Analytical material by V. S. Reznik and S. S. Dembitskyi, Doctors of Sociological Sciences: “Theoretical growth in sociology: a typology of theoretical activity and research programmes”

The website of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine has published an analytical material by V. S. Reznik and S. S. Dembitskyi, Doctors of Sociological Sciences, "Theoretical growth in sociology: a typology of theoretical activity and research programmes"

The question of whether sociology is capable of cumulative theoretical progress comparable to that of the natural sciences remains one of the central issues in the discipline's methodological self-reflection. A productive answer to it was proposed by the post-positivist sociologists of Stanford University J. Berger, M. Zelditch Jr. and D. Wagner, who over nearly three decades developed a typology of theoretical activity in sociology and a conception of theoretical growth grounded in research programmes. Their work was the result of a creative reception of two key post-positivist approaches — T. Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms and I. Lakatos's methodology for analysing scientific research programmes. Despite its considerable heuristic potential, this conceptual system is rarely applied in historical-sociological research because it has not been systematically explicated.

For more detail see the full material.