Abstract
Sociology is a multi-purposive field of study. There are inbuilt dualisms in the questions that can be asked about the basic principles of sociological inquiry. One such dualism exists between a positivistic-individualist-structuralist vision on the one hand, and an interpretative-communal-cultural vision on the other. A second kind of dualism can be found in the tensions between an actor-oriented and an institution-oriented perspective. A third type of dualism is found in the contradictory claims for disciplinary identity and for interdisciplinarity. Such polar oppositions may be combined but the tensions between them cannot be removed.
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