There’s still plenty of tautological thinking in sociology, so I dont think that’s the right answer.
Decline of (structural) functionalism?
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Let me put it this way. How would you go about empirically verifying the AGIL scheme?
And secondly, if it was possible to find empirical support for it, what are the practical implications of it for anyone?Nothing can ever be empirically verified— problem of induction.
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Structural functionalism had some good basic ideas, but stalled out intellectually because it never hardened those ideas into clearly testable propositions that could build a cumulative research program. It could have been done - and some tried - but the bulk of it ended up being vague just-so stories. When, as a previous poster noted, the social upheavals of the 1960s captured the attention of the field, SF was regarded (correctly or not) as lacking the tools to explain those changes and fell out of favor. The riot of alternatives that replaced it were not, for the most part, any better, and none of them was able to establish the level of institutional dominance that SF had in its heyday. Various efforts have been made to reunify the discipline around a single core paradigm over the years, but to date all of them have failed. Whether that reflects a virtuous concern with getting the details right before embracing some grand theory or a lack of intellectual discipline is a matter of debate. My sense is that few sociologists today are very worried about these issues.