ABSTRACT
The question of how social forces intersect with human conduct has puzzled social scientists for centuries. The founders of American and European sociology welcomed the emphasis on the impact of social forces as the research programme for sociology. In the early twentieth century, such emphasis matched well the efforts to ‘institutionalise’ sociology as an academic discipline and in parallel distinguish it from behavioural psychology. Behaviourists consider human conduct as resulting from precisely controllable stimulus–response events. Similar to behaviourism in this respect, neoclassical theories have not sufficiently accounted for social forces in human conduct. Rather, they stayed locked into a mechanistic conception of economic and social processes (Mirowski 1991). This mechanistic view is embedded in an institutional structure in which empirical evidence provides the make-up for a Kabuki dance, i.e. an event that is designed to create the appearance of conflict or uncertainty where outcomes are decided upon beforehand. As a critique to such mechanistic view, the work of Pierre Bourdieu has stimulated new interest in the intersection between social forces and human behaviour. His concept of field has become a leading reference in the growing literature on theories of human action and social context.
