Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue on Causality at Work

Not being able to carry out proper experiments as the true (physical) scientists and even the colleagues from the neighboring psychology department do, sociologists have thrown themselves into the promising arms of the attractive “causal” models. From the 1960s onward, linear structural equation modeling became the norm and standard for the causal analysis of the nonexperimental data, to such an extent that it elicited biting comments from Louis Guttman (1977): “There has been a flowering of causal discoveries in sociology at a pace unheard of in the history of science . . . which undoubtedly put sociology at the forefront of all sciences in terms of frequency of discovery of fundamental relationships” (p. 103). Many others for many different reasons and from many different angles have shared Guttman’s criticisms and worries....