Social Rule System Theory - History

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.