Date: Apr.30, 2021

Time: 13:30-15:30

Speaker: ZHAO Dingxin

Venue: Room 1127, Building A, Creative Center, the West District, Zijingang Campus 

[Speaker Intro]

ZHAO Dingxin is Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He also chairs Department of Sociology of Zhejiang University. His research covers historical sociology, political sociology, social movements, social change, and economic development. His interests also extend to sociological theory and methodology. Zhao has publications in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, American Behavioral Scientist, Social Forces, Mobilization, and Sociology. He is the author of award-winning The Power of Tiananmen (2001) and The Confucian-Legalist State (2015) and several other books in Chinese.

[Abstract]

Since the end of the 19th century, sociology has gradually developed into a discipline highly dependent on the comparison and induction of experience. Deduction lacks enough attention in the process of observation, interview, file reading and theory building. This lecture, therefore, puts forward a theory building path with “ideal-type-set based deduction” as the core, and explains its use and potential in theory building of sociology through various examples, in the hope of changing the current sociological research and theoretical construction model which is absolutely dominated by experience induction.