关键词: 理念型, 未预期结果, 潜在功能, 选择性的亲近, 分岔性的知识建构

Abstract: In past, the task of sociologist has long been regarded as the excavator (and interpreter as well) of those unanticipated consequences deeply remained in conceal under the surface of a social interaction. Under the rubric of structural-functional doctrine, Merton takes a position to conceive society as an organism-like body enshrined with a holistic nature. It thus leads Merton to conceive unanticipated consequences as a handful of social facts with latent function which were objectively constellated within a social system. In effect, those objective unanticipated consequences are considered to be beneficial to the adjustment and adaptation of a system, but they are neither intended nor recognized by the participators. In this article, the author takes an alternative stand to argue that a sociologist may just only play a role of story-teller. Like a stroller in a city who takes all his purposes as well as possible opportunities in mind to choose where to go further at every forking street corner he (or she) is encountering. As a stroller, a person always presents himself (or herself) at a given moment of time in such a way that any single move in space actually tells us a “present” moment in time. That is to say, people are always in a phasic state in which a continuously forking-like displacement of “here/there” phase hybridizes the sense of “time”. Translating such a complex of notions implicit in the scenography of a stroller in a city into the enterprise of sociological knowledge construction, what a sociologist as a story-teller is expected to do means to select a particular conceptual scheme with salient cultural-historical significance as a point of departure to construct a frame of analysis in which finding a conceptual forking path is exerted all the way. Concomitantly Max Weber's ideal type as an analytical tool happens to tell such a same story.

Key words: latent function, the forking model of knowledge building, ideal type, unanticipated consequences, elective affinity