II ON SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE MIDDLE RANGE

L,KE s o MANY WORDS that are bandied about, the won! theory threatens to become meaningless. Because its referents are so diverse­ including everything from minor working hypotheses, through compre­ hensive but vague and unordered speculations, to axiomatic systems of thought-use of the word often obscures rather than creates under­ standing. Throughout this book, the term sOciological theory refers to logically interconnected sets of propositions from which empirical uniformities can be derived. Throughout we focus on what I have called theories of the middle mnge: theories that lie between the minor but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in abundance during day-to-day re­ search1 and the all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop a unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behavior, social organization and social change.2 Middle-range theory is principally used in sociology to guide em­ pirical inquiry. It is intermediate to general theories of social systems which .are too remote from particular classes of social behavior, organiza­ tion and change to account for what is observed and to those detailed orderly descriptions of particulars that are not generalized at all. Middle-range theory involves abstractions, of course, but they are close enough to observed data to be incorporated in propositions that permit empirical testing. Middle-range theories deal with delimited aspects of