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Neo-Weberian closure theory developed principally by Parkin appears at first glance to suffer from two opposing weaknesses — that its central concept of exclusion is either too broad or too narrow. This paper demonstrates that these objections are spurious. It then uncovers several real problems which have not yet been examined by the critics of closure theory. These problems have to do with Parkin's conceptions of usurpation, of the withdrawal of services, and of property, as well as with the ambiguity in the politics of Parkin's closure theory. The paper corrects these weaknesses and clarifies this ambiguity and concludes that closure theory so-corrected provides a promising framework for going beyond analyses focused narrowly on one particular means of domination and one particular set of monopolization and exclusion rules to a focus on monopolization and exclusion per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary exploration of a neglected area in sociology of religion. It aims to interpret and to characterize the distinctive performative basis of Christian liturgy. Ambiguities in liturgical enactment can be routinely handled as long as they relate. to the nuministic content of the rite and not to its social form. Silence is a distinctive non-reducible phenomenon of rite that can be related to the regulation of ceremonial form through tactful management of the implicit. Liturgies work on the basis of an apophatic characteristic that makes them distinctive as religious rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's social credit system is an unusually explicit case where technology is used by multiple actors to turn human behavior into a test object on behalf of the state's goal of modifying the larger social environment, making it an intriguing setting for thinking about the new sociology of testing. This article considers how China's search for a usable "credit" score to both allocate financial resources and explicitly measure a citizen's trustworthiness creates an emergent experimental system of governance similar to, yet not quite captured by, the kinds of experimental processes observed in literature on the platform as a form of market‐based governance. As a site where "seeing like a state" and "seeing like a market" converge, the social credit system is a vantage point for observing the changing relationship between moral and economic domains in an era of digital platforms. The article highlights the experimental quality of the system and its emerging system of governance structured around reward and punishment and argues that strategic ambiguity, institutionalized through the affordances of digital platforms, is an important part of the design of this large‐scale social experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]