A motivating belief is that there is much to be gained not only from the determination of new social categories, where appropriate, but also from the systematic study and elaboration of such familiar categories as process, change, difference, gender, race, space, time, law, internal-relationality, open and closed systems, value, money, markets, firms, regions, power, authority, trust, testimony, institutions, norms, rules, custom, convention, profit, output, income, wealth, identity, individual, social evolution, development, human flourishing, probability, society and economy.

Broadly a distinction is drawn between philosophical ontology, the study of features possessed by all phenomena of any domain, and scientific ontology, interpreted as the study of specific phenomena of a domain. Thus for the social realm, philosophical ontology might be concerned with the manner in which social phenomena depend on us (and its results have included claims that social reality is an emergent realm that is everywhere open, structured, processual, interrelated and so on); whilst scientific ontology might concern itself with the nature of technology, money, gender, markets and so forth.