ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a critical engagement with Niklas Luhmann's project of de-ontologization, which underlies his constructivist-oriented social systems theory, and ends with a rather lengthy discussion of causality and mechanism-based explanation in the social sciences. Filippo Barbera, an Italian economic sociologist and a proponent of analytical sociology, writes that despite the theoretical diversity, methodological preferences, and the study of heterogeneous empirical phenomena in the social sciences, it is nevertheless possible to discern "a shared approach, summarized in the expression analytical sociology". Based on Hedstrm and Swedberg's typology of mechanisms, the Italian sociologist Gianluca Manzo, now a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris and a member of the well-known Groupe d'Etudes des Mthodes de l'Analyse Sociologique (GEMAS), proposes a "generative model".
