Orienting to Chance: Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory

Explores the implications of chance and uncertainty in social theory and offers a new interpretation of the sociological canon. Since the founding of the discipline, sociologists have endeavored to understand the structures of groups, organizations, and societies, and how these entities condition our behavior.While some of the foundational theorists saw these processes as largely deterministic, sociological theory has increasingly insisted on the importance of culture in shaping our position in and responses to social groups.In Orienting to Chance, sociologists Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo aim to show that the social order bears an unmistakable link to chance and urge us to think about how it conditions our actions. Strand and Lizardo provide a sweeping overview of a new social theory framework that they call probabilism.Using examples of probabilism in sociology, particularly in the work of Max Weber, W.E. B. Du Bois, and Pierre Bourdieu, they describe probabilism’s place in multip