ABSTRACT
Between 1960 and 1980, a spate of “theory construction” and “theory building” books appeared in the sociological literature (e.g., Zetterberg 1965; Blalock 1969; Mullins 1971; Reynolds 1971; Gibbs 1972; Dubin 1978; Cohen 1980). These books all sought to outline the “proper methods” or procedures by which theory in sociology is to be developed; and in many ways, they read like methodological primers. Each of these books quickly fell into obscurity because they posited a step-by-step process for building theory that looked something like the theoretical equivalent of the SPSS manual for canned statistical packages. They all drew from a handful of philosophers of science (e.g., Carl G. Hempel, Ernst Mach, R.B. Braithwaite, Ernest Nagel, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Abraham Kaplan, and the like), but rarely did they cite the works of theorists themselves to see how theories are actually created by practitioners. In fact, empirical research was much more likely to be reviewed than actual theories in sociology.
