ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some problems in the development of a social theory, given that accidents are precisely those events that many of the available theoretical approaches have dismissed as unworthy of attention or inexplicable. An adequate sociological theory of accidents would account for their essential features in the lay classification system: namely unpredictability and lack of motivation. The traditional concerns of social theory have little space in which to explore the accident as constructed in everyday discourse and examine its place within a rational cosmology. The attribution of moral content relies on the 'objective' evidence of physical traces, as well as verbal reconstruction of events leading up to the accident. The Weberian tradition in sociology, which could perhaps more reasonably be expected to provide a theoretical starting point to the study of accidents, has prioritized the rational. The roots of rigorous study of the social lie in the establishment of rationalist thought and science.
