Toward a Sociology of Mediations: Impressionist Mapping and Some (Brief) Rules for a Sociological Method

Abstract

This article presents an alternative way to approach social reality from a sociological perspective. It introduces a sociology of mediations, a methodological approach particularly influenced by actor-network theory. Using a notion of social reality as the articulation of heterogeneous elements, this approach is based on a conceptualisation of agency as the production of multiple and distributed transformations, and considers mediation as sociology?s unit of observation. The paper suggests a methodological tool: impressionist mapping. Combining the detailed work of mapping and the impressionist tradition of a formalist sociology, it is possible to construct a methodology that allows us to elaborate short or middle range sociological theories as well as to describe historically and locally situated cases.