Peter Hedström
Biographic Data
| ID | 105182 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Hedström |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Hedström |
| SIGNATURE | HEDSTRÖM P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3536-8449 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 855 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 33 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data
Social-influence processes not only affect the rate at which behaviors spread but can also decouple adoption behavior from individual preferences, and thereby bring about unexpected collective outcomes that cannot be predicted on the basis of the initial likes and dislikes of the individuals involved. However, the conditions under which social influence can lead to such decoupling are not well understood. We identify a social-influence mechanism …
Ethnic preferences, opportunity structures, and the school segregation process
Previous research has shown that parents often have strong ethnicity-related school preferences, and it has been suggested that these preferences are consequential for the ethnic segregation of schools. In this article, we study all students enrolled in compulsory schooling in the Stockholm region during the years 2008 to 2017. Using a combination of statistical analyses of school choices and large-scale, empirically calibrated simulations, we in…
On the Intersection of Analytical Sociology and Computational Social Science
Analytical sociology is concerned with mechanism-based explanations of collective phenomena in socially interdependent systems. Social interdependencies make identifying the processes that generate collective outcomes a challenging task, however, and their study typically requires research designs that differ from those traditionally used by sociologists. The availability of time-stamped networked datasets, the rapid progress in computational pow…
Coda - The past and future of analytical sociology
In this chapter, I reflect on how the field of analytical sociology has developed since the late 1990s. I discuss briefly the birth of analytical sociology, what motivated its emergence, and what its most essential characteristics are. Thereafter, and in more detail, I consider a set of topics that I believe to be of crucial importance for the future of analytical sociology. In particular, I focus on the role of action-based explanations of macro…
Identifying Complex Dynamics in Social Systems: A New Methodological Approach Applied to Study School Segregation
It is widely recognized that segregation processes are often the result of complex nonlinear dynamics. Empirical analyses of complex dynamics are however rare, because there is a lack of appropriate empirical modeling techniques that are capable of capturing complex patterns and nonlinearities. At the same time, we know that many social phenomena display nonlinearities. In this article, we introduce a new modeling tool in order to partly fill thi…
B oudon, R aymond
The scientific production of Raymond Boudon (1934–2013) spanned many topics including social stratification, knowledge and morality, politics, methodology of social sciences, theory of action, and history of sociology and social thought. Beginning with some essential biographic information, this entry periodizes Boudon's scientific production and describes its main achievements. It shows that Boudon's works made important substantive and methodol…
Rational Choice Theory
Rational choice theory is used as a general theory of action in several social science disciplines. Rational choice theory has certain common elements; at the core are actor‐based models, in which actors are assumed to act rationally. From rational action assumptions, theorists try to explain resultant aggregate outcomes. Despite such common elements, rational choice theorists differ with regard to the nature of the rationality assumption, the an…
Analytical sociology and computational social science
Analytical sociology focuses on social interactions among individuals and the hard-to-predict aggregate outcomes they bring about. It seeks to identify generalizable mechanisms giving rise to emergent properties of social systems which, in turn, feed back on individual decision-making. This research program benefits from computational tools such as agent-based simulations, machine learning, and large-scale web experiments, and has considerable ov…
Analytical Sociology
Recent Trends in Agent-based Computational Research: A Brief Introduction
Old friends and new acquaintances: Tie formation mechanisms in an interorganizational network generated by employee mobility
Raymond Boudon (1934-2013)
Une des grandes figures de la sociologie francaise vient de nous quitter. Raymond Boudon etait un des rares sociologues francais a beneficier d’un veritable rayonnement international. Son œuvre, plus commentee et discutee a l’exterieur des frontieres que dans son propre pays, a influence dans maints domaines la sociologie internationale. Peter Hedstrom lui rend hommage et en porte temoignage
Homophily and the Focused Organization of Ties
This article examines homophily — the tendencies for people with similar characteristics to interact with one another — and how social structure gives rise to network autocorrelation more than expected, while at the same time providing a balance against dynamics inducing pure segregation. The article begins with a discussion of two distinct processes by which network autocorrelation can arise from people acting consistently with homophily, their …
Social Dynamics from the Bottom Up: Agent-Based Models of Social Interaction
This article focuses on agent-based computational (ABC) modeling of social interaction. It begins with an overview of ABC modeling as a computational implementation of ‘methodological individualism’, the search for the microfoundations of social life in the actions of intentional agents. It then considers how the ABC method differs from an earlier generation of modeling approaches, including game theory, equation-based models of computer simulati…
Social Influence: The Puzzling Nature of Success in Cultural Markets
This article examines the role of social influence in the puzzling nature of success in cultural markets: successful cultural products, such as hit songs, best-selling books, and blockbuster movies, are considerably more successful than average; yet which particular songs, books, and movies will become the next ‘big thing’ appears impossible to predict. The article investigates this paradox empirically by constructing a website where more than 27…
Segregation Dynamics
This article explores the dynamics of segregation, with particular emphasis on the relationship between identity-based individual choices and the constraints on those choices due to others’ identity-based choices. It begins with an overview of segregation and the key elements of segregation processes: the actors, dimensions of clustering, and universe in which clustering occurs. It then reviews measures, data, and models for investigating the dyn…
Analytic Ethnography
This article examines the unique contribution that analytic ethnography has made and can make to accomplishing two of the key principles of analytical sociology: developing theoretical explanations by identifying mechanisms that connect actors, action, and outcomes; bridging the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis in those explanations. It first distinguishes ‘analytic ethnography’ from other varieties of ethnography before showing how anal…
Conditional Choice
This article examines the dynamics of conditional choice as a mechanism for explaining social action, with particular emphasis on identifying model frameworks for the analysis of the trajectory and outcome of conditional decision-making processes. It begins with an overview of conditional decision-making, including key words and concepts, followed by a discussion of conditional decision rules and initial states of activity and how they shape the …
Heuristics
This article examines the role of heuristics in driving social action, focusing on the simple heuristics that people use in their everyday lives: the Recognition Heuristic and the Take-the-best Heuristic. It first describes recognition-based inference and knowledge-based inference before discussing how fast-and-frugal heuristics are being employed as models of both individual and group decision-making. It then describes social heuristics, with pa…
Time and Scheduling
This article examines time and scheduling dynamics, with particular emphasis on the potential consequences of scheduling constraints for social life. It asks why scheduling conflicts exist and why they are often enormously difficult to resolve, first by providing an overview of traditional approaches to the study of time in the social sciences. These include an extensive literature across a number of disciplines on how societies conceptualize tim…
Status
This article examines status dynamics, with particular emphasis on four common patterns. First, actors use others’ status as a signal of their underlying quality. Second, an actor’s status influences the rewards that he/she receives. Third, an individual’s status position is not fixed, but arises from the exchange relations between individuals. Fourth, actors are especially likely to rely on status queues to make inferences about quality when the…
What is Analytical Sociology All About? An Introductory Essay
This book deals with analytical sociology, an approach for understanding the social world. Analytical sociology explains important social facts such as network structures, patterns of residential segregation, typical beliefs, cultural tastes, and common ways of acting. It does so by detailing in clear and precise ways the mechanisms through which social facts are brought about. This introductory chapter discusses some of the fundamentals of analy…
Trust
This article examines the role of trust as a determinant of cooperative behavior in social relations and social organizations. It begins with an overview of some issues of definition, scope, and measurement of trust, followed by discussion of the dimensions of trust and trustworthiness. It then reviews some evidence on the role of trust in social relations and social organizations before analyzing the main and moderating effects of trust in the c…
Network Dynamics
This article explores dynamic networks and diffusion, with particular emphasis on evolving traces of enacted social relations. It begins with a review of models for the evolution of networks over time — making a distinction between ‘node-based’ and ‘edge-based’ models — and more specifically how and why networks change. It then considers how network timing affects the flow of things across networks, focusing on how edge timing reshapes the set of…
Collective Action
This article examines collective action, focusing on the role of social interactions, conflict, and the dynamics of interpersonal influence in shaping collective identities and interests. The discussion is based on the co-occurrence of individuals’ interest and group identity through a consistent course of action and begins with an overview of analytical models used to investigate extraordinary forms of collective action. The article then describ…
Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences
During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism-based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to t…
Social Mechanisms
In this article it is argued that the search for 'social mechanisms' is of crucial importance for the development of sociological theory. With this concept - which is occasionally used in the sociological literature but has received little systematic attention - attention is called to an intermediary level of analysis in-between pure description and story- telling, on the one hand, and universal social laws, on the other. While the search for uni…
Contagious Collectivities: On the Spatial Diffusion of Swedish Trade Unions, 1890-1940
This article how distances and relations between actors are likely to influence the growth and spread of social movements. A formal theoretical model is developed that extends previous work on threshold models of collective behavior. Spatial distribution of a population influences the network that are likely to emerge within the population; these network, in turn, will influence the likely outcome of a mobilization effort. Key theoretical predict…
Mesolevel Networks and the Diffusion of Social Movements: The Case of the Swedish Social Democratic Party
In analyzing the spatial diffusion of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, this article introduces the notion of a mesolevel network. A mesolevel network is a social network that differs in three important respects from interpersonal microlevel networks directly linking prior and potential adopters of a practice to one another: (1) it is generated by a different causal process than the microlevel network; (2) it tends to be much sparser than the …
Rational Choice, Empirical Research, and the Sociological Tradition
In this article we argue that rational choice theory can play a progressive role in unifying theoretical and empirical work in sociology. The basis of rational choice theorizing is outlined, and it is argued that important ideas of Karl Popper, Max Weber, and Robert K. Merton properly belong in this tradition. Three elements in rational choice theorizing are deemed particularly essential for explanatory sociological theory: the principle of metho…
Analytical Sociology and Theories of the Middle Range
This article locates analytic sociology in the Mertonian tradition of middle-range theory, which focuses on partial explanation of phenomena observed in different social domains through identification of core causal mechanisms. Robert K. Merton was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century sociology. He wrote on a wide range of topics, including bureaucracy, deviance, mass communications, professions, social stratification, and the s…
Social mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory
Organizational Differentiation and Earnings Dispersion
This article analyzes earnings distribution within organizations. A formal model specifies mechanisms through which the hierarchical structure of organizations is likely to influence the extent of earnings dispersion. The predictions derived from the model are confronted with data on the pay structure and formal organizational structure of 5,600 Swedish manufacturing establishments. The empirical analyses largely confirm the predictions derived f…
Analytical sociology and computational social science
Analytical sociology focuses on social interactions among individuals and the hard-to-predict aggregate outcomes they bring about. It seeks to identify generalizable mechanisms giving rise to emergent properties of social systems which, in turn, feed back on individual decision-making. This research program benefits from computational tools such as agent-based simulations, machine learning, and large-scale web experiments, and has considerable ov…
Popper's Situational Analysis and Contemporary Sociology
This article assesses the value of Karl Popper's situational analysis for contem porary sociology We maintain that this element of Popper's social science methodology has been largely neglected by sociologists and suggest that this is because it is borrowed from economics. As such, situational analysis has much in common with recent attempts to introduce rational choice in sociology. Our main question is this: What is the contribution of situatio…
Age and Income in Contemporary Society: A Research Note
This research note describes the distribution of family income in seven industrial nations, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study. Significant differences between the countries are identified. A 'poverty cycle' of the type identified by Rowntree still describes the distribution of income over age groups, but it is neither strong nor universal. Elderly families are found to be a key group for understanding the degree of income inequality in …
Explaining Social Change: An Analytical Approach
La sociologia analítica és una aproximació a la teorització social «d’abast mitjà» que intenta desenvolupar explicacions precises, realistes i basades en l’acció sobre diversos fenòmens socials. En el nucli de l’enfocament analític es troba la idea que les explicacions acceptables han d’explicar els mecanismes a través dels quals es van produir els fenòmens que es volen explicar. En aquest article discutim els elements més importants d’aquest enf…
Recent Trends in Agent-based Computational Research: A Brief Introduction
Frontiers of Sociology: The Annals of the International Institute of Sociology – Volume 11
The 37th World Congress of the IIS focused on theory and research at the forefront of sociology and the relationship between sociology and its neighbouring disciplines. This volume constitutes a sustained effort by prominent sociologists and other social scientists to assess the current standing of sociology. It is a stocktaking of the unique nature of sociology in the light of advances within the discipline itself and within a range of neighbour…
Interaction Domains and Suicide: A Population-based Panel Study of Suicides in Stockholm, 1991-1999
This article examines how suicides influence suicide risks of others within two interaction domains: the family and the workplace. A distinction is made between dyad-based social-interaction effects and degree-based exposure effects. A unique database including all individuals who ever lived in Stockholm during the 1990s is analyzed. For about 5.6 years on average, 1.2 million individuals are observed, and 1,116 of them commit suicide. Controllin…
Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science
This is the first comprehensive critical evaluation of the use of rational choice theory in political science. Writing in an accessible and nontechnical style, Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro assess rational choice theory where it is reputed to be most successful: the study of collective action, the behavior of political parties and politicians, and such phenomena as voting cycles and Prisoner's Dilemmas. In their hard-hitting critique, Green and…
Introduction to This Special Issue on Social Network Analysis
Les AA. s'efforcent de montrer l'interet de l'analyse de reseaux sociaux en ce qui concerne les recherches sur la structure sociale. Ils font une presentation breve d'un certain nombre d'articles rassembles dans un recueil sur ce theme. Ils montrent que ce type d'approche permet de situer les individus dans le tissu de leurs relations sociales et que cette insertion des individus dans un reseau de relations influence leur comportement. Ils rappel…
Introduction to this special issue on rational choice theory
Organizational vacancy chains and the attainment process
In this paper a theory of the earnings attainment process is formalized. This theory conceives of the attainment process as being governed by vacancy chains in hierarchically structured organizations. Predictions deduced from the theory are tested with data on attainment processes within some 5,600 Swedish manufacturing establishments. The empirical results offer support for the theory and suggest that individual attainment processes systematical…
Generative Models and Explanatory Research: On the Sociology of Aage B. Sørensen
The evolution of the bargaining society. politico-economic dependencies in Sweden
A centralized neo-corporatist bargaining system between leading representatives of trade unions, employer confederations, and the state has been established in Sweden. In this essay, an explanation of this phenomenon is offered which emphasizes the strategic behavior of the actors involved. The growth of the public sector, the improved potential for collective action among wage earners, and the internationalization of trade have produced a new sy…
Identifying Complex Dynamics in Social Systems: A New Methodological Approach Applied to Study School Segregation
It is widely recognized that segregation processes are often the result of complex nonlinear dynamics. Empirical analyses of complex dynamics are however rare, because there is a lack of appropriate empirical modeling techniques that are capable of capturing complex patterns and nonlinearities. At the same time, we know that many social phenomena display nonlinearities. In this article, we introduce a new modeling tool in order to partly fill thi…
The Power of Working Class Organizations and the Inter-Industrial Wage-Structure
In reaction to modernization theorists there has lately appeared a number of comparative studies which argue that the existence of powerful trade unions and left parties are crucial to the level of inequality in society. In this research note we examine how well this theory can account for the development of the inter-industrial wage structure in 14 West European societies during the period 1957-1979. The result, which is based on hitherto unused…
Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data
Social-influence processes not only affect the rate at which behaviors spread but can also decouple adoption behavior from individual preferences, and thereby bring about unexpected collective outcomes that cannot be predicted on the basis of the initial likes and dislikes of the individuals involved. However, the conditions under which social influence can lead to such decoupling are not well understood. We identify a social-influence mechanism …
Signaling
This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cos…
The Power of Working Class Organizations and the Inter-Industrial Wage-Structure
In reaction to modernization theorists there has lately appeared a number of comparative studies which argue that the existence of powerful trade unions and left parties are crucial to the level of inequality in society. In this research note we examine how well this theory can account for the development of the inter-industrial wage structure in 14 West European societies during the period 1957-1979. The result, which is based on hitherto unused…
Disability Pension: Welfare or Misfortune
(1986). 10 Disability Pension: Welfare or Misfortune? International Journal of Sociology: Vol. 16, No. 3-4, pp. 208-220
The evolution of the bargaining society. politico-economic dependencies in Sweden
A centralized neo-corporatist bargaining system between leading representatives of trade unions, employer confederations, and the state has been established in Sweden. In this essay, an explanation of this phenomenon is offered which emphasizes the strategic behavior of the actors involved. The growth of the public sector, the improved potential for collective action among wage earners, and the internationalization of trade have produced a new sy…
Age and Income in Contemporary Society: A Research Note
This research note describes the distribution of family income in seven industrial nations, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study. Significant differences between the countries are identified. A 'poverty cycle' of the type identified by Rowntree still describes the distribution of income over age groups, but it is neither strong nor universal. Elderly families are found to be a key group for understanding the degree of income inequality in …
Structures of Inequality: A Study of Stratification within Work Organizations
The Forum
Research in the Sociology of Organizations: A Research Annual, Vol. 6
Organizational Differentiation and Earnings Dispersion
This article analyzes earnings distribution within organizations. A formal model specifies mechanisms through which the hierarchical structure of organizations is likely to influence the extent of earnings dispersion. The predictions derived from the model are confronted with data on the pay structure and formal organizational structure of 5,600 Swedish manufacturing establishments. The empirical analyses largely confirm the predictions derived f…
Is Organizational Ecology at an Impasse
Organizational vacancy chains and the attainment process
In this paper a theory of the earnings attainment process is formalized. This theory conceives of the attainment process as being governed by vacancy chains in hierarchically structured organizations. Predictions deduced from the theory are tested with data on attainment processes within some 5,600 Swedish manufacturing establishments. The empirical results offer support for the theory and suggest that individual attainment processes systematical…
Introduction to this special issue on rational choice theory
Local Employment Contexts and Job Attainment in Swedish Manufacturing Industry
This article analyzes factors that influence the attainment of organizational rank in Swedish manufacturing industry. It is argued that competition for promotions is highly localized and largely restricted to the insiders of organizations. As a consequence, the attainment process is likely to be idiosyncratic and strongly influenced by the particularities of each place of employment. In the empirical analysis, particular attention is given to how…
Introduction to This Special Issue on Social Network Analysis
Les AA. s'efforcent de montrer l'interet de l'analyse de reseaux sociaux en ce qui concerne les recherches sur la structure sociale. Ils font une presentation breve d'un certain nombre d'articles rassembles dans un recueil sur ce theme. Ils montrent que ce type d'approche permet de situer les individus dans le tissu de leurs relations sociales et que cette insertion des individus dans un reseau de relations influence leur comportement. Ils rappel…
Contagious Collectivities: On the Spatial Diffusion of Swedish Trade Unions, 1890-1940
This article how distances and relations between actors are likely to influence the growth and spread of social movements. A formal theoretical model is developed that extends previous work on threshold models of collective behavior. Spatial distribution of a population influences the network that are likely to emerge within the population; these network, in turn, will influence the likely outcome of a mobilization effort. Key theoretical predict…
Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science
This is the first comprehensive critical evaluation of the use of rational choice theory in political science. Writing in an accessible and nontechnical style, Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro assess rational choice theory where it is reputed to be most successful: the study of collective action, the behavior of political parties and politicians, and such phenomena as voting cycles and Prisoner's Dilemmas. In their hard-hitting critique, Green and…
Social Mechanisms
In this article it is argued that the search for 'social mechanisms' is of crucial importance for the development of sociological theory. With this concept - which is occasionally used in the sociological literature but has received little systematic attention - attention is called to an intermediary level of analysis in-between pure description and story- telling, on the one hand, and universal social laws, on the other. While the search for uni…
Rational Choice, Empirical Research, and the Sociological Tradition
In this article we argue that rational choice theory can play a progressive role in unifying theoretical and empirical work in sociology. The basis of rational choice theorizing is outlined, and it is argued that important ideas of Karl Popper, Max Weber, and Robert K. Merton properly belong in this tradition. Three elements in rational choice theorizing are deemed particularly essential for explanatory sociological theory: the principle of metho…
Social mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory
Social mechanisms: An introductory essay
The main message of this book is that the advancement of social theory calls for an analytical approach that systematically seeks to explicate the social mechanisms that generate and explain observed associations between events. It might appear obvious that every social theory, worthy of its name, should be explanatory. But upon closer examination, it turns out that what often goes under the rubric of social theory, should more properly be viewed…
Popper's Situational Analysis and Contemporary Sociology
This article assesses the value of Karl Popper's situational analysis for contem porary sociology We maintain that this element of Popper's social science methodology has been largely neglected by sociologists and suggest that this is because it is borrowed from economics. As such, situational analysis has much in common with recent attempts to introduce rational choice in sociology. Our main question is this: What is the contribution of situatio…
Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory
Mesolevel Networks and the Diffusion of Social Movements: The Case of the Swedish Social Democratic Party
In analyzing the spatial diffusion of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, this article introduces the notion of a mesolevel network. A mesolevel network is a social network that differs in three important respects from interpersonal microlevel networks directly linking prior and potential adopters of a practice to one another: (1) it is generated by a different causal process than the microlevel network; (2) it tends to be much sparser than the …
Generative Models and Explanatory Research: On the Sociology of Aage B. Sørensen
Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology
Over the past few decades serious reservations have been expressed about the explanatory power of sociological theory and research. In this important book, leading social theorist Peter Hedström outlines the foundations of an analytically oriented sociology that seeks to address this criticism. Building on his earlier influential contributions to contemporary debates, Professor Hedström argues for a systematic development of sociological theory s…
Analytische Soziologie in Tocquevilles Über die Demokratie in Amerika
Sociology (61 works) · Epistemology (35 works) · Computer Science (32 works) · Economics (28 works) · Social science (28 works) · Political science (27 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (20 works) · Law (17 works)