• Corpus ID: 236468821

Classifying by phenomena, theories and methods: Examples with focused social science theories

@inproceedings{Szostak2009ClassifyingBP,
  title={Classifying by phenomena, theories and methods: Examples with focused social science theories},
  author={Rick Szostak and Claudio Gnoli},
  year={2009}
}

• R. Szostak, C. Gnoli
• Published 2009
• Philosophy

This paper shows how a variety of theories employed across a range of social sciences could be classified in terms of theory type. In each case, notation within the Integrated Level Classification is provided. The paper thus illustrates how one key element of the Leon Manifesto – that scholarly documents should be classified in terms of the theory(ies) applied can be achieved in practice. The León Manifesto <http://www.iskoi.org/ilc/leon.htm> argues that interdisciplinary research would benefit from a universal system of document classification that classed each work in terms of the phenomena studied, the theory(ies) and theory types applied, and the method(s) applied. Classification by phenomena, instead of disciplines, is being experimented with in the Integrative Level Classification (ILC) project <http://www.iskoi.org/ilc/> (Hong 2005). In ILC, main classes of phenomena are represented by letter codes, such as: s communities sf families sm tribes t organizations tn states tr federations tu supra-national unions u economies u5 [capital facet] u5b labour u5q equipment u5s structures v cultures, technological systems vd pastoralism vm farming vt industry Theories and methods can be expressed in the form of facets, introduced by the digit indicators 04 and 03 respectively. Thus, the subject “states studied by theory x and method y” will be notated tn04x03y. The theory facet has been the least developed element in this approach. Only a dozen grand theories have been classified (Szostak 2004). The purpose of this paper is to show that it is possible to classify documents employing narrowly focused theories. It will place theories from a variety of social science fields – some disciplinary and some interdisciplinary – into a typology, and develop ILC notation for classifying works using these theories. 1. Theories and theory types Theories present a challenge to document classification because theory names are ambiguous: the same theory name can refer to quite different sorts of theoretical argument, while quite similar arguments may go under quite different names (especially in different disciplines). The researcher wondering if a particular theoretical argument has been applied to a particular set of phenomena will receive limited guidance if the