Mundo plural: ¿por qué los individuos hacen lo que hacen?

Abstract

In a context of hyper-specialization, the article addresses a panoramic view of society and a complex conception of individuals, while not forgetting both the theoretical ambition and the empirical pulse. To this end, it asks: "why do individuals do what they do?", and proposes to respond with a universal formula for the study of practices that combines a dispositional dimension with a contextualist one. On the one hand, the dispositions and competences of individuals, understood as the internalized product of more or less frequent access to certain contexts of action. On the other hand, present contexts of action and their diversity. From this formula, the article evaluates different approaches to the social: on the one hand, the oblivion of the past, characteristic of pragmatist, interactionist and rational choice sociologies; on the other hand, the neglect of contexts, typical of certain uses of Bourdieu's sociology and certain psychoanalytic theories. Finally, the article reviews the diversity of contemporary research in social sciences (in relation to the scale of observation, the level of social reality studied, the interest in knowledge, the type of object, the time scales, the number of actors studied, etc.), showing that the dispositional-contextualist approach can guide works in such different directions.