Introduction

Summary

This book outlines and gives examples of a new approach to research in the human sciences. It puts into practice the recommendation of C. Wright Mills, for what he called the exercise of the sociological imagination. But I would call it instead the interdisciplinary, human imagination. Here I develop and elaborate ideas that were proposed in an early form in my Microsociology (1990) and in Suzanne Retzinger's Violent Emotions (1991). These books focused on a substantive topic: emotions and social bonds in their interrelationship. This book continues with that topic, but codifies the methodological dimension.

My goal is to describe an approach to all human research that allows the interpenetration of theory, method, and data in such a way that each equally casts light on the other, generating a theory that is based directly on observations of actual human behavior, both inner experience and outer conduct. This introduction and the first two chapters emphasize methodology, of relating the smallest parts to the largest wholes. The later chapters apply this approach to verbatim human expressions.

When part/whole methods are applied to verbatim texts, the intricate filigree of even the simplist human transactions are revealed. Inevitably, crucial aspects of this filigree are emotions and bondoriented behavior. One important goal of the substantive chapters is to show that understanding the intricacy of human expressions is not a luxury, but an elementary requirement of human science. It is clear that societies (and the human relationships which constitute them) ride upon extraordinarily complex processes.