The aim of the article is to define and delimit a fundamental historical change in the construction of causal models and causal explanations on topics dependent on time. The author met with the problem while working with a study on the emergence of the sociological discourse, but had no opportunity then to elaborate it.

Like any political institution, the national election can change with external technological innovation. Certainly, election campaign habits have responded to transport and communication developments. The electronic computer, the political statistics available through public opinion survey archives and election statistics, and the existing social science theory now constitute the technological basis for computer simulation and a possible further alteration of the electoral institution.

1. The influence of the media has frequently been handled, particularly from a sociological perspective, with the concept of ‘myth’ in mind. The concept, however, has been invoked in a pejorative sense. The target of the word becomes whatever the speaker does not consider ‘his reality’. TV, for instance, is taken as ‘a myth world’ which is sharply divorced from the real world.

Die Frage kann nach über einem Jahrzehnt in Deutschland praktizierter Marktwirtschaft überraschen, und sicherlich wird es viele geben, die ihre Berechtigung rundweg leugnen werden, nämlich zu prüfen, wieweit die Struktur der Marktwirtschaft schon von wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Elementen überwuchert wurde. Wir wollen nicht versuchen, das Problem exakt zu lösen, vielmehr geht es darum zu zeigen, daß hier überhaupt ein Problem vorliegt, dessen Bedeutung in der heutigen deutschen Sozialpolitik nicht recht erkannt zu sein scheint.

Répondre à cette question suppose qu'on puisse définir avec précision ce qu'on entend par « réussite d'une modernisation », et par le mot « pourquoi ». Or, la modernisation est un concept vague. On pourra remarquer que, s'il n'y avait pas, à l'heure actuelle, un succès économique du Japon qui frappe même les plus aveugles des Européens, on ne discuterait guère de la modernité japonaise. Cela implique d'abord que l'élément économique, en particulier industriel, est fondamental dans notre perception de la modernité. Mais comme la notion de modernité a été definie à partir exclusivement de l'expérience européenne ou américaine, on éprouve la tentation de penser que seules les ressemblances entre le Japon et l'Europe sont significatives, et que le Japon (ou l'Europe…) ne saurait avoir sa modernisation particulière. Provisoirement, pour faire le tri dans le passé japonais, on retiendra ici des critères bien connus, déjà repérés en Europe: mobilité, individuation et laïcisation; et on admettra que la recherche de ces critères ne peut se limiter à l'ère Meiji et doit remonter d'une part au moins jusqu'au XVIIIe siècle et d'autre part, comme la modernisation est une adaptation continue à des techniques qui évoluent rapidement, aller jusqu'á nos jours.

This paper adds to a vital international tradition of discussing the history of sociological theory by empirically investigating its structure, dynamics, and relationships. Our primary contribution to this tradition is to bring to the conversation a greater level of comparative and historical scope, a more systematic quantitative methodology, and a degree of reflexivity and synthesis. To do so, we examine some 670 editions of sociological-theory books geared toward students, published in English, German, and French between 1950 and 2020. Our empirical analysis highlights patterns, trends, and relationships among the theorists featured in these books, the narratives and approaches that define their visions of sociological theory, and the characteristics of the authors who wrote them. Our findings reveal some key intellectual as well as sociological factors associated with the changing composition of the canon.

The trans-disciplinary New Institutional framework identifies the importance of incentive structures in preventing opportunism in market making. In recent decades this theoretical tradition has increasingly shifted its attention from formal institutions to identify the significance of cultural processes in countering uncertainty, bounded rationality, and information asymmetries. More specifically the New Institutional perspective tends to focus on the formal mechanisms producing and reproducing culture, as opposed to an examination of specific cultural content. This attention to formal mechanisms means that value-rational action and commitments in market making receive insufficient attention. In order to examine the problems entailed in this trend, the case study of a financial market in which market making was constituted by the values of loyalty, duty, and honor of traders is used.