Philosophers of the social sciences have also emphasized and debated the importance of mechanistic knowledge (e.g., Elster 1989; for a useful review of these connections, see Hedström and Ylikoski 2010). In that context, appeals to mechanisms are intended to remedy the relative uninformativeness of social (or macro-level) explanations of social phenomena (such as widespread norms, persistent inequalities, network and institutional structures) by insisting that these explanations ultimately be grounded in mechanistic details about individual agents and actors, their desires and motivations, and, importantly, their relations to one another. The emphasis on relations among actors distances this mechanistic view from methodological individualism (see the entry on   methodological individualism).  Mechanists in the social sciences have also tended to shy away from grand, overarching theories and toward more local explanations: scientific knowledge grows by adding items to a toolbox of mechanisms and showing how items from that toolbox can be combined to provide an explanation for a particular phenomenon. Frederica Russo (2009) discusses a number of strategies for modeling social mechanisms (see also Little 1991, 1998; Hedström 2005; Hedström and Swedberg 1998).