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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.

There are several theses in political science that are usually explicitly called 'laws'. Other theses are generally thought of as laws, but often without being explicitly labelled as such. Still other claims are well-supported and arguably interesting, while no one would be tempted to call them laws. This situation raises philosophical questions: which theses deserve to be called laws and which not? And how should we decide about this? In this paper we develop and motivate a strategy for thinking about laws in political science which integrates two core concepts: spatio-temporal stability and social mechanisms. The proposed strategy is a set of guidelines that political scientists can use to reflect on and argue about specific cases within their discipline, not a clear-cut demarcation criterion. We defend and motivate this strategy and apply it to two cases (one with respect to state repression, one about parliamentary elections). After we have developed and motivated our strategy for political science, we show that our proposal is relevant for other disciplines in the social sciences. We explain how our views fit into critical realism and embed them in the debate on laws in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of the social sciences.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory seeks to understand inconsistency by situating it within individual cognition. By doing so, it overlooks the role of the social context in the experience and management of inconsistency and dissonance and fails to capture the processes through which it is negotiated when it appears. On the other side, the cognitive polyphasia hypothesis together with a dialogical approach on Social Representations provide a socioculturally situated, process-oriented understanding of inconsistency. In this paper, meat-paradox, the phenomenon of simultaneously declaring love and respect towards animals and also consuming animals, mainly studied through Cognitive Dissonance Theory, is used in order to highlight the merits of a sociocultural approach to inconsistency. Four relevant empirical examples from interviews and focus groups with meat-eaters and vegetarians in Cyprus are used to illustrate the approach. The examples illustrate how meat-eaters manage dissonance in ways that exhibit coexistence of contradictory representations and ways of thinking. Three different modalities of knowledge coexistence are identified, as proposed by cognitive polyphasia researchers: displacement, selective prevalence and hybridisation. We discuss the importance of a sociocultural approach to studying paradoxes, the epistemological and methodological implications of such a theorisation and we suggest other life contexts in which such an approach can be applied. 49 2 235 253

This paper uses conceptual resources drawn psychosocial process thinking (Stenner, 2017, Brown and Reavey, 2015, Brown and Stenner, 2009) and from G.H. Mead in particular, to contribute to an emerging body of work on the experiences of adult women with ADHD (Singh, 2002, Waite and Ivey, 2009, Quinn and Madhoo, 2014, Horton-Salway and Davies, 2018). It has a particular focus on how ADHD features in the construction of women’s identities and life-stories and it draws upon findings from a qualitative investigation of adult women diagnosed or self-diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). A theoretically informed ‘thematic decomposition’ of 16 depth interviews reveals how complex processes of identity transformation are mediated by the social category of ADHD. Through this process, pasts are reconstructed from the perspective of an ‘emergent’ identity that offers participants the potential for a more enabling and positive future.

The notion of “deontic rights”—the capacity of an individual to determine action—is described as a tool to analyze human power plays in the turn‐by‐turn unfolding of social interaction. Drawing on various bodies of literature, the paper portrays the organization of the adjacency‐pair sequence as the key locus of negotiation over deontic rights. How such negotiations happen in practice is also considered. Two deontic patterns instantiating themselves in sequential relations—deontic congruence and deontic incongruence—are discussed. Negotiations of deontic rights are suggested to take place specifically in and through three different forms of deontic incongruence, each of which involves a subtle mismatch between the claims of deontic rights of the first speaker and the recipient's treatment of these claims. These implicit power plays easily escape the eye and are therefore difficult to reflect upon and counteract by the participants themselves, which makes a thorough understanding of these mechanisms important.

By leveraging the case of Hindu sati, this paper elucidates the ways in which structure and culture condition suicidal behavior by way of social psychological and emotional dynamics. Conventionally, sati falls under Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicides, or the self-sacrifice of underindividuated or excessively integrated peoples like widows in traditional societies. In light of the fact that Durkheim's interpretation was based on uneven data, nineteenth century Eurocentric beliefs, and a theoretical framework that can no longer resist modification and elaboration, by reconsidering sati it is possible to sketch a new model that strengthens Durkheim's theory by making it more robust and generalizable. The following model is built on five principles. First, integration and regulation are not distinct causal forces, but overlapping contextual conditions. Second, to better explain the variation in suicidality across time and space, we must also pay attention to culture as it provides the underlying meanings of suicide that can increase the odds a person or class of persons become suicidal or are protected against suicidality. Third, structure still matters, but in many cases, the role power and power-differentials play must be considered. Fourth, understanding why and how people choose suicide depends on incorporating identity and status processes. Fifth, because the expression of social emotions like shame are patterned by structural and cultural conditions, to understand how suicidality is socioculturally patterned we must further explore the link between identity/status, social emotions, and structure and culture.

The self is conceptualized in a multitude of ways in different scholarly fields; at the same time moral agency appears to presuppose a unitary conception of the self. This paper explores this tension by introducing ‘moral senses’ which inform the normative evaluations of a person. The moral senses are featured as innate dispositions, but they inevitably recruit discursive categorizations in order to function. These senses forward both an ‘individual self’, by experiencing a unitary body, mind and character, and a ‘social self’, that is similarly experienced as a body, a mind, and a character. This social self is enabled by the capacity to internalize other people's feelings and intentions and the need to have otherworldly explanations for observable reality. This integrative framework of moral senses provides an understanding that helps to address the challenge of moral heterogeneity and plurality.

This paper examines two commonly held and conflicting cognitions in the modern world, each based on a belief vital to the individual's sense of self, both maintained in what is here considered as a chronic state of dissonance. This psychological inconsistency consists of an inherent practical belief in the goodness of empirical knowledge and a culturally-developed transcendent belief denying, or at least mitigating, empirical evidence about the finite nature of individual life and affirming a counter-empirical belief in supernatural: supra-cause-and-effect forces that influence life. I argue that since both beliefs are highly resistant to change, they lead to an impasse that individuals in diverse cultures have borne and been motivated to maintain. They have borne it, as I hope to show, because the consonant “cure” has proved to be more discomforting than the dissonant condition.

This paper presents a new approach to the demarcation of social emotions, based on their dependence on social appraisals that are designed to assess events bearing on social concerns. Previous theoretical attempts to characterize social emotions are compared, and their inconsistencies highlighted. Evidence for the present formulation is derived from theory and research into links between appraisals and emotions. Emotions identified as social using our criteria are also shown to bring more consistent consequences for social behavior than nonsocial emotions. We conclude by considering ways of validating and refining our classification. © 2008 The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd.