro, Macro, or Megrim? in Jürgen Schlumbohm, ed., Mikrogeschichte – Makrogeschichte: komplementär oder inkommensurabel? (1998) Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag; Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, vol 7
Social Networks
The article outlines the four main ontologies that social scientists have applied to social life. Phenomenological individualism which is the doctrine that individual consciousness is the primary or exclusive site of social life, methodological individualism which is the doctrine that assumes human individuals are the basic unit of social reality but models them within consciousness (economic historians), holism which is the doctrine that social structures have their own self-sustaining logics, and relational realism which is the doctrine that interactions and social ties constitute the central existance of social life. Tilly writes that relational realism is best equipped to overcoming the micro/macro gap in analysis because relationships simultaneously form organizational structures and shape individual behavior.
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