ABSTRACT
Order and disorder are the outcomes of a continuous process of transformation of order into disorder and vice versa. Institutions arise and change unintentionally, but they can be the object of planning by organizations based on class interests, status groups, political associations, etc. For Max Weber, social life is a heterogeneous set of practices and struggles by subjects in concrete, historical situations of conflict between sectorial interests or political formations/states with their territoriality and violence. The actor-centered approach does not seek ordered relationships between parties, sectors or functions, but between values, subjective meanings, symbols and communications of meaning. Despite the many differences between the schools of thought and research streams that take this approach, they share an anti-positivist epistemological stance. Social scientists do not investigate “objective facts” like subatomic particles: their object of study has its own subjectivity.
