Orienting Strategies
Some sociologists (Berger & Zelditch, 1993; Wagner,1984; Wagner & Berger, 1985) have used the term “orienting strategies”. They find that orienting strategies should be understood as metatheories: "Consider the very large proportion of sociological theory that is in the form of metatheory. It is discussion about theory: about what concepts it should include, about how those concepts should be linked, and about how theory should be studied. Similar to Kuhn’s paradigms, theories of this sort provide guidelines or strategies for understanding social phenomena and suggest the proper orientation of the theorist to these phenomena; they are orienting strategies. Textbooks in theory frequently focus on orienting strategies such as functionalism, exchange, or ethnomethodology. "(Wagner & Berger, 1985, p. 700).
Sociologists thus use metatheories as orienting strategies. We may generalize and say that all people use metatheories as orienting strategies and that this is what direct our attention and also our browsing - also when we are not conscious about it.
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Famous quotes containing the word strategies:
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
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