Contemporary literature on sociological explanation emphasizes the microelements of social life, such as causal mechanisms and constitutive descriptions. This focus has enhanced our ability to localize the components that perform explanatory functions within theories. However, we currently have a fragmented understanding of mechanisms, and their relationships with non-causal explanations and descriptions remain poorly understood. Addressing these challenges requires shifting the focus from these microelements to the larger systems they are a part of, but we currently lack a developed conceptualization of such systems and how they shape explanations. By simultaneously outlining a general approach to systems and their sociological specificities, moving beyond traditional associations with differentiation theories and focusing on mechanization, I aim to resolve these inconsistencies. This approach elucidates the relationships between causal mechanisms, non-causal explanations, and constitutive descriptions, while also recasting the generalizability of sociological arguments in a more comprehensible manner and identifying shared underlying principles across methods.