Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach that informs the argument and analysis. I view the generation and distribution of power in society, and how and why that evolves over time, as inherently linked and thus the fundamental context for social inquiry. The chapter defines social power, arguing that power needs to be understood as something distributed among agents. Thus the definition of social actors is also central, and especially the fact that in the modern period these are increasingly collective, corporate entities, based on modes of association other than kinship. The sharpening and proliferation of such corporate actors, and the domestication of competition, are reciprocal processes. Competition and competitors are mutually defining. Drawing on the tradition of cultural ecology, I also clarify what I mean by ‘social evolution’, emphasising a shift in focus from ‘societies’ to forms of social organisation as the key units of analysis.

The aim of the microfoundations movement in management is to link macro management phenomena, such as corporate governance and strategic alliances, with more micro disciplines, such as organizational behavior and psychology. The core ideas of microfoundations are closely related to methodological individualism, which is the epistemological stance stressing the explanatory primacy of individuals and their purposeful behavior. Methodological individualism should be distinguished from ontological individualism, which is the thesis that all social phenomena are created, or caused, by individuals. Coleman’s boat is a visual representation showing how large-scale entities (the macro) influence smaller-scale entities (the micro) and how a macro phenomenon is composed of microscale events and activities. A key limitation of the microfoundations movement is that emergent entities, such as organizations, and their properties are common in management research. The properties of an emergent entity itself cannot be explained away and thus eliminated entirely from explanations involving the exercise of the entity’s causal powers.

Like a broad array of core notions in human and social sciences, identity is reformulated with regard to a general anti-Cartesianism. This leads to shifting reified entities to processes and results in a fundamental opening to dynamic plurality and to contextualizing any phenomenon. This shift can be read as a theoretical and as a societal shift in dominant industrialized countries, but it can also be used as a critique of traditional Western individualism that colonizes through psychological science what is otherwise done through markets and symbolic meanings of things, actions, and persons. In this reading, the term “identity” crystallizes the ideology of individualism. Thus, this chapter uses a nonindividualistic, performative-dialogic approach emphasizing the concrete experience of “languaging.” It broaches two issues emerging through processuality: How can we theorize continuity and coherence within change? How do we articulate the social and the individual to each other? Dialogism framing language and self builds the ground for developing identity as a process occurring in a field of mediated activities generated and shaped by language activities deployed onto that field. This process displays a call-and-reply dynamic of crossing and blending voices. An example illustrates this dynamic, highlighting identity as being called by voices of different types. Finally, the two issues are offered an answer by deconstructing the assumptions of sameness and homogeneity and shifting towards heterogeneity, plurality, and dialogicality that are contained by centripetal and centrifugal forces: identity is an interim, even fragile, stage that continues through the dynamic of call-and-reply of speaking voices.

Mathematical models of biological populations and communities are the most common type of representation in ecology, with a wide array of functional forms and many different types of variables and parameters. This complexity and the uneasy relationship between theoretical and empirical work in ecology makes for fertile philosophical fodder. For example, most ecological models are highly idealized, incorporating unrealistic assumptions to make mathematical model analysis tractable. This is troubling in ecology as mathematical ecologists often uncritically emulate mathematically sophisticated models of physics to ensure their modeling is mathematically rigorous. Showing the characterization of ecological stability as Lyapunov stability as indefensible is one goal of this chapter. Another goal is assessing the ecological promise of individual-based models (IBMs) and the philosophical issues they pose. IBMs do not aggregate over, or abstract from, the details of interactions between individual organisms. This modeling strategy is part of a more general, well-vetted “methodologically-individualistic” approach to representing the world often employed in social sciences. Debates about methodological individualism in the social sciences reveal insights about how individual-based ecological modeling should be understood and indicate their reductive potential in ecology.

Interdisciplinary research of international law has been on the rise in recent decades and scholars have adopted widely varying disciplines, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks to investigate international legal behavior. However, it is this chapter’s contention that a lion’s share of the literature on international legal behavior has understated the role of individual people in international law. Although international law is made, implemented, changed, or broken by people, this ontological insight has not found its way into influential paradigmatic views of international law and consequently has not been adequately embedded in methodologies, theoretical accounts, and research agendas. This chapter offers an illustrative review of relevant scholarship, critiques the scholarship’s statism and outlines its implications. It uses the United States case of the Torture Memos as a means to demonstrate the pitfalls of the literature’s statism and the potential benefits of steering away from it. The chapter therefore argues that future interdisciplinary work of international law would benefit from ridding itself of the dominance of paradigmatic statism and instead recognizing the central role of individuals in the everyday practice of international law.

Discusses empirical examples showing how the preference for individual-level explanation – that is, for psychological, social-psychological, and microeconomic explanation – has limited the explanation of a wide range of macrosocial outcomes: of European economic history, of postindustrial development, of world economic development and globalization generally.

Works in detail through important empirical examples – including a canonical one from Max Weber – showing how supra-individual social causal processes often provide more sensible depictions of historical processes than do cumbersome ones imagining highly autonomous individual and organizational actors.

Richard A. Musgrave (1910-2007) is the architect of modern public finance. Born and educated in Germany, Musgrave was a widely read scholar who fought attempts to narrow the scope and methods of economics. He had always been critical of what we now call welfarism, and more generally of strict methodological individualism. This chapter reviews the history of Musgrave’s connection with the idea of community. Musgrave’s limited opening – often implicit – for the idea of community provides a basis for an alternative conception of welfare. He realised the importance of a social or communal frame late in his life and left cursory remarks. Musgrave never fully articulated a coherent vision of what the idea of community belonging might entail for a democratic theory of the government’s budget. Yet, securing an ontological status for societies or communities allowed him to theorise a larger scope for public interventions than other economic models of the state. It provided a new meaning to his concept of merit wants. Reframing merit wants as ‘community wants’ is explained by the revival of moral and political philosophy in the 1970s and revisiting older German theories.

While by the early twentieth century major advances had been made in establishing population regularities in ‘volitional phenomena’ through new methods of data collection and analysis, little attention had been given to the basis on which such regularities were to be explained. Lexis had made a start in the context of his critique of Quetelet but it was Weber who, over the course of several large-scale studies of agricultural and industrial labour in contemporary Germany and of his work on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, played a crucial role in insistingon methodological individualism and indevelopingthe concept of erklärendes Verstehen.Explanatory narratives of established population regularities had to be provided in terms of the action of individuals that could be understood - made intelligible – in terms of the at least subjective rationality that was involved. This led to his proposal of sociology as ‘a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.’

Chapter 4 discusses how capital for Marx functions as a totality. It also explains how Marx’s conception of totality is based on Hegel’s conception of the logic of essence. Capital has a sui generis character, and is able to maintain and reproduce itself through individuals. Thus, the ground-level of domination in capitalism is not the domination of capitalists over workers, but the abstract domination of the totality of capital over both capitalists and workers. It is true that individuals can exert power over each other; yet they can do so not due to their personal characteristics, but in fact as a “personification of economic categories.” Finally, I observe that the power of capital has an impersonal and non-intentional character, although that power must necessarily be mediated by the action of individuals.

Some Roman economic historians are skeptical of an economic rationality which explicitly imposes capitalism-centric value judgements on antiquity. Should Roman historians study rationality as a phenomenon exclusively ‘locked’ inside the minds of individuals, or is it possible to study rationality as something at least influenced or even determined by collectivized social and cultural structures (or embedding contexts)? In this chapter, I argue that Collingwood’s observation that observers and subjects share the same cognitive process opens up new opportunities for understanding the thinking of ancient peoples. First, I define this cognitive process, after Weber and especially Mises, as ‘purposefulness’ and defend its a priori epistemological status. Then, using Weber’s insights on ideal types, I discuss how embedding contexts bounded purposefulness. Finally, I combine these arguments into an experimental heuristic model for understanding the purposeful actions of historical individuals by comparing these choices to both ideal-typical economic theory and unchosen counterfactual actions.