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Some philosophical and psychological approaches to social interaction posit a powerful explanatory tool for explaining how we navigate social situations: scripts. Scripts tell people how to interact in different situational and cultural contexts depending on social roles such as gender. A script theory of social interaction puts emphasis on understanding the world as normatively structured. Social structures place demands, roles, and ways to behave in the social world upon us, which, in turn, guide the ways we interact with one another and the ways we coordinate our behaviors. In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of coordinated behaviors in social interactions in humans. I argue that looking closely at everyday interactions, for which social coordination is central, strongly points to a fundamental role of scripts for social cognition and interaction. In order to explain some social interactions, like those based on social coordination, we do not need to recourse to mental state attribution. Rather, I argue, scripts are a powerful resource for explaining social interaction and especially coordinated behaviors. Scripts have been neglected in standard approaches to social cognition but are (re‐)gaining attention via the normative turn in social cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely accepted conception that institutions are norm systems or norm‐guided practices. Opening this conception itself to discussion, the paper initially discusses a group of concepts, such as norm, power, practice, structure, etc., that are related to the definition of institution. Following the discussion, it focuses on the possibility of understanding institutions as spaces. Finally, the paper suggests that institutions mediate ontologically between structure and agency within a framework developed with a critical‐realist approach, and formulates the two sides of this mediation (structure‐institution and institution‐agency) as two spatialities. While the institution as a topos corresponds to a ground on which social structures materialize their causal powers, the institution as a locus manifests itself as a place where agents reproduce and/or transform with their strategic and dispositional actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper is a response to the new book by Alexander Wendt (2015) entitled Quantum Mind. The paper commends Wendt on the book's contribution to our understanding, particularly of quantum mechanics, panpsychism, and externalism in the philosophy of mind. At the same time, it takes issue with Wendt's overall thesis, particularly as it relates to materialism, emergentism, and social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst loneliness may be receiving greater media and political attention, the tendency to present the issue as a discrete individual problem separable from wider social concerns has led to some frustration amongst the sociologically minded. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sociological account of loneliness which is not as susceptible to individualist interpretations as other works in the genre have been. As such the paper focuses on how the structure of a society, rather than its culture, might lead to loneliness. To this end, the paper makes original use of the works of Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Specifically, Simmel's account of how we come to know other people through synthetic construction is applied to his better‐known theory of intersecting social circles. The author claims that when taken together these two aspects of Simmel's thought suggest that social structure can create a form of social isolation in which people find it very difficult to get to know one another, due to a lack of multiple‐context interactions with the same people during their day‐to‐day behavioural patterns. This clustering of interactions within narrow interlocuter‐contexts is hypothesised to account for a portion of the variability in loneliness across individuals, societies and historical time, and is provisionally named as structural loneliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life story methods in Europe commonly belong to the field of biographical sociology. This paper points out that biographical sociology is missing from American sociology and describes in-depth two well-known methods in this field in Europe, the narrative interview and objective hermeneutics. The absence of biographical sociology from U.S. sociology should be remedied, it is argued, for the following reasons: First, an analysis of biographical patterns could counteract the heavy emphasis on social structure in American sociology and enrich certain subfields within it. For example, some of the concepts used in European biographical sociology, such as the concept of the 'trajectory' can be related to conceptions of agency set forth by American and British sociologists and thus enrich sociology overall. Second, biographical sociology can help counteract the heavy orientation towards quantitative research in American sociology without falling into the pitfalls of purely interpretive methodologies. And third, biographical sociology can significantly enrich the still missing link between culture and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the agency-structure issue from the evolutionary perspective. Rather than treating it as something unique to human society, the article examines this issue in the broad context of how different species of social organisms, with humans being one of them, influence the constitution of their societies. The main finding of this analysis is that social organisms of different species all exert influence on their societal formations, but the impact varies depending on the level of agency the organisms possess, particularly their perceptual capabilities. Social organisms with higher perceptual ability play a bigger part in shaping the structure of their societies. A fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman social animals in the agency-structure relations lies in the fact that humans are the only species on earth known to be capable of constructing institutional rules for societal regulation. This capacity is attributable to the syntactic language and reflective self-awareness humans possess. Within human species, however, there is considerable variation in the exercise of this capacity among individuals, groups, and societies. It is therefore important to examine species and intra-species level differences in addressing the agency-structure issue in human society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the concept of social values by presenting analytical tools that explore how social values are classified, re-presented and interpersonally performed in the construction of identities. I approach social values as classificatory systems of acceptability and desirability that are collectively generated. The meanings of social values are embedded in culture and in power imbalanced social relations; they constantly undergo reformulation in identification processes and are also used to define the social order. I suggest that social values can be analysed in relation to aspects of representation and interpersonal positioning that are also involved in the construction of identities: Value classifications involve compartmentalising moral orders into e.g. good, desirable, important, necessary; value projects are concerned with how value classifications and content occupy roles and become oriented to action; and value positioning is concerned with how narrators align with value classifications and projects as well as with individuals and groups seen to share or reject such classifications and projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aron Gurwitsch's four‐domain model of consciousness is placed in political‐economic context to theorize how social forces influence perception. Along with clarifying key concepts in cognitive sociology like "relevance" and "the taken‐for‐granted," the model explains the processes through which social structures—despite being vaguely understood, ignored, or unknown by the typical subject on a typical day—condition thematization and what items are considered relevant or irrelevant to the given theme. A capitalist "social horizon" influences attention by structurally imposing themes on consciousness as well as filters what items are considered relevant to the given theme through hegemonic frames—which select theme‐relevant items conducive to encouraging actors to consensually reproduce the status quo—and reificatory processes, or discursive and material practices that constitute items as fixed and inalterable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This comment addresses some of the critiques of “Quantum Mind and Social Science” by the other contributors, with special reference to the challenge that the mind‐body problem poses to conventional, classical thinking about social science. A quantum social ontology transcends those challenges, and in the process could transform social scientific thinking across the board. As an example the essay concludes with a consideration of the physics of social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to comments on his article on ontology and social relations. He defends his conception of rights-obligation relations by criticizing relations of exploitation in relation to Marxism. He also discusses several alternative forms of social relation in relation to his belief that the community is the most basic form of social totality bounded by the positional rights and obligations.

In recent years, there has been a rapidly growing body of work in the social sciences that underscores the prevalence of the phenomenon of 'social acceleration'--the speeding up of social life-- in many parts of the Western world. Although research on social acceleration has tended to analyze the phenomenon on a social-structural level, there is also a need to investigate how social acceleration has 'ramifications for the socially dominant forms of self-relation'. One way to gain a more in-depth understanding of this facet of social acceleration is to investigate the speeding up of social life through the prism of the self. The central argument of this article is that there are at least five images of the self which can be associated with the social acceleration phenomenon: (1) the 'detached' self, (2) the 'reflexive' self, (3) the 'reinventive' self, (4) the 'stationary' self and (5) the 'decelerating' self. By explaining how these kinds of self relate to the speeding up process, we seek to advance a more nuanced and sophisticated theory of social acceleration, which captures some of the complexities and paradoxes that the phenomenon involves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People use social categories to perceive and interact with the social world. Different categorizations often share similar cognitive, affective and behavioral features. This leads to a hypothesis of the common representational forms of social categorization. Studies in social categorization often use the terms 'ingroup' and 'outgroup' without clear conceptualization of the terms. I argue that the ingroup/outgroup distinction should be treated as an elementary relational ego-centric form of social categorization based on specific cognitive mechanisms. Such an abstract relational form should produce specific effects irrespective of the nature of a particular social category. The article discusses theoretical grounds for this hypothesis as well as empirical evidence from behavioral and brain research. It is argued that what is commonly termed as 'ingroup' and 'outgroup' can be produced by distinct cognitive operations based on similarity assessment and coalitional computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]