Concluding remarks

The aim of this chapter has been to present the classical and the most influential approaches to the problem of the micro- and macro-levels of analysis in socio-logical theory� I have compared the micro-macro pairing with other important for sociological theory pairings, such as individual-society and agency-structure�

I have also discussed the inspiration coming from the field of economics to dis-tinguish these two levels of analysis� The distinction between micro and macro (as well as the meso or more levels, if they are introduced) is a distinction of an analytical character, although many theorists saw it as something empirical – sometimes because they built on different theoretical assumptions, sometimes because they confused micro-macro with the two other pairings (individual-society and agency-structure)�

I have presented the stances of classical sociologists (Marx, Durkheim, We-ber, Simmel, Mead, and Znaniecki), which might be interpreted as their views on micro and macro� Although they did not use the micro-macro terminology, they can be seen as antecedents of all current approaches to the issue� I have also presented, what I called, the 1980s debate on the micro-macro link� The actual debate began before the 1980s and was continued also in the later years, nevertheless, the 1980s were a time of particular focus on solving the problem of reconciling the micro-macro dichotomy in sociological theory� The debate concerned also the agency-structure pairing, which is still a crucial problem for sociological theory�

In the last section of the chapter, I have discussed attempts to link micro with macro, not through some kind of mechanism or by reduction, but by establish-ing a level (or levels) of analysis between them, referred to by some theorists as the meso-level� In this section I have presented theoretical achievements which were accomplished mostly during the 1980s debate, but also a later theory of Jonathan H� Turner (2010c)� In my opinion, however, the ideas of Turner are a product of this debate and might be recognized, next to Ritzer’s (2010) work, as a kind of its summary�

The reason why I have not discussed network theorists, who have already been involved in the debates on micro-macro in the discussed period, is that I do this in a separate chapter devoted to social networks in the latter part of my work (Chapter 3)� It is the same in the case of social field theory – initiated by works of Pierre Bourdieu already in the 1970s and by the institutional sociology of organizations in the 1980s – which I discuss in Chapter 2� Both social network theory and social field theory were already mentioned in the 1980s debate, but they were far from its mainstream� I devote to these two approaches separate chapters, because I believe they represent the main change that took place in sociological theory since the 1980s debate: social networks and social field are now key concepts of sociological mainstream theory, and this is where it is now necessary to look for hints on how to understand the connections between the micro- and macro-level social processes�

In the summary of this chapter, there is one more thing that needs to be men-tioned about the relations between the micro-macro pairing and the individual-society and agency-structure pairings in sociological theory: it is the dynamics of the development of sociological theorizing� The classics were preoccupied with the individual-society pairing� They wanted to understand how these two realities influence each other� Later, after economists with their division to mi-cro-economics and mami-cro-economics influenced the way sociologists started to categorize levels of their analysis, the center of the debate was on the micro-macro dichotomy� The 1980s were the peak of the interest in micro and micro-macro, but already at this time many theorists focused on tackling the agency-structure pairing� I disagree with Ritzer (2010), who claimed that American sociologists were mostly interested in the micro-macro pairing while the European sociolo-gists focused on the agency-structure pairing� Both American and European so-ciologists were equally active in dealing with the micro-macro issue, as well as the agency-structure issue� Similarly, as it is possible to interpret classical thought on the individual-society pairing in terms of the micro-macro pairing, it is now possible to interpret the still “hot” sociological debate on agency-structure in terms of the micro-macro pairing� The interest in the individual-society pairing would now seem outdated, which is a sign of development in the theory� I claim that shifts in focus on various pairings are a good base for a valuable periodiza-tion of the development of sociological theory: first, the theory was interested in individual-society as two realities; then, it was mostly concerned with micro-macro as two levels of analysis; now, the central issue is agency-structure� There is still a quite large theoretical production on the micro-macro link, but I believe this divide has already been reconciled� The approaches to linking micro with macro (sometimes using meso-level of analysis) are in the mainstream of the theory, and both micro-chauvinists and macro-chauvinists (to use Turner’s ter-minology) are on its margins�

The key objective of the present book is to understand the problem of the so-ciological vacuum and for this reason, it is still necessary to present and summa-rize discussions on levels of analysis� I believe that the proper understanding of relations between various (micro, macro and maybe meso) levels of analysis will help in a deeper discussion of the empirical findings, which are often interpreted with reference to the sociological vacuum conception�

2 Social fields: the meso-level of analysis