In sociology generally, the infringement of legal norms is not treated as a special kind of norm violation, the sociology of law being an obvious exception. The study of illegal markets therefore faces the challenge of distinguishing illegality from legality, and relating both to legitimacy....

Bei diesem Beitrag handelt es sich um einen Vortrag, der im Rahmen des von der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften am 26. April 1989 in München veranstalteten Kolloquiums "Der Föderalismus vor den Anforderungen der Gegenwart" gehalten wurde. Ausgangspunkt ist die Frage, welche Bedeutung...

In this paper an attempt is made to widen the perspective under which interorganizational networks are generally seen. It is argued that both in the economy and in policy making, network phenomena are in fact becoming more prominent. This is linked to functional differentiation, a core process...

The purpose of this paper, which was written for a forthcoming book on the state-of-the-art in the social sciences, is to survey the influence which natural science concepts and models have recently had on theoretical developments in the social sciences, especially sociology. Such influences can...

The history of a research field called political economy dates back to the eighteenth century, giving rise to a variety of disciplinary approaches, and experienced a renaissance as a multidisciplinary field after the Second World War, combining economic, political science, and sociological...

Bei einer theoretisch orientierten kausalen Rekonstruktion des Entstehens der Finanzkrise von 2008 auf der Grundlage der Diskussion in Wissenschaft und Medien lassen sich verschiedene Erklärungsansätze identifizieren, die teils dem Schema Handeln und Struktur und teils dem Schema Akteur und...

In the social sciences, the development of a specific social event or structure is often explained by a statistical correlation between an independent variable and a variable assumed to be dependent upon it. This mode of explanation is contested by a methodology of causal reconstruction that...