ABSTRACT
Most sociologists would agree that one should always strive to establish a symbiotic relationship between theory and empirical research, where each contributes to the development of the other. Most empirical research carried out by sociologists concerns subject matters guided more by the political and social issues of the day than by sociological theory. In the sorts of situations, actions are social and highly interdependent in that one individual's action directly enables or hinders the actions of other individuals. The distinction between a complex social reality and an intentionally simplified analytical model of this reality seems to have been lost in many sociological discussions of rational-choice theory. Methodological individualism is the doctrine that states that social phenomena are in principle only explicable in terms of individuals' actions. In the context of social movements, an actor's threshold denotes the proportion of the group which must have joined the movement before the actor in question decides to do the same.
