ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on available intellectual resources in regard to interpretation and critique and it is the best thought of as a species of historical institutionalism coupled to culture-critical analysis. It allows an analyst to uncover structural patterns and the ways in which groups, including social scientists, have read and reacted to enfolding circumstances, arguments that can be presented dialogically in exchanges with other cultures. Social theorizing is an active and prospective business as sets of ideas are taken from the materials of available tradition and put to work in order to produce substantive analyses; in this way, theoretical machineries are enhanced or modified or abandoned. The business can be summarized in the form of two diagrams: one diagram addresses the formal relationship of the elements involved in making an argument; the other addresses the substantive phases of a simple research process.
