This reading course (Lektürekurs) will discuss one of the major methodological issues in social sciences and humanities, namely: the relationship between micro and macro perspectives. Depending on the research topic, location and timeframe, this can be translated as tensions between structure and agency, biography and society, or interpersonal behaviour and institutional system. The question of how to link such disparate levels of analysis confronts scholars across disciplines.
Combined under the heading of “micro-macro links”, a range of topics will be discussed in this reading course, including aggregation, embeddedness and representativeness, to highlight a few. More specifically, we will discuss how to conceptualise the links between individual motivations and societal outcomes on the one hand, and the impact of large-scale social processes on individual behaviour on the other; on making case studies productive for scholarly analysis; and, as the historian Jan Gross (2012) put it – on ways to “convert episodic knowledge into a general understanding of what happened”.
So far, despite their shared challenges, scholars have restricted discussions on micro-macro perspectives to their own disciplines. Our reading course aims to cut across the boundaries between history, sociology and anthropology, and find sensible ways to combine micro- and macro-knowledge.
- Docente: Kornelia Konczal