ABSTRACT
Sociology is one of the sciences of which Thomas Kuhn once said that they are still in a ‘pre-paradigm’ period. He meant that, unlike the natural sciences, these sciences have as yet no uniform conceptual framework or paradigm from which scientific research can take its lead and which would afford the possibility of working accumulatively. Instead of this, social science has been the battlefield of whole series of contending and sometimes contentious schools. There can be no revolutionary change – the theme of Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1 – in such a pluralistic science; all that happens is a periodical shift of the balance of power between the different schools.
