system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
(Why) is sociology less unified than economics?

From what I could gather from a couple of comments on this subreddit, I got the impression that sociology still seems somewhat divided with different people using quite different paradigms (that, to some degree, still go back to Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, as well as, probably, some more modern ones) to describe or analyse the same situation. Economics, on the other end, despite, of course, having disagreements, only really has one mainstream with a few people on the fringes who are, usually, not taken seriously.

I am curious as to how much truth there is to this assessment, and why those differences exist, despite the fact that both fields often care about quite similar questions?
gpt
There haven't been any rival paradigms to overtake neoclassical economics. While institutional economics goes back to the nineteenth century, it has not had notable upsurges in the field. Economics as a whole has relatively few challengers in comparison to other fields. This might be because it is largely a deductive study.

In comparison, sociology has had strong rivalries since the late 19th century. In particular, the positivist vs antipositivst camps have both been mainstays in sociology. The closest thing economics has had to antipositivism is Marx which has never been mainstream within economics departments. Also, sociology gets included in all the different kinds of interdisciplinary movements: rational choice, evolution, different variants of marxism, postmodernism, semiotics..... In sum, there is a greater variety of competing strongholds in sociology in comparison to economics.

Source: *Formal Theory in Sociology: Opportunity or Pitfall?* Edited by Jerald Hage. 1994. State University of New York Press.