Alain Degenne and Yannick Lemel

There is a dearth of textbooks leading up to the style of sociology exemplified by, among others, the European Sociological Review: a clever problem choice, systematic theorizing, and rigorous testing. American textbooks present sociology as a grab bag of topics, the theories in British treatises are so liquid that students may wish for a bar of soap, and German tomes are so concerned with the conditions for the possibility of sociology that sociology's research findings take the back seat. The French book under review fills this gap to a large extent. If more of its examples had been taken from English publications, a translation into that language might have been a hit. The book aims to provide a tool box for those who wish to analyze individual behavior from a sociological perspective, and does so by starting from the assumption that individuals act with a minimum of intentions (a synonym for purposes). It distances itself from narrowly conceived rational choice explanations, and dissects as well as synthesizes a large number of highlights from half a century of sociological studies. The examples include field work in developing countries, archival research, and network mapping. To achieve their aim of synthesis, the authors disavow the holistic concept of culture and define culture as shared beliefs, so that analytical exercises at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels become possible by specifying who does the sharing. The first part of the book (Chapters 1–4) is an introduction and shows, by way of examples, that three types of explanations are involved in the analysis of specific cases. The fourth part (Chapters 12–15) sums up. The second part (Chapters 5–8) views ‘cultures and representations as sciences and collective norms’, the third one (Chapters 9–11) takes ‘the relational environment as context and construction’. Behind these vague titles lurks one big substantive statement, consisting of three layers providing better and better approximations. This reviewer articulated them as the following falsifiable propositions

Epistemology · Field (mathematics) · German · Linguistics · Perspective (graphical) · Premise · Social science · Sociological imagination · Sociological theory · Sociology · Style (visual arts) · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Computer Science · French Urban and Social Studies · Philosophy · Social Sciences and Governance