Talk:Social dynamics
Hi you!
Good what you write, but you have to see that "social dynamics" is heavily dealing with mathematics, else it wasn´t called "dynamics". We should get this together someway.
Grasso
After reading these two articles, my head hurts. Is there a sociologist in the house? --LMS
I do not understand this article.
The lead sentence right now is "Social dynamics is the analysis of social systems and behavior." But isn't "sociology" and "anthropology" the "analysis of social systems and behavior?" A more precise definition, and an explanation that clearly locates "social dynamics" (which sounds more like an object to be analyzed, rather than a method of analysis or model of the what is observed) needs to be located -- is it a discipline, a movement with in a discipline, a theory, and object of investigatiopn, or what? How is it different from/related to other "analyses of social systems and behavior" like structuralism, functionalism, marxism, etc.?
Also, the second paragraph does not mention "social dynamics" but rather "situational dynamics." Okay, should the whole article be retitled "situational dynamics?
Finally, the article mentions someone named Thomas as the developer of this whatever it is theory discipline model, whatever. But as described/defined, it sounds like it was started by William James's pragmatic psychology. How does "situational analysis" differ from the work of the famous anthropologist, Max Gluckman? How does it differ from what sociologists call symbolic-interactionism and ethnomethodology?
In short, I have never heard the term used this way. This fact does not in and of itself invalidate the article. But I think it is fair to expect an article to explain a concept clearly, and situate it, so that someone like me who does not know what it means can understand it. Right now I just don't understand what the article is talking about, SR
"which sounds more like an object to be analyzed, rather than a method of analysis or model of the what is observed"
You are right. This term was used by Marxist and leftist political theorists, I guess in the 60-70´ it became popular again (that was before my time, and I´m German anyway). I don´t know how much work has been done on that, but I think that Larry´s sources and interpretation is slightly off.