Abbott, Andrew

A professor at the University of Chicago since 1991, Andrew Abbott is widely acknowledged as an important American sociologist with a strong reputation for being highly original and innovative as both a theorist and a methodologist. His substantive research fields are general social theory, occupations and professions, the academic system, and social knowledge in general. As a methodologist, he pioneered algorithmic sequence analysis (SA) in the social sciences and has worked upon the philosophy of methods, temporality, and rhetoric in sociological writing. Capitalizing on his own extensive experience as a teacher and a PhD supervisor, he has written on heuristics in the social and human sciences and on library research. Recognized as one of current sociology’s most fertile and original thinkers, Abbott has explicitly linked his work to the Chicago tradition of sociology, a tradition he has contributed to theoretically revive and historically reconstruct. His place in this heritage, or better in this lineage, is well established but far from being straightforward. What Abbott has been developing in almost 40 years of activity is indeed a sort of reconstruction of the whole sociological tradition, centred on an array of new concepts and methods and grounded on a radical critique of the epistemological and methodological common sense if not unconscious of the discipline, especially as it has developed in the United States. The following sections offer some essential information about Abbott’s intellectual and academic career, moving soon after to an illustration of his main tenets about social ontology and epistemology. The last section highlights Abbott’s main contributions to methodology and methods in social research.