Let me begin by identifying the empirical social world in the case of human beings. This world is the actual group life of human beings. It consists of what they experience and do, individually and collectively, as they engage in their respective forms of living; it covers the large complexes of interlaced activities that grow up as the action of some spread out to affect the actions of others... . The empirical world, in short is the world of everyday experience, the top layers of which we see in our lives and recognize in the lives of others. (1969, p. 35).
Direct observation permits the scholar to meet all of the basic requirements of an empirical science: to confront an empirical world that is available for observation and analysis; to raise problems with regard to that world; to gather necessary data through careful and disciplined examination of the world; to unearth relations between categories of such data; to formulate propositions with regards to such relations, to weave such proposition into a theoretical scheme; and to the test the problems, the data, the relations, the propositions, and the theory by renewed examination of the empirical world. (p. 48)
[Sociological thought] do not regard the social actions of individuals in human society as being constructed by them through a process of interpretation. Instead, action is treated as a product of factors which play on and through individuals. ... Hence, the social action of people is treated as an outward flow or expression of forces playing on them rather than as acts which are built up by people through their interpretation of the situation in which they are placed. (1969, pp. 83-84)
Human society is to be seen as consisting of acting people, and the life of the society is to be seen as consisting of their actions. The acting units may be separate individuals, collectivities whose members whose members are acting together on a common quest, or organization acting on behalf of a constituency. ... There is no empirically observable activity in a human society that does not spring from some acting unit. (1969, p. 85)