The End of Unilinear Reality

Drawing on Abbott's recent work, and particularly on Time Matters (2001), this paper questions the current state and the future prospects of methodology in the social sciences. Abbott critiques the “routinization” of causal analysis, which is based on the study of dependency between variables and thus produces illusions as to the modes of social structuring. Instead, he points to methodologies that tend to analyze the contextual (spatial and temporal) dimensions of “units” drawn from the course of world history. Grounding sociological work in research into sequences implies studying social facts not as “things,” but as processes. This makes it possible to consider the possibility of models that would respect the interpretative nature of the social sciences. For now, this question is grounded more in prospective discourse than experimentation.