【Talk & Lecture】Structural/Mechanism Explanations and the Laws of Cosmic/Human Historical Development
Date: Dec 17, 2021
Time: 13:30-15:30
Speaker: ZHAO Dingxin
[Speaker Intro]
Zhao Dingxin, Head of the Department of Sociology as well as Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Zhejiang University, is also Max Palevsky Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He has served as President of the North American Society of Chinese Sociologists, Chair of the China Committee of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, and Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His research interests include political sociology, social movements and historical sociology.
His research results have been published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Perspectives and China Studies Quarterly. His monograph in English, Power of Tiananmen, published by the University of Chicago Press, won the American Sociological Association's 2001 Best Book Award for Asian Studies and the 2002 Best Book Award for the Study of Collective Action and Social Movements. The Confucian-Legalist State, published by Oxford University Press, won the American Sociological Association’s 2016 Best Book Award for Political Sociology.
【Abstract】
The core of sociological analysis is structural/mechanism analysis. But why does it have to be so? For example, why is the interpretation of laws prevailing in physics rather than structural/mechanism analysis? And what is the relation between structures and mechanisms in sociology? Dsiven by these doubts, the speaker integrates the knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and social sciences to present a unified field model that can portray the development of the relation between social structures and mechanisms which immediately formed after the Big Bang, and on the basis of this model discusses the siginificance of understanding the development for social analysis.
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