Mechanism (sociology)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Mechanisms in sociology explain how social outcomes happen by describing the steps and players that cause them. The idea is not only to name a prior cause but to outline the mechanism that links cause and effect. Elster argues that explanation should provide or at least suggest the mechanism behind an event. Bunge defines a mechanism as a process in a real system that can bring about change. The most influential contemporary account (Machamer, Darden and Craver) says a mechanism consists of the entities involved (with their properties) and the activities they perform, alone or with others; these activities bring about a change. The kind of change depends on the properties, activities, and relations of the parts. In short, a mechanism is a set of parts and actions organized to regularly produce a particular social outcome, and explaining a social phenomenon means pointing to the mechanism that brings it about.