If you want to hold out strictly for things like 'social structures' as determinate, then modern sociology probably doesn't have a whole lot to offer in terms of explanation. Post-modern sociology wouldn't even try from the starting point of the 'rational'.
It would seem in all the so-called social sciences--at least as academic pursuits rewarding successfully published individuals-- epistemological efficacy (or is that greed?) and knowledge claims get WAY overdone.
The multiple degree holders in economics overdo this too. What really seems to happen is that economists and their models and predictions based thereon are mostly wrong, but they are too willing to jump on a random successful result and proclaim it to the heavens.
BTW, by way of an example, Krugman's 'explanation' of what happened and is still happening in S. Korea since 1997 is pretty laughable (who on LBO list respects this guy?).
As if S. Korean housewives selling the family jewells and refusing to buy Louis Vuitton and Gucci led to the break up and sell off of the once mighty chaebols. What a tumultuous concantenation of economic phenomena. If it were mine to give, he'd get the Noble!
The problem with 'alternative' economists is they are usually just as awful and wrong as the 'mainstream' ones. Their apotheosis in mostly unread discourse would have to be Lyndon Larouche. Krugman or Sachs haven't run for president--not yet anyway. The current P.M. of Japan, Koizumi, majored in economics, but many quip he seems to specialize in having something to say about things he knows nothing about.
Now I'm not going to oversell the natural vs. social science distinction either (though I prefer air conditioner technicians and computer repair people to economists).
Most experimental natural science is just a bunch of technicians running unconscious algorithmic procedures in an array of replications and variations and replications, etc., until someone somewhere claims they have noticed something in the data . Sometimes it's a revelation, and often it's just cold fusion variation 999. Interpretation is always an act of contamination.
One of the problems with explanations in the social sciences is that even if we can re-construct someone's act rationally and teleologically--what their goals were and how they went about achieving them--such explanations are post facto psychologisms AT BEST. It's all too easy to fall for a retrospective fiction after the fact. It's as if the fictional present determines the psychological and sociological past--though some still use the term '. And in the case of the WTC attacks, no one can even interview one of the actors in the events to get even that twisted account of events and ideas and actions.
Effective explanation has to lead to prediction. Something all social sciences are terrible at doing.
In the realm of the psycho-social, I think anyone with an acquired and experiential knowledge base of the real world (that is, read widely, talk to people, live a life) can have equal success at a process Peirce called 'abduction', which means coming to or accepting a conclusion on the grounds that it best explains the available evidence.
This is why an elite of print journalists are often our best social scientists, scientists of current affairs--their brains have a richer source of personal experiences and acquired information to shift through for patterns and ultimately explanations (you can read this with heavy irony if you want, but I was thinking of journalists such as John Pilger. In other words, who reads books by sociologists except Sociology 101 students and Sociology majors?) .
Such reasoning processes have great application for the rational analysis of current affairs, and the knowledge to do it fairly well is widely available to those who care to do it. Certainly an exchange of information and ideas (linking that information)--such as is possible on LBO list--is helpful. Such a conclusion probably seems in line with Habermas.
However, if you read Feyerabend (post-modern analytic) or Lyotard (post-modern structuralist), you might not be so optimistic.
Charles Jannuzi