History
The development of a more systematic conceptualization and theorizing about social rules and systems of social rules emerged in the late 1970s in the collaborative work of Thomas Baumgartner, Tom R. Burns, Philippe DeVille, and later Helena Flam, Reinier de Man, Atle Midttun, Anders Olsson, and others. Its formalization stemmed from a number of articles in the early 1980s.
Social theory concepts such as norm, value, belief, role, social relationship, and institution as well as game were shown to be definable in a uniform way in terms of rules and rule complexes. Rules and rule configurations may be treated as mathematical objects (the mathematics is based on contemporary developments at the interface of mathematics, logic, and computer science . Rules may be imprecise, possibly inconsistent, and open to a greater or lesser extent to modification and transformation by the participants.
Rules are key concepts in the new institutionalism, in several variants of socio-cultural evolutionary theory, and in work in semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy on “language games” . Among the many other researchers developing and applying rule concepts in the social sciences. In general, much of the use of rule concept in the social sciences and humanities has been informal and even metaphorical, with the major exception of Chomsky.
Read more about this topic: Social Rule System Theory
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)