here's a thought if you want to really deal with social theory, throw out 'methodological individualism' and figure out a way of actually analyzing the collective. once that is done, then the social will be analyzed in a way that is far more profound and perhaps more real.
Again, I agree with these two sentences, but not the implication. We should indeed focus on the "real", and move beyond invididualism. But that doesn't mean that "analyzing the collective" requires aggregate measures. Descriptions and observations should proceed from case instances. We can thus analyze a collective (whatever it's called - network, community, nation, Frank, etc.) as the multitude of observed interactions (is the network of talk dense or sparse, tight or loose?) without extrapolating that the collective is something more or other than those observed interactions. Analyzing a collective, devoid of descriptions of case instances, is less profound (and much farther from "real") than individualism.
It is actually unclear that we can extrapolate a collective identity from a multitude of identities, though that is what many believe.... It is just one theoretical tradition that accepts that aggregation or the whole is equal to the some of the parts, others believe that the whole is less than and/or greater than the some of the parts. It is unclear to me whether it can be more profound than individualism, what does seem to be the case is that people have real problems with both Genetic and Atomistic Fallacies between the individual and the collective. Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series