Mikael Carleheden: Unchain the Beast!
Associate Professor Mikael Carleheden has contributed to the book "Die Praxis soziologischer Theoriebildung".
Mikeal Carleheden has written a chapter in the book listed above called "Unchain the Beast! Pluralizing the Method of Theorizing".
Today, most sociologists claim to be theorizing or use theory in one sense or the other. However, it is often unclear what this claim means and how such theorizing is conducted. A sociologist is a scientist sitting on a stool with three legs: social theory, qualitative research, and quantitative research. If one of the legs is in bad shape, the stool might break and the sociologist will fall down.
Thus, these main subfields of sociology differ in many aspects, but are interdependent. In this paper, I will focus on the theoretical dimension of this interdependence. My claim is that all three subfields include practices of theorizing, which typically are different in kind. This difference, however, has the form of “know-how” rather than “know-that.” I will therefore try to explicate the different methods implicated by these different ways of theorizing. The general aim is to show how the different methods of theorizing can accomplish different things, all of which are crucial for the sociology discipline. Thus, the paper calls for theoretical pluralism.