One distinguishes in the beginning two types of methodological approaches in sociology, the approach holist in opposition to the approach Individualisme (or nuclear engineering). It however got clear a third type of approach refusing to exclusively adopt the first or the second, but exploiting the two levels of analysis. These various methodological approaches rise from designs (or paradigms) different from the company and the individual.

Holistic approach

Schematically, that consists starting from the general to go towards the private individual.

Like representatives of the holistic methodological approach, one recognizes Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx.

For Durkheim, and those which are claimed of its heritage, the company is a holon, a whole which is higher than the sum of its parts, it preexists to the individual and the individuals are acted by it. Within this framework, the company includes the individuals and the individual conscience is seen only like one fragment of the collective conscience.

According to this point of view, the object of sociological research is the social fact, which it is necessary to treat like a thing, its cause having to be sought in former social facts. The social fact, which is the subject of an institutionalization, is external with the individual and exerts a constraint on this last. The individuals are thus framed in institutions, themselves inserted in homologous structures the ones compared to the others. Sociology is then the science of the institutional invariants in which are the observable phenomena.

Marcel Mauss will print a significant inflection with these doctrines by asserting need for describing completely and in their totality the forms in which the phenomenon appears to reveal their secrecy. To analyze the concrete interdict to neglect the sensitivity to lived.

Atomic approach

Schematically, that consists starting from the private individual to go towards the general.

Developed by max Weber which induces that each individual is a social atom. The atoms act according to reasons, interests, of clean emotions and are related to the other atoms. A system of constant interactions between the atoms produced and reproduced the company.

According to this point of view, the object of sociological research is the direction given by the actor to his social action. The actors do not act in a mechanical way. The accent is related to the cause of the social actions and the direction given by the individuals to their actions. One does not seek any more of arrangements of institutions but a horizon of significances which are used as references. The institution is there but it serves the reasons and the interests of the social actors and the greenhouse: it is the “iron cage” of the bureaucracy.

Another approach

One can also vary scale of analysis, passing from the microsociologic, with the mesosociologic and the macrosociologic.

See too

Related articles

* Holisme

* empirical Empiricism/Science