The x and society syndrome

Abstract

Half a century of behavioral, practice-oriented research in fields as diverse as politics, economy, law, and science has generated insights that improve our understanding of these fields’ workings considerably. Surveying the pertinent literature, however, also leads to a baffling finding: the social that this research sought to vindicate is not there. And this, the article shows, is no coincidence. Rather, it is a direct consequence of the middle range approach of theorizing this research both adopts and reflects; an artefact of a mode of analysis which makes the social into a derivative of an essential other: the topic under investigation. As a result, its meaning changes every time the analysis switches to a new field, to some other ‘x’. A proposal is made to fix this problem by drawing on general sociological theory, with whose help it can be easily avoided.