ABSTRACT
The polarization of sociology into two armed and antagonistic theoretical camps obviously completely distorts social reality — it also ignores the possibility that ‘millenarianism’ often has a transforming quality. Sociologists tend to encapsulate social reality in a network of constructs which they often label ‘theory’. Assuming that we are ever in a position to confirm George C. Homans’s hope for a behaviourally located sociology and social science, then what we are left with is a purely formal behavioural system without any reference to culture or meaning. Sociology is concerned with social acts or interactions, which always involve the meaningful aspect of human phenomena that is relative to a symbolic context. Weber defines intention as the meaning that the behaviour has to the acting individual, or how the individual defines the situation. The social scientist’s facts are always the subjective intentions, feelings, attitudes, definitions of the situation and acts of human beings.
