Seminar 1-B
Formal Analysis, Mathematical Sociology and the Interpretation of Culture

A number of particpants also raised very practical questions about the use of formal methodologies in the measurement of meaning. Balazs Vedres asks the basic question “what are the characteristics of symbolic networks that differ from social networks?” Kate O'Neil raises the question of how suitable Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is for the study of configurations of themes found in texts? She also asks “how QCA relates to other approaches for studying sets of themes and concepts, such as approaches using network methods and lattices?” Marc Ventresca asks “What are new directions for the family of MDS and other clustering analyses to track public and collective ideologies/rationalized belief systems over time?” Bill Holt asks about possibilities for combining multiple methods that straddle the qualitative/quantitative divide, while Kyoko Sato wonders about the linkage between meaning measurement and “political outcome: how can we … connect public discourse to actual outcomes such as policy?” Mary Blair-Loy raises a similar type of concern when she asks whether we can “better assess the explanatory power of culture in relationship to (or alongside) other dimensions of social structure?” Martin Rueff pushes this issue further still and asks the more fundamental question as to whether “sociologists of culture (can) conduct research that enjoys the replicability and validity of quantitative work in other specialty areas (e.g. demography, organizational theory, social psychology, etc.)?” This seminar will focus on these matters, questions about formal methods, about the scientific project, and the question of where we stand today in terms of formalizing the study of meaning.