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Bourdieu's concept of habitus relies heavily on insights from phenomenology, yet his theoretical effort falls short of existing phenomenological solutions to the problems of cognition, agency, and reflexivity in social action. These shortcomings are evident in the analytical and descriptive failures of the concept of habitus documented by critics. Turning to the work of Alfred Schutz, this paper offers his concept of pragma, meaning context, and theory of relevances as an alternative way to describe the embodied and temporal nature of social action and accounting for social determinations. The paper further parses out key differences between Schutz's social phenomenological understanding of embodied action and Bourdieu's habitus, including differences in understanding schemas of standardization and their relation with objectivities of the social world. The paper ends with a call for a critical reassessment of Schutz's social phenomenology, with potentially wide ranging implications not only for understandings of agency, but also of meaning and the constitution of objectivities of the social world, as well the underlying interpretive method of social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As field change is often explained by recourse to agentic efforts of a few or revolutionary turbulence of many, this paper provides a complementary explanation of change grounded in the quotidian dynamics of physical objects and settings. Using the culinary and mountaineering fields, we demonstrate how attending to the materiality of objects and settings offers analytical leverage into the ways fields conflict and change. More specifically, we argue field instability is normal because, at the level of social action, mass and energy are inherently finite. As a result, actors responding to effects from distal fields may nevertheless collide over the objects and settings in which they are compelled to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visualization of social theory is an important part of the development and communication of our theoretical ideas. While most theorists use figures of some kind, few if any have formal training, or guiding rules or principles for the representation of theory. This has often led to poor visualization efforts, and the visual culture of sociology continues to lag behind the natural sciences. The intent of this paper is to serve as a practical and empirically aided guide for social theorists, by providing insights surrounding the cognitive and perceptual properties of certain elements and figures. Through these properties we identify four major problems in theory visualization: vagueness, reduction, unwanted spatial inferences and unwanted metaphorical inferences. We offer solutions to these problems, and to improving theory visualization more generally. Our hope is that this paper will serve as a resource for more thoughtful and informed visualization for practicing social theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine-assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical and theoretical foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder- Vass (2012), Kaidesoja (2013) and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be (and in practice implicitly are) based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman (2006) and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological, economic and evolutionary paradigms of human agency have often seen social agents either as the rational controllers of their fate or as marionettes on the strings of historical, functional or adaptive necessity. They found it therefore difficult to account for the variability, intentionality and creativity of human behaviour and for its frequently redundant or harmful results. This paper argues that human agency is a product of evolution, but that genetic variation and inheritance can only provide a limited explanation of its complex nature. The primary evolutionary problem which human agents face while they are alive is not to adapt to stable environments, but to respond flexibly and creatively to a contingent, uncertain world. Variation and selection therefore take two connected but distinct forms, one external, genetic, and inherited across generations, the other internal and cognitive, and operating during the lifetime of individuals. An examination of this lived part of evolution provides a better understanding of key properties of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does 'discursive consciousness' play in decision-making? How does it interact with 'practical consciousness?' These two questions constitute two important gaps in strong practice theory that extend from Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to Stephen Vaisey's sociological dual-process model and beyond. The goal of this paper is to provide an empirical framework that expands the sociological dual-process model in order to fill these gaps using models from cognitive neuroscience. In particular, I use models of memory and moral judgment that highlight the importance of executive functions and semantic memory. I outline each model as it pertains to the aforementioned gaps in strong practice theory. I then use the models from cognitive neuroscience to create an expanded dual-process model that addresses how and when conscious mental systems override and interact with subconscious mental systems in the use of cultural ends for decision-making. Finally, using this expanded model I address the sociological debate over the use of interview and survey data. My analysis reveals that surveys and interviews both elicit information encoded in declarative memory and differ primarily in the process of information retrieval that is required of respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Drawing on the dual process framework from social and cognitive psychology, this paper reconciles two distinct conceptualizations of trust prevalent in the literature: “rational” calculative and irrational “affective” or normative. After critically reviewing previous attempts at reconciliation between these distinctions, we argue that the notion of trust as “reliance” is the higher order category of which “deliberate trust” and “intuitive faith” are subtypes. Our revised approach problematizes the conflation of epistemic uncertainty with phenomenological uncertainty while providing sound footing for a key sociological insight: that reliance on the routine social order is both the cognitive default and based on substantial practical evidence. We develop two broad suggestions for future research from these implications: (1) sociological research should examine the role of intuitive faith—as opposed to deliberate trust—in late modern societies, and (2) analysts should challenge the role of deliberate trust as the “modal” form of reliance in contemporary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive sociology has been split into cultural and interdisciplinary traditions that position themselves differently in relation to the cognitive sciences and make incompatible assumptions about cognition. This article provides an analysis and assessment of the cognitive and methodological assumptions of these two traditions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. We argue that while the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology has provided important descriptions about how human cognition varies across cultural groups and historical periods, it has not opened up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that produce and sustain this variation. This means that its explanations for the described phenomena have remained weak. By contrast, the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology has sought to integrate cognitive scientific concepts and methods into explanatory research on how culture influences action and how culture is stored in memory. Although we grant that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists have brought many fresh ideas, concepts and methods to cultural sociology from the cognitive sciences, they have not always clarified their assumptions about cognition and their models have sketched only a few specific cognitive mechanisms through which culture influences action, meaning that they have not yet provided a comprehensive explanatory understanding of the interactions between culture, cognition and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the time Alzheimer's disease (AD) was described and named in the first decades of the 20th Century, a biomedical lens was used to examine and understand what Oliver Sacks 1970) called 'the disease the person has' and the dysfunctions caused by that disease. Treatments were mainly pharmaceutical and neuropsychological tests administered in clinics were among the outcome measures used to quantify dysfunctions and assess the efficacy of drugs. The final decades of the 20th Century and the first decades of the 21st Century witnessed the advent of qualitative approaches to understanding what Sacks termed, 'the person the disease has'. The theoretical contributions of Rom Harré were essential to the identification of important aspects of the subjective experience and selfhood, as well as significant cognitive and social strengths, possessed by people deemed to be in the moderate to severe stages of the disease. I shall explore some of those contributions and their significance herein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand themselves as playing a social role, individuals must understand themselves to be contributing to a cooperative endeavor. Psychologically, the form of cooperation required is a specific type that only humans may possess, namely, one in which individuals form a joint or collective agency to pursue a common end. This begins ontogenetically not with the societal level but rather with more local collaboration between individuals. Participating in collaborative endeavors of this type leads young children, cognitively, to think in terms of different perspectives on a joint focus of attention ‐ including ultimately an objective perspective ‐ and to organize their experience in terms of a relational‐thematic‐narrative dimension. Socially, such participation leads young children to an understanding of self‐other equivalence with mutual respect among collaborative partners and, ultimately, to a normative (i.e. moral) stance toward "we" in the community within which one is forming a moral role or identity. The dual‐level structure of shared endeavors/realities with individual roles/perspectives is responsible for many aspects of the human species' most distinctive psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006-2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) 'variablistic' or 'covering law' models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of 'mechanisms' to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]