ABSTRACT
To open any work on sociological theory (e.g., Parsons and Shils’s Theories of Society or Gross’s Symposium on Sociological Theory) is to realize that the notion of theory means many things in sociology and that these meanings are even more diverse than in the natural sciences. Merton indicated this diversity very clearly in a classical text in his Social Theory and Social Structure. He writes that sociologists tend to use the word theory as synonymous with 1) methodology; 2) general sociological orientations; 3) conceptual analysis; 4) post factum sociological interpretations; 5) empirical generalizations; 6) ‘derivations’ (deductions from consequences derived from already established propositions) and ‘codifications’ (the search for general propositions through induction, permitting the sociologist to subsume already established propositions); 7) sociological theory (in the strict sense).
