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Manifest functions are the consequences that people see, observe or even expect. It is explicitly stated and understood by the participants in the relevant action. The manifest function of a rain dance, according to Merton in his 1957 Social Theory and Social Structure, is to produce rain, and this outcome is intended and desired by people participating in the ritual.
Metabolic rift is a theory of ecological crisis tendencies under the capitalist mode of production that sociologist John Bellamy Foster ascribes to Karl Marx.Quoting Marx, Foster defines this as the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism".
The strong programme or strong sociology is a variety of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) particularly associated with David Bloor, [1] Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, Donald A. MacKenzie, [2] and John Henry. The strong programme's influence on science and technology studies is credited as being unparalleled (Latour 1999).
Quantum social science is an emerging field of interdisciplinary research which draws parallels between quantum physics and the social sciences.Although there is no settled consensus on a single approach, [1] a unifying theme is that, while the social sciences have long modelled themselves on mechanistic science, they can learn much from quantum ideas such as complementarity and entanglement.
In Marxist philosophy, reification (Verdinglichung, "making into a thing") is the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.
The phrase was first used in sociology by Morton Grodzins when he adopted the phrase from physics where it referred to the adding a small amount of weight to a balanced object until the additional weight caused the object to suddenly and completely topple, or tip. Grodzins studied integrating American neighborhoods in the early 1960s.
Figurational sociology is also referred to as process sociology. This feature is an attempt to correct for an in-built language prejudice which tilts theory to reduce processes into static elements, separating, for example, human actors from their actions.
In science studies, the social process of blackboxing is based on the abstract notion of a black box. To cite Bruno Latour, blackboxing is "the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its ...