An Introduction to the Symposium on Narratives, Temporality and Sociology

During the Eighties, and still more the Nineties, a handful of sociologists have begun to talk and write about the possibilities and the promises of a novel manner of practicing social research. That is, a specifically narrative mode, able to merge the claims to generalization and theory-building typical of (historical) sociology with a strong sensitivity for temporality, events and contingencies, also encompassing individualities, traditionally at the centre of historiography and ethnography. The aim of this symposium is to present, discuss and compare some of the most interesting and seminal paths in contemporary research on the narrative foundations of sociological analysis, chosen in order to represent different epistemological visions, different generations and also distinctive ways of integration between theory and methods. In the choice of authors and visions two issues have been privileged: the microfoundation of social analysis and the quest for formalization.