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This paper replies to Porpora, King, and Varela's responses to my earlier paper “For Emergence”, focussing on the relationship between the concepts of social structure and social relations. It recognises the importance of identifying the mechanisms responsible whenever we make claims for the emergence of causal powers, and discusses the mechanism underlying one case of social structure: normative institutions. It also shows how critical realism reconciles the claims that both social structures and human individuals have emergent causal powers that combine to produce actual social events. [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]

I this paper, I draw on recent research on the radically embodied and perceptual bases of conceptualization in linguistics and cognitive science to develop a new way of reading and evaluating abstract concepts in social theory. I call this approach Sociological Idea Analysis. I argue that, in contrast to the traditional view of abstract concepts, which conceives them as amodal 'presuppositions' removed from experience, abstract concepts are irreducibly grounded in experience and partake of non-negotiable perceptual-symbolic features from which a non-propositional 'logic' naturally follows. This implies that uncovering the imagistic bases of allegedly abstract notions should be a key part of theoretical evaluation of concepts in social theory. I provide a case study of the general category of 'structure' in the social and human sciences to demonstrate the analytic utility of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The many critical approaches to an ‘ethnicity framework’ have fallen short of a very possible conclusion—that the language of ethnicity provides, for the most part, a poor paradigm with which to work. In the present paper we seek not only to re-state some key weaknesses of this paradigm but also to suggest that these weaknesses are more general in an over-ethnicised sociology. There are numerous critiques of particular models or elements of ethnicity thinking, including critiques of primordialist approaches (Fenton 2003), of multiculturalism ( Barry 2000 ), and of the over-objectification of groups (Brubaker 2004; see also Jenkins 2008). The major critiques constitute a strong case against ‘thinking with ethnicity’; the broader weaknesses are more general in contemporary ‘identitarian’ sociology. From this position we turn to the question of offering an alternative approach in a sociology which emphasizes agency, and is grounded in an analysis of actors in material situations. This is allied to the concept of ideational resources, social categories and identities upon which actors draw, and a middle-range view of causality and tendency in social change. Ideas of ancestral belonging are among those ideational resources, and these ideas and assumptions are played out in a context of material and political change. The subject of study is not ethnicity, but power, resources, social relations and institutions (which may and may not be) informed by cultural identities and ideas of ancestry. The strategy of the paper will be first to re-state the deficiencies of ‘ethnicity thinking’ and second to offer an alternative framework for thinking about social action and social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Alfred Schutz is most frequently identified as the main influence on Harold Garfinkel, and the latter on Anthony Giddens in his development of structuration theory, in fact the later Wittgenstein’s insights into meaning and understanding strongly influenced both. This paper attempts to demonstrate Wittgenstein’s influence on ethnomethodology and structuration theory, and show that despite their intentions, and contrary to what is normally thought, Giddens’s and Garfinkel’s work do not express as much of a creative version of social life as they intended, in that each had difficulties regarding the issues of social uniformity (“cultural dopes”) and individual choice. I will argue that these problems are rooted in their interpretations of Wittgenstein’s rule–following considerations. [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]

In the physical sciences a realist ontology rests on our ability to demonstrate the actual and real nature of material entities. Realist metaphysics of social entities, most influentially Bhaskar's critical realism, attempt to provide a related philosophical foundation for the social sciences. This paper examines the central issue of what is real about society it concludes that social relations and the organisations they constitute do exist and discusses the conditions of their demonstration. Realist interpretations of Bourdieu's theories are given particular attention in an argument that accepts the necessity of social realism but remains cautious about the development of methodologies able to provide effective demonstration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution presents an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to emotions and social structures. Combining theoretical accounts from the neurosciences, psychology, and sociology, the role of emotion in the micro-macro link is investigated and the social components of emotion on different levels of analysis are examined. Micro-level analysis explores societal influences on the interaction of cognition and emotion, emphasizing the role of appraisals and of emotion circuits on the brain level. Analysis of the meso-level investigates how emotions are elicited and expressed in social interactions and macro-level investigation scrutinizes how instances of social structural configurations affect the processing and regulation of emotion. The authors conclude with a conceptualization of emotions as a bidirectional mediator between large-scale social structures and individual behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of dead person returning to life was the most ancient source of irrational fear (i.e. fear not caused by objective menace) appeared in culture. This conclusion is argued with empirical data from archeology and ethnography. Fear has been expressed in funeral rites, the tying of extremities, burning and dismemberment of dead bodies, and ritual cannibalism (compensatory necrophilia) etc. At the same time, it was attended by effective care for helpless cripples, which seems to descend to the Lower Paleolithic as well. Dread of posthumous revenge played a decisive regulative role at the earliest stage of anthropogenesis, as the disparity between artificial weapons (the tools) and natural aggression-retention mechanisms (the instincts) became self-destructive. In the new conditions, individuals with normal animal mind were doomed to catastrophe. Those hominid groups proved viable, in which mystical fear, a product of unnaturally developed imagination, bounded lethal conflicts among kinsmen. The phobias corresponded to the psycho-nervous system's“strategic pathology”; that was a condition for early hominids’ self-preservation. As a result, a causal connection between instrumental potential, cultural regulation quality and social sustainability (the techno-humanitarian balance law) was formed, which has been a mechanism of social selection for all of human history and prehistory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]