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Writing Papers That Apply Sociological Theories or Perspectives

This document is intended as an additional resource for undergraduate students taking sociology courses at UW. It is not intended to replace instructions from your professors and TAs. In all cases follow course-specific assignment instructions, and consult your TA or professor if you have questions.

About These Assignments

Theory application assignments are a common type of analytical writing assigned in sociology classes.  Many instructors expect you to apply sociological theories (sometimes called "perspectives" or "arguments") to empirical phenomena. [1]   There are different ways to do this, depending upon your objectives, and of course, the specifics of each assignment. You can choose cases that confirm (support), disconfirm (contradict), [2]  or partially confirm any theory.   

How to Apply Theory to Empirical Phenomena

Theory application assignments generally require you to look at empirical phenomena through the lens of theory.  Ask yourself, what would the theory predict ("have to say") about a particular situation. According to the theory, if particular conditions are present or you see a change in a particular variable, what outcome should you expect? 

Generally, a first step in a theory application assignment is to make certain you understand the theory! You should be able to state the theory (the author's main argument) in a sentence or two.  Usually, this means specifying the causal relationship (X—>Y) or the causal model (which might involve multiple variables and relationships). 

For those taking sociological theory classes, in particular, you need to be aware that theories are constituted by more than causal relationships.  Depending upon the assignment, you may be asked to specify the following:

  • Causal Mechanism: This is a detailed explanation about how X—>Y, often made at a lower level of analysis (i.e., using smaller units) than the causal relationship.
  • Level of Analysis: Macro-level theories refer to society- or group-level causes and processes; micro-level theories address individual-level causes and processes.
  • Scope Conditions: These are parameters or boundaries specified by the theorist that identify the types of empirical phenomena to which the theory applies.
  • Assumptions: Most theories begin by assuming certain "facts." These often concern the bases of human behavior: for example, people are inherently aggressive or inherently kind, people act out of self-interest or based upon values, etc.

Theories vary in terms of whether they specify assumptions, scope conditions and causal mechanisms.  Sometimes they can only be inferred: when this is the case, be clear about that in your paper.

Clearly understanding all the parts of a theory helps you ensure that you are applying the theory correctly to your case. For example, you can ask whether your case fits the theory's assumptions and scope conditions.  Most importantly, however, you should single out the main argument or point (usually the causal relationship and mechanism) of the theory.  Does the theorist's key argument apply to your case? Students often go astray here by latching onto an inconsequential or less important part of the theory reading, showing the relationship to their case, and then assuming they have fully applied the theory.

Using Evidence to Make Your Argument

Theory application papers involve making a claim or argument based on theory, supported by empirical evidence. [3]   There are a few common problems that students encounter while writing these types of assignments: unsubstantiated claims/generalizations; "voice" issues or lack of attribution; excessive summarization/insufficient analysis.  Each class of problem is addressed below, followed by some pointers for choosing "cases," or deciding upon the empirical phenomenon to which you will apply the theoretical perspective or argument (including where to find data).

A common problem seen in theory application assignments is failing to substantiate claims, or making a statement that is not backed up with evidence or details ("proof").  When you make a statement or a claim, ask yourself, "How do I know this?"  What evidence can you marshal to support your claim? Put this evidence in your paper (and remember to cite your sources).  Similarly, be careful about making overly strong or broad claims based on insufficient evidence.  For example, you probably don't want to make a claim about how Americans feel about having a black president based on a poll of UW undergraduates.  You may also want to be careful about making authoritative (conclusive) claims about broad social phenomena based on a single case study.

In addition to un- or under-substantiated claims, another problem that students often encounter when writing these types of papers is lack of clarity regarding "voice," or whose ideas they are presenting.  The reader is left wondering whether a given statement represents the view of the theorist, the student, or an author who wrote about the case.  Be careful to identify whose views and ideas you are presenting. For example, you could write, "Marx views class conflict as the engine of history;" or, "I argue that American politics can best be understood through the lens of class conflict;" [4]  or, "According to Ehrenreich, Walmart employees cannot afford to purchase Walmart goods."

Another common problem that students encounter is the trap of excessive summarization.  They spend the majority of their papers simply summarizing (regurgitating the details) of a case—much like a book report.  One way to avoid this is to remember that theory indicates which details (or variables) of a case are most relevant, and to focus your discussion on those aspects.  A second strategy is to make sure that you relate the details of the case in an analytical fashion. You might do this by stating an assumption of Marxist theory, such as "man's ideas come from his material conditions," and then summarizing evidence from your case on that point.  You could organize the details of the case into paragraphs and start each paragraph with an analytical sentence about how the theory relates to different aspects of the case. 

Some theory application papers require that you choose your own case (an empirical phenomenon, trend, situation, etc.), whereas others specify the case for you (e.g., ask you to apply conflict theory to explain some aspect of globalization described in an article). Many students find choosing their own case rather challenging.  Some questions to guide your choice are:

  • Can I obtain sufficient data with relative ease on my case?
  • Is my case specific enough?  If your subject matter is too broad or abstract, it becomes both difficult to gather data and challenging to apply the theory.
  • Is the case an interesting one? Professors often prefer that you avoid examples used by the theorist themselves, those used in lectures and sections, and those that are extremely obvious.

Where You Can Find Data

Data is collected by many organizations (e.g., commercial, governmental, nonprofit, academic) and can frequently be found in books, reports, articles, and online sources.  The UW libraries make your job easy: on the front page of the library website ( www.lib.washington.edu ), in the left hand corner you will see a list of options under the heading "Find It" that allows you to go directly to databases, specific online journals, newspapers, etc. For example, if you are choosing a historical case, you might want to access newspaper articles.  This has become increasingly easy to do, as many are now online through the UW library.  For example, you can search The New York Times and get full-text online for every single issue from 1851 through today!  If you are interested in interview or observational data, you might try to find books or articles that are case-studies on your topic of interest by conducting a simple keyword search of the UW library book holdings, or using an electronic database, such as JSTOR or Sociological Abstracts.  Scholarly articles are easy to search through, since they contain abstracts, or paragraphs that summarize the topic, relevant literature, data and methods, and major findings.  When using JSTOR, you may want to limit your search to sociology (which includes 70 journals) and perhaps political science; this database retrieves full-text articles. Sociological Abstracts will cast a wider net searching many more sociology journals, but the article may or may not be available online (find out by clicking "check for UW holdings").  A final word about using academic articles for data: remember that you need to cite your sources, and follow the instructions of your assignment.  This includes making your own argument about your case, not using an argument you find in a scholarly article.

In addition, there are many data sources online.  For example, you can get data from the US census, including for particular neighborhoods, from a number of cites. You can get some crime data online: the Seattle Police Department publishes several years' worth of crime rates.  There are numerous cites on public opinion, including gallup.com. There is an online encyclopedia on Washington state history, including that of individual Seattle neighborhoods ( www.historylink.org ). These are just a couple options: a simple google search will yield hundreds more.  Finally, remember that librarian reference desks are expert on data sources, and that you can call, email, or visit in person to ask about what data is available on your particular topic.  You can chat with a librarian 24 hours a day online, as well (see the "Ask Us!" link on the front page of UW libraries website for contact information).

[1] By empirical phenomena, we mean some sort of observed, real-world conditions. These include societal trends, events, or outcomes. They are sometimes referred to as "cases."   Return to Reading

[2] A cautionary note about critiquing theories: no social theory explains all cases, so avoid claiming that a single case "disproves" a theory, or that a single case "proves" a theory correct. Moreover, if you choose a case that disconfirms a theory, you should be careful that the case falls within the scope conditions (see above) of the given theory. For example, if a theorist specifies that her argument pertains to economic transactions, it would not be a fair critique to say the theory doesn't explain dynamics within a family. On the other hand, it is useful and interesting to apply theories to cases not foreseen by the original theorist (we see this in sociological theories that incorporate theories from evolutionary biology or economics).   Return to Reading

[3] By empirical evidence, we mean data on social phenomena, derived from scientific observation or experiment.  Empirical evidence may be quantitative (e.g., statistical data) or qualitative (e.g., descriptions derived from systematic observation or interviewing), or a mixture of both. Empirical evidence must be observable and derived from real-world conditions (present or historical) rather than hypothetical or "imagined".  For additional help, see the "Where You Can Find Data" section on the next page.   Return to Reading

[4] If your instructor does not want you to use the first-person, you could write, "This paper argues…"   Return to Reading

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Social Justice and Sociological Theory

Bradley campbell.

Department of Sociology, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032 USA

Sociology is the science of social life, and as such, it is different from the pursuit of social justice and other efforts to evaluate or to reform the social world. Still, the idea of social justice is intimately connected with the idea of sociology. It arises along with scientific understandings of the social world and draws from these understandings to reshape society. The problem is that in practice, social justice activists often draw from only one type of sociological theory, conflict theory, and from a particular form of conflict theory known as critical theory. In doing so, they may ignore potential problems with the theories they are drawing from, and they may overlook many possibilities for effective reform. Conflict theory orients activists toward fighting oppression, but other theoretical approaches could help societies to achieve other possible moral goals, such as promoting understanding, increasing virtue, incentivizing virtue, making virtue easier, and strengthening solidarity.

What does sociology have to do with social justice? If sociology is the science of social life, its aim is to describe and explain the social world. This is very different from social justice activism and other efforts to evaluate and reform the social world. Sociology and social justice are different enterprises, but the idea of social justice is intimately connected with the idea of sociology. It arises along with scientific understandings of the social world and draws from these understandings to reshape society. The moral goals of social justice activists cannot be derived from sociology, but to the extent, sociology is successful in describing and explaining the world; it provides an understanding of society that can enable activists and reformers to achieve their goals. They can draw from sociological theory to better understand the social world they are seeking to change.

One complication, though, is that sociology is a divided field with multiple competing perspectives, so even the most successful theories are hotly contested. Sociology can help us better understand the social world, but the lack of agreement among sociologists should lead us toward caution. If we draw too narrowly from the range of sociological theory, we may ignore potential problems with the theories we are drawing from, and if we are trying to understand the social world better so that we can change it, too narrow a view may lead us to overlook many possibilities for effective reform.

Currently much social justice-oriented scholarship and activism draws from an approach called critical theory in viewing society as a system of oppression and in embracing a morality focused on liberation. Sometimes the connection is explicit. Occidental College, for example, has a Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice, and “at the heart of the program,” according to the department’s website, “is an interrogation of inequality and systems of power” (Occidental College 2021 ). Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (2017), in their book Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education , are also explicit about the connection. They argue that most people fail to understand “what social justice is and what might be required to achieve it” and they see themselves as combatting a form of “society-wide social justice illiteracy” that “prevents us from moving forward to create a more equitable society” (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017 : xix). Their objective, they say, is to “provide a foundation for developing social justice literacy” (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017 : xix), and as they make clear, they believe they are providing this foundation with an analysis of social justice based on critical theory (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017 : Chapter 2).

I agree with Sensoy and DiAngelo that there is a great deal of confusion about what social justice is and how to pursue it, but I think that by relying so heavily on critical theory, they exemplify the confusion more than they correct for it. While critical theory can certainly provide insights into the workings of society, it has not achieved the kind of consensus that would justify elevating it above other sociological approaches. And to the extent that critical theory gives us incorrect or just incomplete ideas about reality, it may lead to efforts at reform that are ineffective or even harmful. Sensoy and DiAngelo are right to think that knowledge about society can provide a foundation for social justice literacy, but our knowledge needs to be as accurate and complete as possible. Rather than focus so much on one approach, if social justice activists take seriously the full range of sociological theory, they might be able to develop more rounded conceptions of social justice that would perhaps provide a way to more accurately diagnose social problems and to more effectively deal with them.

The Idea of Social Justice

Any discussion of social justice quickly runs into the problem of how to define it. Friedrich Hayek said he had tried for 10 years to find out what social justice meant and failed. He concluded that the idea was an “empty formula, conventionally used to assert that a particular claim is justified without giving any reason” (Hayek 1979 :3). Similarly, Michael Novak said social justice is most often “an instrument of ideological intimidation,” that it is “a term of art whose operational meaning is, ‘We need a law against that’” (Novak 2000 ).

It is easy to see why this state of affairs would lead Hayek and others to reject the idea of social justice altogether. It is not readily apparent to me, though, that social justice is unusual in this respect. Fairness , tolerance , wisdom , love , and other moral concepts might also go undefined, and they might also be used more often as weapons in political conflicts than as tools for serious moral analysis. This does not lead most of us to reject these concepts or to stop advocating for them and pursuing them, though it might require us to think and talk about them more carefully to avoid misunderstanding. Likewise we need to be clear about what we mean by social justice.

One thing we need to be clear about is what the idea of social justice adds to our moral vocabulary. How does social justice differ from justice more broadly? One way of understanding the difference is by thinking about what was missing from older views of morality. According to David Johnston, “In the vast bulk of ancient writings that touch on questions of justice, the idea that the primary contours — the terrain — of the social world might be reshaped to conform to human design never arises” (Johnston 2011 : 107). In the Iliad , he says, the status hierarchies are taken for granted, and in the Hebrew scriptures, a detailed legal code comes directly from God. What neither the archaic and preclassical Greeks nor the ancient Hebrews imagined was “that the terrain of the social world might be re-graded to accord with a design of strictly human origins” (Johnston 2011 : 108). Along with philosophical thought, the idea gradually began to emerge among the Greeks and Romans, but the older idea, that “the basic contours of the social world are determined by nature,” was still a strong competitor, and with the collapse of the Roman Empire, it remained the dominant idea for many centuries (Johnson 2011 : 111). As people began again to have more confidence in their ability to understand the world, though, they began to think again that the social world might be understood and even altered. Accordingly in the eighteenth century, reflections on justice began to deal with this question: “How can human beings redesign and rebuild the terrain of the social world so as to make that terrain itself just?” (Johnston 2011 : 115).

Those who ask this question reject the idea that social arrangements are simply natural and inevitable. And those who ask the question are pursuing social justice. In Johnston’s words, the idea of social justice is that we can develop “a set of principles from which we may work out an ideally just distribution of rights and privileges, burdens and pains, which can be deployed to assess a society’s institutions as a whole and to argue for a transformation of those institutions if they are found wanting” (2011: 174). More simply, Jason Manning and I have suggested that we think of social justice as the idea “that laws, policies, and social institutions — not just individual behaviors — are part of the moral sphere” (Campbell and Manning 2018 : 188). If we are concerned with social justice, we evaluate institutional arrangements in terms of whether they contribute to human flourishing, fairness, equality, or whatever else we see as morally desirable.

Understood this way, social justice is not a particular idea about how institutions should be organized; it is just the idea that the way institutions are organized is of moral concern. Understood this way, it does not make much sense to reject social justice. Few people now think of the social world as wholly natural and fixed. Political disagreements abound, but they usually involve different visions of how best to organize society rather than a disagreement about whether social arrangements can be altered at all. Social justice seems useful as a moral term, and it seems inevitable that anyone who thinks at all about the world sociologically—anyone seeking descriptions and explanations of social arrangements—would also, when thinking about the world morally, reflect on the desirability of those arrangements.

Social Justice and Sociology

There is a sense in which social justice and sociology are not connected at all. To describe and explain reality is different from evaluating it or changing it. What is is different from what ought to be . One way of putting this is to say that as a science, sociology is value-free. This does not mean that sociologists do not themselves have values that affect what subjects they study or that people’s moral commitments do not affect their observations or interpretations. It simply means that science is not the same as morality—that science does not and cannot by itself determine what is right or wrong, good or evil, desirable or undesirable (Black 2013 ; Campbell 2014 ; Weber 1958 ). Science describes and explains observable reality, and descriptions and explanations are not evaluations.

That sociology is value-free is often misunderstood. To say that value judgments are not statements of fact does not mean value judgments are not important, for sociologists and for others, or that sociology is not relevant to moral debates. Sociology cannot decide between clashing values, but it can sometimes clear up matters of fact. And it can point us to what is possible—to whether and how we can act on our value commitments.

Sociology prepares the way for social justice, and in that sense, the two are intimately connected. Sociology is the science of social life, so the idea of sociology was that the old ways of thinking about the social world were inadequate. Humans had already begun to gaze upon parts of the physical world in a new way, using observation and logic to identify patterns such as the rotations of planets and the speed of falling objects. Sociologists claimed that the social world was another part of observable reality and that we could study it similarly. And if the social world could be understood like the natural world, it could be manipulated. The natural sciences provided new insights about reality, and in doing so, they enabled new technologies. Technologies manipulate the world toward human ends—faster travel, faster communication, deadlier weapons, etc.—and if the natural sciences could make new wonders possible, surely the social sciences could as well. Sociology offers the promise of social technology to enable us to live happier lives, to have more peaceful relationships, and to distribute resources more fairly. It raises the hope of social justice.

Another way social justice and sociology are intimately connected is that those who pursue social justice need sociology to help them pursue their goals. If you are going to reorganize society to reduce violence, say, or inequality, you need to know the conditions that lead to peace and violence, or equality and inequality. Just as you would not try building and flying an airplane without first knowing something about physics, it makes sense, as Axel Van den Berg puts it, “to try to understand the world a little better before rushing off to change it” (2014: 69). Social justice activists need sociology to guide them toward policies that will have the effects they intend, to ensure their attempts to reorganize society do not make things worse.

Social justice advocates generally know this, of course. As we saw with Sensoy and DiAngelo, they believe they do understand the social world and that their policy goals draw from this knowledge, but often their knowledge comes almost exclusively from a single theoretical perspective—a type of conflict theory that is increasingly prominent but has never been dominant in sociology.

Social Justice and Conflict Theory

Thomas Kuhn said that scientific revolutions were rare events in the history of science, where the dominant paradigm of a discipline—that is, the “entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given [scientific] community” (Kuhn 1962 :175)—is replaced by a new paradigm.

More relevant to understanding the situation of contemporary sociology, however, is Kuhn’s discussion of what he calls pre-paradigmatic science (Kuhn 1962 :17). If we alter Kuhn’s definition of a paradigm slightly to include any general framework in which theories are forumulated (rather than one shared by the entire community), this period before the emergence of a dominant paradigm can more accurately be called a multi-paradigmatic period (compare Black 1995 ; Ritzer 1975 ). That is, there are usually several paradigms—several different, competing strategies of explanation. That is the current state of sociology. In sociology there is no dominant paradigm; there are a number of competing strategies of explanation. One of these is conflict theory, and it is critical theory, one form of conflict theory, that informs so much present-day social justice activism.

Conflict theory “explains human behavior as a struggle for domination” (Black 2001 ). Additionally, conflict theory usually assumes four things: (1) that social life involves clashes of interest, (2) that clashes of interest involve zero-sum outcomes where one side’s gain is the other’s loss, (3) that dominant groups gain at the expense of others, and (4) that radical change is the only way to reduce the power of dominant groups (Black 2001 ).

Karl Marx was the first to use this approach. For Marx the clashes of interest were between social classes, and class struggle drives historical change. In every society there has been a system of class relations, and social institutions benefit the dominant class and enable the exploitation of others. The clash between classes normally results in a new class system with a new dominant class, but Marx believed the overthrow of the current capitalist system, in which the bourgeoisie (the capitalists), who own the means of production, exploit the proletariat (the workers), who must work for wages, would put an end to class once and for all, and lead to a new kind of society. Marxists advocate revolution, and they analyze social relationships and institutions in capitalist societies in terms of how they benefit the bourgeoisie and exploit the proletariat.

For a Marxist studying capitalist societies, the task is not to determine whether or how much capitalists exploit workers. The approach treats exploitation as a constant to be assumed rather than as a variable to be explained. The task instead is to show how social arrangements lead to exploitation—even if those social arrangements might at first appear liberating. Thus, Marxists have argued that the idea of equality before the law actually furthers inequality. Agreements between capitalists and workers appear legitimate because they are treated as agreements between equals, even though the power dynamics mean workers are in no position to bargain. The idea of equality disguises inequality and exploitation.

Marx offered a new way of understanding societies and of understanding historical change, but his predictions have failed. The clash between capitalists and workers did not lead to the failure of capitalism and to revolution. And in societies where communist parties gained power and abolished class, doing so did not lead to a new kind of society. Government did not wither away, as Marx predicted. Instead communist reformers established totalitarian governments that were among the most intrusive and violent governments in history (Rummel 1994 ). Abolishing class also did not put an end to conflict and exploitation. Political elites ruled over the masses in the new societies, and they often turned on one another as they pursued power. The economic systems established also failed, leading to famine and shortages of basic goods, and eventually governments led by communist parties collapsed or made reforms.

The orthodox Marxist may be unfazed by any of this. The idea may be that capitalism will still collapse; revolution is still coming. The revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere were not real communist revolutions and their governments were not real Marxist governments. Marxism has not failed; real Marxism has not been tried. But another tack for those sympathetic to Marxist analysis is to accept much of Marx’s framework while rejecting many of the specifics. This could mean accepting Marx’s class analysis while rejecting his hope for change, but more commonly, it means accepting the conflict framework while rejecting Marx’s emphasis on class alone as the source of oppression and the driver of historical change. For most of today’s conflict theorists, it is not just class, but also race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability status, immigration status, and much else that give some people power over others. Otherwise the analysis is similar. The idea again is that the oppression of disadvantaged groups is a constant to be assumed rather than a variable to be explained. Just as social institutions benefit capitalists at the expense of workers, they benefit whites at the expense of persons of color, men at the expense of women, heterosexuals at the expense of gays and lesbians, the cisgendered at the expense of the transgendered, Christians at the expense of Muslims, the able-bodied at the expense of the disabled, the native-born at the expense of immigrants, etc., in an interlocking system of domination. Sometimes called critical theory or intersectional theory , this type of conflict theory follows Marxism in calling for a radical reorganization of social institutions to put an end to oppression, but it is not enough just to deal with class, as Marxists would do. And it is not enough to deal with any other single source of oppression, whether gender, race, or something else. The goal is to put an end to the entire system of oppression.

The new conflict theorists also follow Marxists in analyzing interactions and institutions—including those that might at first appear innocuous or even liberating—as sources of oppression. Laws, prisons, and wars contribute to oppression, but so do cultural practices and even ordinary conversations. One idea is that members of oppressed groups frequently experience microaggressions , small slights that make their lives unpleasant and block them from success (Sue 2010 ). When a person of color goes to college and sees portraits honoring mostly white men who contributed to the university or achieved success in the past, this might be a microaggression. Or it might be a microaggression when whites in conversation ask Asians where they are from. These things contribute to people feeling marginalized, and they add up.

Those who do not accept this framework may reject the idea of microaggression, particularly the idea that the intentions of the microaggressor do not matter. But what makes something a microaggression is that it furthers the oppression of those who are already disadvantaged, and it does not matter how well-intentioned someone is (Sue et al. 2007 : 277–278).

Microaggression is just one of the concepts derived from critical theories that outsiders might unfamiliar and objectionable. Other new kinds of offenses include cultural appropriation (such as when members of dominant cultures the clothing styles or eat the foods associated with marginalized cultures), heteronormativity (when someone makes a statement that implies heterosexuality is normal), and white fragility (when whites are defensive over being confronted with their racism and privilege) (Ziff and Rao 1997 ; Warner 1991 ; DiAngelo 2018 ). Another concept that can be jarring to outsiders is the idea of white supremacy (Newkirk 2017 ). In more mainstream contexts white supremacy refers to things like Jim Crow laws that segregated whites and blacks and banned blacks from certain places, and white supremacists are Ku Klux Klansmen and others who favor such laws. But the new conflict theorists talk about mainstream institutions today as “white supremacist institutions,” and they speak of those who oppose revolutionary change as “white supremacists.” It is not that they believe these people are Klansmen or that the Klan or similar groups run mainstream institutions. It is that they see society’s institutions as protecting the advantages whites have over persons of color, and this is the sense in which those institutions and those who defend them contribute to white supremacy.

By now most people are familiar with at least some of these concepts. Increasingly they are not just the argot of critical theorists in academia; concepts like microaggression , cultural appropriation , and white supremacy have made their way into workshops at universities and corporations and into the mainstream media and in public debate. Usually they are presented in the context of efforts to pursue social justice, and both the advocates and opponents of these ideas tend to see them that way, with the advocates using the term positively and the opponents using it pejoratively (such as by referring to social justice activists as social justice warriors ) (Ohlheiser 2015 ).

The result is that social justice often becomes synonymous with a particular theoretical approach and with particular remedies. Social justice activists draw heavily from critical theory, a type of conflict theory. But it is not just conflict theorists and those who adopt the conflict framework who are concerned with social justice, and there is no reason that theoretical perspectives other than conflict theory could not form the basis for other kinds of social justice activism.

Social Justice and Sociological Paradigms

Conflict theory is not the only sociological paradigm, but what are the others? Sociologists have developed various typologies of sociological explanation. Daniel Rigney identifies eight metaphors of society that undergird different sociological perspectives: society as a living system, society as a machine, society as war, society as a legal order, society as a marketplace, society as a game, society as theater, and society as discourse (Rigney 2001 ). Randall Collins discusses four sociological traditions: the conflict tradition, the rational/utilitarian tradition, the Durkheimian tradition, and the microinteractionist tradition (Collins 1994 ). Jonathan Turner says there are ten broad approaches to sociological theorizing: evolutionary theorizing, systems theorizing, ecological theorizing, conflict theorizing, interactionist theorizing, exchange theorizing, structuralist theorizing, cultural theorizing, and critical theorizing (Turner 2013 : Chapter 9). Donald Black ( 2001 ) identifies eight sociological paradigms or strategies of explanation: conflict theory, phenomenological theory, motivational theory, neo-Darwinian theory, rational choice theory, opportunity theory, functionalist theory, and pure sociology. There are a number of other ways of classifying sociological theories, too, and they overlap substantially, but here I draw most explicitly from Black’s typology, and I discuss how six of the sociological perspectives he identifies can inform ideas of social justice. 1 These are some of the most commonly used perspectives in sociology, and each goes about explaining human behavior using different assumptions and employing different concepts: Conflict theory , as noted above, explains human behavior as a struggle for domination, phenomenological theory explains human behavior with the subjective experience of a person, motivational theory explains human behavior with the psychological impact of social forces, rational choice theory explains human behavior as the least costly means to a goal, opportunity theory explains human behavior with what is possible, and functionalist theory explains human behavior with its contribution to the needs of the group (Black 2001 ).

None of these are explanations of human behavior themselves; they are frameworks in which theorists might generate explanations. And because they offer different ways of viewing the social world, would-be reformers will understand social justice differently depending on which framework they draw from. No framework can provide answers to fundamental moral questions, but different assumptions and concepts, and different findings and explanations, will lead people toward different ways of formulating social problems and to different ways of addressing them. Just as conflict theory has inspired activists to call attention to oppression and to fight for liberation, other approaches could inspire them to pursue a variety of other possible social justice projects: to promote understanding, to increase virtue, to incentivize virtue, to make virtue easier, or to strengthen social solidarity.

Promoting Understanding

Phenomenological theory explains human behavior with the subjective experience of a person. The framework focuses on subjectivity, and phenomenologists tend to see people as creators of their own social worlds (Berger and Luckmann 1967 ). They may see the free will of human beings as undermining deterministic explanations, and they may be more interested in describing what it is like to experience a behavior than in explaining it (Black 2000 : 357, n. 36).

The determinism of other approaches is usually what leads us to think about how we might go about altering the social world, so the anti-determinism of phenomenology means that its possible contribution to social justice is more limited or at least less apparent. Some phenomenologists do try to explain behaviors, but those explanations are less deterministic than most social science. Jack Katz ( 1988 ), for example, sees typical cases of homicide, where one person gets angry at another and kills the person on the spot, as “righteous slaughters” from the standpoint of the killers. The killers, responding to insults, adultery, and other behavior that both offends and humiliates them, see themselves as meting out justice to wrongdoers. It is the experience of moralism, anger, and humiliation that leads to the killing. Phenomenological theorists do not see these experiences as the result of socialization or some other social force; they result from internal forces—from subjective experience. How someone suddenly becomes motivated to commit crime is not explained. Katz says it is a kind of magic.

Perhaps as phenomenological theories help us to better understand how violence, discrimination, and other behaviors that we might wish to reduce are experienced by their perpetrators, we could develop ways to help would-be perpetrators develop new understandings of their situations. But if phenomenologists are correct about the mysterious and non-deterministic properties of subjectivity, we would have limited success.

Phenomenological theory is not likely to help us much in trying to change people or their behaviors, but the idea is that it still helps us understand people better. Phenomenologists may see their work as advancing social justice in that it gives dignity to the subjects. Their work treats people as having agency, and it interprets the meaning of their behaviors. Clifford Geertz, for example, provided thick descriptions of human behaviors within particular cultures. In his description of cockfighting in Bali, he argued that betting around the cockfights was a symbolic reenactment of Balinese status conflicts (Geertz 1973 ). The reader comes to see something that might have at first looked irrational and barbaric as purposeful and meaningful within the context it occurs. Phenomenologists may see this kind of cultural translation as promoting tolerance.

Phenomenological theory might also aid us in better understanding our political opponents. In works such as Culture Wars and Before the Shooting Begins, James Davison Hunter ( 1994 ) carefully describes the worldviews of orthodox and progressive opponents in contemporary cultural conflicts and shows that their failure to understand one another inhibits conversation and compromise. That people fail to understand one another is a concern beyond just the culture war issues. Chris Martin ( 2016 ) says that epistemic egocentrism commonly prevents understanding across political ideologies, as we evaluate others as if they shared our information and our concerns. Martin refers to a study that showed that while liberals tend to value authority less than conservatives, liberals and conservatives both thought these differences were much greater than they actually were: “liberals believed that conservatives were obsessed with authority, while conservatives believed that liberals disdained authority” (Martin 2016 : 223). Their egocentrism and lack of empathy led them astray. As Martin points out, “If a liberal uses himself or herself as a reference point, thus framing morality egocentrically, he or she will assume a conservative holds moral positions that are diametrically opposite his or her own, thus rating conservatives as far more different than they actually are” (Martin 2016 : 223). 2

If epistemic egocentrism helps fuel the political polarization of recent years, along with the tendency of people to imagine the worst of their political adversaries and to treat them as enemies, phenomenological theory, to the extent that it accurately portrays the perspectives of its subjects, holds the promise of increased understanding and empathy.

Increasing Virtue

Motivational theory explains human behavior with the psychological impact of social forces. The idea is that institutions and interactions affect the minds of individuals and motivate them to engage in certain behaviors, whether that is altruism, violence, religion, or any other behavior. Motivational theory is as individualistic as phenomenological theory, in that behavior stems from motivations, but motivational theory is more deterministic: The motivations that affect behavior are social products; society shapes the individual (Black 2000 : 357, n. 36). Motivational theory is thus compatible with one kind of reformist project: that of shaping moral character so that people engage in more virtue and in less vice.

Black ( 2001 ) points out that motivational theories come in four forms. Learning theories explain motivations as the result of socialization, bonding theories explain them with the presence or absence of attachments, compliance theories explain them with social pressure, and strain theories explain them with psychological discomfort. Whatever the nature of the explanatory mechanisms, the idea is that individuals are shaped by their social environments. The task for reformers drawing from this approach, then, would be to discover how they might alter social environments to reduce motivations toward behavior they see as undesirable and increase motivations toward behaviors they see as desirable. This could mean educational reform, changes in foster care, and other efforts to better socialize children. It could mean communitarian policies that seek to promote the kinds of social ties that encourage prosocial behavior. It could even mean more fundamental institutional change, as advocated by Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld ( 2012 ) in Crime and the American Dream. Messner and Rosenfeld argue that the USA has high rates of violent crime compared to other advanced industrial democracies in part because of an institutional imbalance where the economy is valued more than institutions such as the polity, the family, and education. This leads to a highly competitive society in which crime flourishes, but altering the institutional imbalance, such as by strengthening social welfare programs, would reduce crime.

Those who draw from motivational theory in pursuit of social justice might focus on institutions, then, but it is in terms of how those institutions impact individuals. Accordingly, this tends to be the approach of liberal reformers rather than revolutionaries. Usually such reformers are optimistic about the ability of the insights of social science to help reduce suffering and injustice and optimistic that this is possible by modifying current social arrangements rather than destroying them.

Incentivizing Virtue

Rational choice theory explains human behavior as the least costly means to a goal. It focuses on the interests of individuals, but it is unlike motivational theory in that the characteristics of individuals are usually treated as a constant rather than a variable. Rational choice theorists may assume that individuals are pursuing their own happiness, for example, and what explains variation in their behavior is not variation in their goals; it is variation in their interests. A variable that might help them achieve their goals on one occasion might not on another.

Rational choice theory is the dominant paradigm in economics, and it is associated with free market perspectives. Economists and rational choice sociologists, though, have applied this type of thinking outside the marketplace—to religion, to romantic relationships, and to many other areas where people might at first seem to be behaving irrationally. Rational choice theorists might recommend a variety of policies across the political spectrum, but whatever their recommendations, the central task for those drawing from rational choice theory to pursue social justice is to determine how social arrangements might best incentivize what they see as good behavior and make costly what they see as bad behavior. The goals are more modest—change behavior, not character—since there is no assumption that virtue and vice stem from character.

Enlightenment reformers of the eighteenth century used this approach to argue for changes in the legal systems of the time. The deterrence theory of crime and punishment proposes that people are less likely to commit crimes, the more certain, swift, and severe the punishment is. The idea is that punishment makes crime costly—not in the interests of the would-be criminal. To do this, punishment just needs to outweigh the benefits of the crime, so the reformers argued for reducing the harsh penalties in effect at the time. The certainty of punishment is much more important, and this often puts contemporary deterrence theorists at odds with both liberals and conservatives, since they favor frequent use of the justice system, which liberals might be concerned about, but they oppose the harsh penalties conservatives might favor.

Other applications of rational choice theory have similarly led to policy proposals that challenge conventional thinking. Olson ( 1990 ) addressed the different individual interests related to private goods and public goods. With private goods, it is clearly in people’s interest to protect and take care of whatever they own. But public goods are owned collectively—they are available to everyone. It is therefore not in anyone’s individual interest to contribute to protecting public goods, even though they derive a benefit from them. This is known as the free-rider problem: Everyone would be better off cooperating, but it is in everyone’s individual interest not to do so. One thing this means is that larger groups will not naturally pursue their group interests, and this is one reason Marx was wrong to think the working class would perceive its interests and then revolt.

There is always the danger that public goods simply will not be provided or protected, but just as incentives or punishments might alter the likelihood of someone committing crime, inducements and coercion can ensure that public goods get provided. Rational choice theory is often used to defend free markets, then, but Olson’s analysis helps us understand why the free market will fail when public goods are involved. His analysis shows why labor unions are likely to fail if they are completely voluntary, for example, and why government involvement might be needed to protect the environment.

Another rational choice theorist, James Buchanan ( 2000 ), showed why politics often fail. Individuals involved in politics—voters, politicians, and others—act according to their own interests. Politics is a competitive marketplace. Politicians compete for votes, for example, and they do so by spending money on things voters like. It is not in the self-interest of voters to pay taxes, though, so politicians end up borrowing and spending, rather than reducing spending or raising taxes. This is rational for everyone involved but only in the short run.

For those pursuing policy changes, these kinds of theories could serve as essential starting points or at least as correctives enabling them to better pursue their goals. Social institutions are not changed in a vacuum; individuals are involved, and one runs the risk of not anticipating the effect one’s policies will have, or how they will be dealt with in the political realm, without taking into account the immediate and individual interests of all those involved.

Making Virtue Easier

Opportunity theory explains human behavior with what is possible. Opportunity theorists assume certain motivations and goals, and the idea is that certain social conditions prevent or enable people from achieving those goals. In criminology this might mean assuming the motivation to commit various crimes, but explaining variation in crime with factors make the crimes easier (e.g., Cohen and Felson 1979 ). The layout of a store could encourage shoplifting by placing valuable and small objects where they are easy to get, or the layout of a neighborhood could encourage burglary by providing routes where burglars could travel on foot without a high likelihood of being seen.

Just as people may have the motivation to commit crime but not the opportunity, they might desire friendships across cultural boundaries without the ability to form any. Peter Blau ( 1980 ) pointed out that when the numbers of different population groups differ, the numbers of friendships possible across those groups is limited. In areas where whites greatly outnumber racial minorities, for instance, most whites—regardless of their preferences—would not have the opportunity for an interracial friendship.

Whether one is seeking to reduce crime or increase racial integration, opportunity theory points to the need to consider what is possible under certain conditions. The task for those using the approach to pursue social justice is to find ways to alter the opportunity structure. The idea would not be to change hearts and minds, or even to incentivize virtue, but simply to make virtue possible more often, and vice impossible more often. And while the use of opportunity theory in this manner might be limited, it is likely to be effective. It is also an area where it is easy to see the distinction between ordinary justice and social justice. If two neighborhoods have different rates of crime not because of the motivations of potential criminals but because the design of one prevents many opportunities for crime, people might seek to alter the design of the high-crime neighborhood or at the very least to design new neighborhoods differently. The design of neighborhoods might become a moral issue—a social justice issue. But it may not have been bad intentions or bad behavior that led to the different designs in the first place. No one would have behaved unjustly when they built the neighborhoods, and individual criminals would still be blamed for their crimes. It is simply that better information now makes it possible to make social changes that reduce harm, and with that knowledge, doing so might become a moral imperative.

Strengthening Solidarity

Functionalist theory explains human behavior with its contribution to the needs of the group. 3 Functionalist theorists see society as akin to an organism, with distinct and necessary parts that contribute to the functioning of the whole society, just like the heart, lungs, skin, and central nervous system of the human organism contribute to the needs of the whole body. Talcott Parsons used this strategy when he identified four basic problems all societies needed to solve—adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latent pattern management—and pointed to the way social institutions such as the economy, the political order, law, religion, education, and the family solve them (Turner 2013 : 352–354).

If motivational theory tends to be associated with liberal politics, and conflict theory with radical politics, functionalist theory is most associated with conservative politics. It is true that many functionalists have been liberals and that many functionalist analyses—such as Émile Durkheim’s argument that crime strengthens social solidarity or Kingsley Davis’s ( 1937 ) argument that prostitution strengthens the family—are contrarian takes that would offend many conservatives. Still, since the gist is that social institutions provide stability and meet social needs, functionalists tend to point to what most people would see as the positive and prosocial aspects of social institutions rather than their negative and oppressive aspects. Conservatives also tend to be concerned with social order and suspicious of radical change and the chaos they fear it will produce, and functionalist analyses often point to the conditions leading to social solidarity, social stability, and harmonious relationships.

Liberals and radicals may question whether conservatives concerned with preserving or strengthening social institutions for the common good are pursuing social justice at all, but many conservatives accept that society is to some extent malleable and that the design of social institutions should be of moral concern. To the extent that they resist change, they may simply be more cautious than others because of the harm and injustice they believe the weakening of social institutions will cause. In their efforts to protect institutions, they are trying to strengthen what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls moral capital —“the resources that sustain a moral community.” These include “interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible” (Haidt 2012 : 292). Conservatives tend to value moral capital over diversity, equality, and other things valued more by liberals and radicals. Perhaps they are wrong about the tradeoffs, and perhaps the functionalist view of society is limited or distorted. But functionalist analysis might even be able to help those on the left more effectively change society toward the ends they value. However, you alter social institutions, when you are finished you still face the problem of preserving the new social order you have created. As Haidt says, “if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble” (2012: 294).

Whether or not the multi-paradigmatic nature of sociology is healthy is a matter of debate. If we follow Kuhn in seeing the dominance of a paradigm as a sign of a mature science, then it is not. But whether it is healthy or not, and whatever the reasons for it, it is the current state of sociology, and it does little good to pretend otherwise. We cannot just declare a dominant paradigm—that has to be established through evidence and consensus and currently that does not exist. It is thus odd that current social justice activism, even in its institutional forms at universities and corporations, so often draws from only one of the many theoretical approaches in sociology, as if conflict theory, and this particular version of it, a marginal approach in the field and only one of many, had become dominant and its claims uncontested.

Activists and their allies who take this approach run the risk of making unwarranted assumptions and even treating claims as fact that have little empirical support. The idea of microaggression, for example, first developed by critical race theorists and later taken up by critical theorists more broadly, has become institutionalized now, with microaggression reporting systems at many universities and microaggression awareness workshops at many universities and corporations. When Scott Lilienfeld ( 2017 ) investigated the claims of microaggression theorists, though, he found little support for them. This means that a great deal of political and institutional energy has been spent promoting ideas that might be incorrect and which might even harm those they are intended to help (al-Gharbi 2020 ; Lukianoff and Haidt 2015 , 2018 ). And this is likely true of many other ideas formulated using the conflict perspective. Of the various sociological paradigms, conflict theory, and particularly the version often known as critical theory, is the most overtly political, and its adherents are often hostile to science or at least to the idea that sociology can or should be scientific. Sometimes conflict theory acts more as a political ideology than a sociological paradigm, and while it provides a distinctive model of society and many new concepts for thinking about social relations, those working within this perspective have mostly failed to produce general and testable propositions about social life. 4 When they do make testable claims, as with Marx’s predictions about the fall of capitalism and the end of class and with the microaggression claims that Lilienfeld tested, they often turn out to have little support. That the claims of conflict theorists are often untestable or unsupported has led even many sociologists who support the political aims of conflict theory to reject it at as a sociological approach or at least to deal with it cautiously.

Meanwhile the field of sociology is saturated, possibly oversaturated, with perspectives and explanations of social reality. These various paradigms can each provide ways of thinking about and pursuing social justice that differ from those of most social justice activists. Fighting systematic oppression is but one possible aim of social justice, and those with broader moral concerns and a broader awareness of strategies of effecting change might also wish to change the world by promoting understanding, increasing virtue, incentivizing virtue, making virtue easier, or strengthening solidarity, and they might draw from a variety of perspectives other than conflict theory to aid them in doing so. Currently, social justice activists who draw mainly from a tiny sliver of sociology run the risk that their efforts will be based on a distorted understanding of reality. While it would be irresponsible to try to reshape society while ignoring sociology entirely, it is also irresponsible to do so while ignoring most of the field. Dealing with a fragmented, multi-paradigmatic field may be hard, and it may be unsatisfying to find that with much of our knowledge about ourselves and our societies contested, there are few easy answers to our problems. But if we are serious about improving the world, we need to be willing to face social reality as we find it. This is the true foundation for developing social justice literacy.

is professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology and coauthor of The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars.

1 My use of Black’s typology rather than one of the others frames the discussion, but since there is a great deal of overlap between the typologies, my argument does not depend on the typology used. However, exactly one divides up the main sociological perspectives; the different perspectives will give us different ways of thinking about social justice and different possibilities for reform.

2 Consider also how last year’s debates over closures due to COVID-19 led to mutual recrimination and misrepresentations of each side’s position, with lockdown supporters accusing lockdown opponents of “human sacrifice,” and the opponents accusing the supporters of “fascism” (Paresky and Campbell 2020 ).

3 Black ( 2001 ) actually calls this strategy “systems theory,” and he refers to systems theory and the approach he calls neo-Darwinian theory together as “functionalism,” but I follow many others here in using functionalism to refer to systems theory alone.

4 There are important exceptions, though. Theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf ( 1956 ) and Randall Collins ( 1975 ) have developed more scientific conflict theories that could also be used to develop strategies for social justice that would differ from those of critical theorists.

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Theories are formulated to explain, predict, and understand phenomena and, in many cases, to challenge and extend existing knowledge within the limits of critical bounded assumptions or predictions of behavior. The theoretical framework is the structure that can hold or support a theory of a research study. The theoretical framework encompasses not just the theory but the narrative explanation about how the researcher engages in using the theory and its underlying assumptions to investigate the research problem.

Abend, Gabriel. "The Meaning of Theory." Sociological Theory 26 (June 2008): 173–199; Kivunja, Charles. "Distinguishing between Theory, Theoretical Framework, and Conceptual Framework: A Systematic Review of Lessons from the Field." International Journal of Higher Education 7 (2018): 44-53; Swanson, Richard A. Theory Building in Applied Disciplines . San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2013; Varpio, Lara, Elise Paradis, Sebastian Uijtdehaage, and Meredith Young. "The Distinctions between Theory, Theoretical Framework, and Conceptual Framework." Academic Medicine 95 (July 2020): 989-994.

Importance of Theory and a Theoretical Framework

Theories can be unfamiliar to the beginning researcher because they are rarely used in high school social studies curriculum and, as a result, can come across as dubious and imprecise when first introduced as part of a writing assignment. However, in their most simplified form, a theory is simply a set of assumptions or predictions about something you think will happen based on existing evidence and that can be tested to see if those outcomes turn out to be true. Of course, it is slightly more deliberate than that and so, summarized from Kivunja (2018, p. 46), here are the essential characteristics of a theory.

  • It is logical and coherent
  • It has clear definitions of terms or variables, and has boundary conditions [i.e., it is not an open-ended statement]
  • It has a domain where it applies
  • It has clearly described relationships among variables
  • It describes, explains, and makes specific predictions
  • It comprises of concepts, themes, principles, and constructs
  • It must have been based on empirical data [i.e., it is not a guess]
  • It must have made claims that are subject to testing, been tested and verified
  • It must be clear and concise
  • Its assertions or predictions must be different and better than those in existing theories
  • Its predictions must be general enough to be applicable to and understood within multiple contexts
  • Its assertions or predictions are relevant, and if applied as predicted, will result in the predicted outcome
  • The assertions and predictions are not immutable, but subject to revision and improvement as researchers use the theory to make sense of phenomena
  • Its concepts and principles explain what is going on and why
  • Its concepts and principles are substantive enough to enable us to predict a future

Given these characteristics, a theory can be understood as the foundation from which you conduct research to test existing assumptions or predictions about the research problem in a way that leads to new knowledge and understanding as well as, in some cases, discovering ways to improve the relevance of the theory itself.

A theoretical framework consists of concepts and, together with their definitions and reference to relevant scholarly literature, existing theory that is used for your particular study. The theoretical framework must demonstrate an understanding of theories and concepts that are relevant to the topic of your research paper and that relate to the broader areas of knowledge being considered.

The theoretical framework is most often not something readily found within the literature . You must review course readings and pertinent research studies for theories and analytic models that are relevant to the research problem you are investigating. The selection of a theory should depend on its appropriateness, ease of application, and explanatory power.

The theoretical framework strengthens the study in the following ways :

  • An explicit statement of  theoretical assumptions permits the reader to evaluate them critically.
  • The theoretical framework connects the researcher to existing knowledge. Guided by a relevant theory, you are given a basis for your hypotheses and choice of research methods.
  • Articulating the theoretical assumptions of a research study forces you to address questions of why and how. It permits you to intellectually transition from simply describing a phenomenon you have observed to generalizing about various aspects of that phenomenon.
  • Having a theory helps you identify the limits to those generalizations. A theoretical framework specifies which key variables influence a phenomenon of interest and highlights the need to examine how those key variables might differ and under what circumstances.

By virtue of its applicative nature, good theory in the social sciences is of value precisely because it fulfills one primary purpose: to explain the meaning, nature, and challenges associated with a phenomenon, often experienced but unexplained in the world in which we live, so that we may use that knowledge and understanding to act in more informed and effective ways.

The Conceptual Framework. College of Education. Alabama State University; Corvellec, Hervé, ed. What is Theory?: Answers from the Social and Cultural Sciences . Stockholm: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2013; Asher, Herbert B. Theory-Building and Data Analysis in the Social Sciences . Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984; Drafting an Argument. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Kivunja, Charles. "Distinguishing between Theory, Theoretical Framework, and Conceptual Framework: A Systematic Review of Lessons from the Field." International Journal of Higher Education 7 (2018): 44-53; Ravitch, Sharon M. and Matthew Riggan. Reason and Rigor: How Conceptual Frameworks Guide Research . Second edition. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2017; Trochim, William M.K. Philosophy of Research. Research Methods Knowledge Base. 2006; Jarvis, Peter. The Practitioner-Researcher. Developing Theory from Practice . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

Strategies for Developing the Theoretical Framework

I.  Developing the Framework

Here are some strategies to develop of an effective theoretical framework:

  • Examine your thesis title and research problem . The research problem anchors your entire study and forms the basis from which you construct your theoretical framework.
  • Brainstorm about what you consider to be the key variables in your research . Answer the question, "What factors contribute to the presumed effect?"
  • Review related literature to find how scholars have addressed your research problem. Identify the assumptions from which the author(s) addressed the problem.
  • List  the constructs and variables that might be relevant to your study. Group these variables into independent and dependent categories.
  • Review key social science theories that are introduced to you in your course readings and choose the theory that can best explain the relationships between the key variables in your study [note the Writing Tip on this page].
  • Discuss the assumptions or propositions of this theory and point out their relevance to your research.

A theoretical framework is used to limit the scope of the relevant data by focusing on specific variables and defining the specific viewpoint [framework] that the researcher will take in analyzing and interpreting the data to be gathered. It also facilitates the understanding of concepts and variables according to given definitions and builds new knowledge by validating or challenging theoretical assumptions.

II.  Purpose

Think of theories as the conceptual basis for understanding, analyzing, and designing ways to investigate relationships within social systems. To that end, the following roles served by a theory can help guide the development of your framework.

  • Means by which new research data can be interpreted and coded for future use,
  • Response to new problems that have no previously identified solutions strategy,
  • Means for identifying and defining research problems,
  • Means for prescribing or evaluating solutions to research problems,
  • Ways of discerning certain facts among the accumulated knowledge that are important and which facts are not,
  • Means of giving old data new interpretations and new meaning,
  • Means by which to identify important new issues and prescribe the most critical research questions that need to be answered to maximize understanding of the issue,
  • Means of providing members of a professional discipline with a common language and a frame of reference for defining the boundaries of their profession, and
  • Means to guide and inform research so that it can, in turn, guide research efforts and improve professional practice.

Adapted from: Torraco, R. J. “Theory-Building Research Methods.” In Swanson R. A. and E. F. Holton III , editors. Human Resource Development Handbook: Linking Research and Practice . (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 1997): pp. 114-137; Jacard, James and Jacob Jacoby. Theory Construction and Model-Building Skills: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists . New York: Guilford, 2010; Ravitch, Sharon M. and Matthew Riggan. Reason and Rigor: How Conceptual Frameworks Guide Research . Second edition. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2017; Sutton, Robert I. and Barry M. Staw. “What Theory is Not.” Administrative Science Quarterly 40 (September 1995): 371-384.

Structure and Writing Style

The theoretical framework may be rooted in a specific theory , in which case, your work is expected to test the validity of that existing theory in relation to specific events, issues, or phenomena. Many social science research papers fit into this rubric. For example, Peripheral Realism Theory, which categorizes perceived differences among nation-states as those that give orders, those that obey, and those that rebel, could be used as a means for understanding conflicted relationships among countries in Africa. A test of this theory could be the following: Does Peripheral Realism Theory help explain intra-state actions, such as, the disputed split between southern and northern Sudan that led to the creation of two nations?

However, you may not always be asked by your professor to test a specific theory in your paper, but to develop your own framework from which your analysis of the research problem is derived . Based upon the above example, it is perhaps easiest to understand the nature and function of a theoretical framework if it is viewed as an answer to two basic questions:

  • What is the research problem/question? [e.g., "How should the individual and the state relate during periods of conflict?"]
  • Why is your approach a feasible solution? [i.e., justify the application of your choice of a particular theory and explain why alternative constructs were rejected. I could choose instead to test Instrumentalist or Circumstantialists models developed among ethnic conflict theorists that rely upon socio-economic-political factors to explain individual-state relations and to apply this theoretical model to periods of war between nations].

The answers to these questions come from a thorough review of the literature and your course readings [summarized and analyzed in the next section of your paper] and the gaps in the research that emerge from the review process. With this in mind, a complete theoretical framework will likely not emerge until after you have completed a thorough review of the literature .

Just as a research problem in your paper requires contextualization and background information, a theory requires a framework for understanding its application to the topic being investigated. When writing and revising this part of your research paper, keep in mind the following:

  • Clearly describe the framework, concepts, models, or specific theories that underpin your study . This includes noting who the key theorists are in the field who have conducted research on the problem you are investigating and, when necessary, the historical context that supports the formulation of that theory. This latter element is particularly important if the theory is relatively unknown or it is borrowed from another discipline.
  • Position your theoretical framework within a broader context of related frameworks, concepts, models, or theories . As noted in the example above, there will likely be several concepts, theories, or models that can be used to help develop a framework for understanding the research problem. Therefore, note why the theory you've chosen is the appropriate one.
  • The present tense is used when writing about theory. Although the past tense can be used to describe the history of a theory or the role of key theorists, the construction of your theoretical framework is happening now.
  • You should make your theoretical assumptions as explicit as possible . Later, your discussion of methodology should be linked back to this theoretical framework.
  • Don’t just take what the theory says as a given! Reality is never accurately represented in such a simplistic way; if you imply that it can be, you fundamentally distort a reader's ability to understand the findings that emerge. Given this, always note the limitations of the theoretical framework you've chosen [i.e., what parts of the research problem require further investigation because the theory inadequately explains a certain phenomena].

The Conceptual Framework. College of Education. Alabama State University; Conceptual Framework: What Do You Think is Going On? College of Engineering. University of Michigan; Drafting an Argument. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Lynham, Susan A. “The General Method of Theory-Building Research in Applied Disciplines.” Advances in Developing Human Resources 4 (August 2002): 221-241; Tavallaei, Mehdi and Mansor Abu Talib. "A General Perspective on the Role of Theory in Qualitative Research." Journal of International Social Research 3 (Spring 2010); Ravitch, Sharon M. and Matthew Riggan. Reason and Rigor: How Conceptual Frameworks Guide Research . Second edition. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2017; Reyes, Victoria. Demystifying the Journal Article. Inside Higher Education; Trochim, William M.K. Philosophy of Research. Research Methods Knowledge Base. 2006; Weick, Karl E. “The Work of Theorizing.” In Theorizing in Social Science: The Context of Discovery . Richard Swedberg, editor. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), pp. 177-194.

Writing Tip

Borrowing Theoretical Constructs from Other Disciplines

An increasingly important trend in the social and behavioral sciences is to think about and attempt to understand research problems from an interdisciplinary perspective. One way to do this is to not rely exclusively on the theories developed within your particular discipline, but to think about how an issue might be informed by theories developed in other disciplines. For example, if you are a political science student studying the rhetorical strategies used by female incumbents in state legislature campaigns, theories about the use of language could be derived, not only from political science, but linguistics, communication studies, philosophy, psychology, and, in this particular case, feminist studies. Building theoretical frameworks based on the postulates and hypotheses developed in other disciplinary contexts can be both enlightening and an effective way to be more engaged in the research topic.

CohenMiller, A. S. and P. Elizabeth Pate. "A Model for Developing Interdisciplinary Research Theoretical Frameworks." The Qualitative Researcher 24 (2019): 1211-1226; Frodeman, Robert. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Another Writing Tip

Don't Undertheorize!

Do not leave the theory hanging out there in the introduction never to be mentioned again. Undertheorizing weakens your paper. The theoretical framework you describe should guide your study throughout the paper. Be sure to always connect theory to the review of pertinent literature and to explain in the discussion part of your paper how the theoretical framework you chose supports analysis of the research problem or, if appropriate, how the theoretical framework was found to be inadequate in explaining the phenomenon you were investigating. In that case, don't be afraid to propose your own theory based on your findings.

Yet Another Writing Tip

What's a Theory? What's a Hypothesis?

The terms theory and hypothesis are often used interchangeably in newspapers and popular magazines and in non-academic settings. However, the difference between theory and hypothesis in scholarly research is important, particularly when using an experimental design. A theory is a well-established principle that has been developed to explain some aspect of the natural world. Theories arise from repeated observation and testing and incorporates facts, laws, predictions, and tested assumptions that are widely accepted [e.g., rational choice theory; grounded theory; critical race theory].

A hypothesis is a specific, testable prediction about what you expect to happen in your study. For example, an experiment designed to look at the relationship between study habits and test anxiety might have a hypothesis that states, "We predict that students with better study habits will suffer less test anxiety." Unless your study is exploratory in nature, your hypothesis should always explain what you expect to happen during the course of your research.

The key distinctions are:

  • A theory predicts events in a broad, general context;  a hypothesis makes a specific prediction about a specified set of circumstances.
  • A theory has been extensively tested and is generally accepted among a set of scholars; a hypothesis is a speculative guess that has yet to be tested.

Cherry, Kendra. Introduction to Research Methods: Theory and Hypothesis. About.com Psychology; Gezae, Michael et al. Welcome Presentation on Hypothesis. Slideshare presentation.

Still Yet Another Writing Tip

Be Prepared to Challenge the Validity of an Existing Theory

Theories are meant to be tested and their underlying assumptions challenged; they are not rigid or intransigent, but are meant to set forth general principles for explaining phenomena or predicting outcomes. Given this, testing theoretical assumptions is an important way that knowledge in any discipline develops and grows. If you're asked to apply an existing theory to a research problem, the analysis will likely include the expectation by your professor that you should offer modifications to the theory based on your research findings.

Indications that theoretical assumptions may need to be modified can include the following:

  • Your findings suggest that the theory does not explain or account for current conditions or circumstances or the passage of time,
  • The study reveals a finding that is incompatible with what the theory attempts to explain or predict, or
  • Your analysis reveals that the theory overly generalizes behaviors or actions without taking into consideration specific factors revealed from your analysis [e.g., factors related to culture, nationality, history, gender, ethnicity, age, geographic location, legal norms or customs , religion, social class, socioeconomic status, etc.].

Philipsen, Kristian. "Theory Building: Using Abductive Search Strategies." In Collaborative Research Design: Working with Business for Meaningful Findings . Per Vagn Freytag and Louise Young, editors. (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2018), pp. 45-71; Shepherd, Dean A. and Roy Suddaby. "Theory Building: A Review and Integration." Journal of Management 43 (2017): 59-86.

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Book cover

Principles of Social Research Methodology pp 83–99 Cite as

Critical Theory in Social Research: A Theoretical and Methodological Outlook

  • Ashek Mahmud 4 &
  • Farhana Zaman 4  
  • First Online: 27 October 2022

1733 Accesses

1 Citations

Critical theory, a multidisciplinary and multifaceted approach, was put forward to reconstruct dominant ideology by the critical task of explaining and criticizing. Contextualizing this new approach, the chapter is designed to focus on the development of social thought and its application in social research grounding on the critical theory. The discussion, drawing from many kinds of literature, depicts that critical theory as a perspective of social praxis unveils the critical reality through a detailed analysis of leading texts, pervasive conversations, social interactions, and persistent social practices. Thereby, critical theory provides insight to form ‘Critical paradigm’ and ‘Critical Realist Paradigm’ that generates ‘Ideology critique’, ‘Critical action research’, and ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ (CDA) as the dynamic research methods. With those, researchers can explain the relationship between theory and practice linking language, ideas and social actions. By highlighting the basic characteristics of critical theory, this chapter analyses its application in the field of social research focusing on when and in which context critical theory is applied. Finally, the chapter attempts to ascertain the emancipatory function of this new approach by providing some examples of research output in connection to perpetual social problems in modern social settings.

  • Critical theory
  • Critical research paradigm
  • Critical research methods
  • Social research

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Mahmud, A., Zaman, F. (2022). Critical Theory in Social Research: A Theoretical and Methodological Outlook. In: Islam, M.R., Khan, N.A., Baikady, R. (eds) Principles of Social Research Methodology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5441-2_7

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Social theory begins with ordinary questions, like why do some passively accept authority while others respond with political violence? Religions provided answers in a distant past. Social theory emerged as a secular alternative, often joining ethical and positive elements. Three traditions of social theory are important for the social sciences.

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A first tradition comes from Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). After years of bloody warfare between Catholics and Protestants, Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) offered a worldly theory of social order. What was really at issue was power. As an early example of what would be termed ideology critique, Hobbes asks “cui bono?”—whose interest does this idea serve? People obey, he argued, because of fear of violent death. Social order thus turns on who has ultimate power over violence. If there is not one final authority, there would be war of all against all, and life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Better, he argued, is a society founded on fear of a great leviathan, whose power guarantees stability.

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Leviathan relied on no Absolute Good, whether God or Nature. In tracing all “higher” ideas to “lower” things—power, fear, death, the body, violence—Hobbes set the tone for one main strand of social theorizing. This approach continued in writers from Karl Marx (18181883) to Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). While each differs, they are Hobbesian in asking “cui bono?”—and answering with a complex power struggle, even if it is denied, for example, in art, religion, and morality. This first type of social theory ferrets out hidden power structures behind everyday interactions and institutions.

Hobbes’s stress on fear led others to ask: Does not social order depend on more? What of obligation or love? How could the passions of a millennium and a half of Christianity be redirected onto earth, without producing the disastrous consequences Hobbes feared?

Such questions led to a second strand of social theory, stemming from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). He emphasized not fear but devotion as the foundation of social order. In our long-forgotten natural condition, Rousseau argued, we were independent, loving ourselves for ourselves; but society creates new needs, amour prope We love ourselves based upon how much others love us. Not power, but the struggle for recognition and status regulates social order.

For Rousseau, justice can transcend nature and inequality. Justice depends in turn on the social contract, wherein each person must totally submit to the general will. Private freedom, he argued, depended on public equality, which required a “lawgiver.” Moreover, the social bond, to last, should be held sacred.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) and V. I. Lenin (18701924) transformed the lawgiver into the revolutionary vanguard; the redefined social contract was the abolition of private property, as the condition of freedom and justice. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) later pursued Rousseau’s connections between social solidarity and religious sentiment.

Critical theorists—Theodore Adorno (1903-1969), Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Axel Honneth—explored how modern societies create vast inequalities, not only in wealth, but respect and self-worth. They expanded Rousseau’s ideas that culture can create unnecessary dependencies, focusing on the “culture industry”—the popular press, music, movies, advertising, and fashions. These sought to promote “needs” like Marx’s false consciousness, where people became blinded to their own interests and dependent upon corporate and political masters. Some, like David Riesman (1909-2002), extended Rousseau’s amour propre to the 1950s conformism of American “other-directed-ness,” while others, like Daniel Bell, analyzed how politicians and corporations could shift the erotic into a political ideology. Thus social theory identified key foundations of power, even if exercised in subtle arenas.

These first two traditions invoke a strong state to right social wrongs, as theoretically defined. The third tradition is more cautious. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was equally concerned with the roots of order and governance, but took a different course. Writing after the French Revolution (1789-1799), Tocqueville the aristocrat pondered the implications of equality. Societies emphasizing equality—like postrevolutionary America and France—were hostile toward exceptional talent and excellence; they could level out uniqueness and difference, generating a middling mediocrity. Moreover, equality threatened social identity and meaning: In a hierarchical society, one knew one’s place and did not have to anxiously make one’s place. In equalized societies, all is in doubt: Foreign observers regularly noted that Americans suffered a permanent “identity crisis,” which was spreading globally at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Traveling across America, Tocqueville commented on the deleterious effects of equality, and potential remedies. Loosed from primordial hierarchies, Americans, he argued, developed a passion for voluntary associations. The town hall and the local church were key examples, sustained by their members’ voluntary efforts more than the weight of tradition or the power of elites (or a leviathan or lawgiver). What mattered was commitment by each participant, and Americans were joiners. The strongest social structures, Tocqueville argued, emerged not just through struggles for power or regard of others, but by citizens voluntarily developing shared commitments in local associations, which trained future leaders.

Tocqueville’s voluntaristic, bottom-up approach informs a third strand of social theorizing. Max Weber (1864-1920) stressed voluntarism in probing the religious roots of capitalism. Capitalists did not just strive to make money. Rather, Weber argued, Puritan sects encouraged their members to seek salvation in voluntary, committed “good works”—against the old nobility that valued leisure over work. Capitalism was the unintended consequence. Though Weber felt we inherited an “iron cage” of capitalist society that we did not choose, his response was volun-taristic: If you are a scholar, do it as a “vocation,” not as a heartless specialist; if you are a politician, lead, do not act as a technocratic bureaucrat. Voluntary commitment was key. In egalitarian America, every social interaction among equal citizens became a source of identity, obligation, and meaning, following G. H. Mead (1863-1931), C. H. Cooley (1864-1929), and Herbert Blumer (1900-1987). Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) extended voluntarism to critique past social theories, but like Weber joined basic values with individual choices. Edward Shils (1911-1995) and Daniel Elazar (1934-1999) continued Tocqueville’s concern for hierarchy, honor, and glory, noting that even within an egalitarian society, they remain social powers. Still others, such as Robert Putnam, suggest that the individualistic strain in voluntarism has gone so far in contemporary American life that the commonwealth Tocqueville saw had weakened, as more Americans “bowl alone.” Some postmodernists are so individualistic and egalitarian that they deny the possibility of meaning beyond the minds of separate individuals.

These three traditions have been revised and combined in efforts to interpret deep social changes. Consider the rise of industry, the division of labor, and bureaucratic organization in the theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.

Marx, working in London, wrote of the English countryside transformed by industrial manufacturing; he saw people from all races and religions living near factories. These proletarians were a nascent class, opposed to capitalist/owners of the forces of production. In his theory, conflicts between such classes drove history.

Durkheim saw similar changes, but focused on the division of labor. Traditional societies, he argued, held together from pressures toward homogeneity. Modern societies are more like organisms. Social cohesion arises from interdependence; individuals perform specialized functions and develop a heightened sense of uniqueness. But without some firm social regulation, normlessness or “anomie” can undermine differentiated societies. Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) extended Durkheim’s social differentiation into multiple, interconnected subsystems that fill different social functions, while others, such as Robert Merton (1910-2003), developed the idea of anomie and deviance as central to modern life.

Max Weber, writing in Germany, stressed the hierarchical rationality of government bureaucratic officials. Bureaucracies are ancient, but Weber stressed how modern organizations grew ever larger, more rational, and more hierarchical. Not only was the bureaucrat’s personality stunted by his duties, everyone risked bureaucratization— since it was balanced increasingly less by the charisma of religion or respect for tradition. Seeking a “value-neutral” perspective, Weber posited that modern society is increasingly subject to “rational authority,” as opposed to “traditional” or “charismatic authority.” But the theory also had a quasi-moral intent, namely, to provide modern models for styles of action—rooted in the bonds of tradition or the electricity of charisma—which Weber saw threatened by the cold, abstract rationalism of bureaucracy.

Rationality was a political weapon that Enlightenment philosophers used to attack the “irrationality” of the ancient regime before the French Revolution of 1789. The secular theories of Hobbes and Rousseau helped refocus thinking on specific secular arrangements, rather than divinities or kings. But the legacy of this rational approach proved so powerful that Weber feared its excess. Analysis and criticism of rationalism in modern society have been among the most doggedly pursued strands of twentieth-century social thought, especially by Jurgen Habermas and other critical theorists and postmodernists.

Since Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, social theories have continued to stretch the imagination, seeking to capture the times and perhaps guide them. New topics emerge with new social forces: the massive rise of cities and new urban lifestyles; mass media, electronic media, and mass education; increased global interconnection; general increase in leisure time across societies; and a resurgence in the global power of religions are but a few of the subjects whose causes and meanings social theorists continue to pursue.

References:

  • Lemert, Charles, ed. and commentator. 2004. Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  • Parsons, Talcott, Edward Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts. 1965. Theories of Society. 2 vols. London: Collier-Macmillan.

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