I realized as I was reading this that I know very little about sociology as a discipline. In particular, I'm unaware of any of its "Great Theories", a la General Relativity for physics, or Darwinian Evolution for biology.
Any candidates? I'm not trying to be snide, I really would like to learn more about this. The Wikipedia page for sociology describes "theories" that sound more like schools of thought.
I would posit the social signalling theories of Robin Hanson as perhaps a theory of this magnitude.
The problem is, though most of Hanson's theories have plausible explanations and "feel" right, there is very little experimental evidence and very few studies are directed in that area. In fact, you might even say it is a symptom of that type of signalling itself: as homo-hypocritus, we don't want signalling theories to be proven true so we make up reasons for deriding signalling explanations as not rigorous enough to even merit being properly tested or studied. Of course, this too is no better, because then do we just actually have no evidence to believe in signalling explanations, or are we using signalling excuses to suppress the meaning of that evidence? It's somewhat self-defeating.
The next most important theory I would posit is Prospect Theory by Kahneman and Tversky. But there again, many aspects of it have not been successfully replicated, and too often limited experiments are generalized too much.
One set of social theories that I would love to see given more quantitative foundations is the research from the book Moral Mazes. Robert Jackall carried out some lengthy longitudinal studies in which he collected anecdotal narrative and interview data from employees at all seniority levels through a couple different firms. He was able to see people rise up the corporate ladder, people get fired, executives fired and replaced, large layoffs, etc., and conduct informal interviews with employees all up and down the ladder.
Based on his interviews, he put together a series of theories about how morality and ethical identity form within bureaucracy, and particularly how managers develop an understanding of ethical obligations to subordinates, and how certain factions of an organization (notably HR) come to function when there are competing concerns between ethical expectations and bureaucratic mandates.
In every job I've had, it's been a frustrating experience of basically saying, "Yep, I know this chapter from Moral Mazes ..." because companies operate almost as if they've read the book as a field guide.
Yet at the same time, it's still just a qualitative study that is scaffolded by academic sociology. If it were actually possible to collect that kind of data from corporations, I'd love to see some theories from the book explored more quantitatively.
The thing about sociology is that there simply aren't definitive theories akin General Relativity in sociology. At best there are broad methodological schools and approaches, (such as Structuralism, Utilitarianism, etc). The difference is none of these schools and approaches have been or could (within present constraints) be established by experiments as definitive as Newtonian physics, General Relativity, the atomic theory of matter.
I'm not saying sociology is useless - rather it seems to work by combining a broad approach with specific statistical analysis to get some idea that the specific analysis has some merit.
The non-definitive quality of social science at this level is why sociologists talk about nuance. Just finding a correlation tends to really sketchy for causation - having a reason that the correlation would be causation is better than nothing but still a thin reed.
The other thing that makes sociology different from those theories, is that for anything more specific/advanced, it needs a system of values.
When you measure magnetic forces or examine the behavior of gravity, you don't need that.
But when you study society, you need to stand on some foundations of what's desired, good etc -- at least in the very basic sense.
And even something as simple "good is what's useful for society" doesn't answer that, because we then can ask "useful towards what end?", etc. Is something like murder justified? What about war? etc.
Those questions are not (and will never be) settled. At the most basic, the different schools come from different such understandings.
Latour's "Reassembling the social" is an interesting, non-ancient perspective.
I mean, people in the social sciences tend to tell you to read Durkheim and Weber and Marx while no one would tell someone to learn calculus on Newton, Cauchy or even Landau.
It seems like memetics wants to be for sociology what genetics is for evolution and biology, but as far as I know they haven't been able to trace "memes" back to their neurological roots. It's an interesting idea but won't dislodge prevailing schools of thought until/unless it has its own Watson and Crick moment.
> I realized as I was reading this that I know very little about sociology as a discipline.
...You wrote in a text field on a website with other readers who will be able to upvote or downvote your comment.
Sociology tends to have less of an emphasis on theory than some other fields, but that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of research that's useful and relevant.
My point was that there is a ton of research relevant to each component of that interaction... E.g. how text affects us emotionally, how peer feedback impacts motivation, the properties of synchronous vs asychronous communication, etc.
I was merely trying to evoke "the sociological imagination".
Any candidates? I'm not trying to be snide, I really would like to learn more about this. The Wikipedia page for sociology describes "theories" that sound more like schools of thought.