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The scope and structure of social theory are often analyzed as part of or preamble to theorizing proper. This paper takes an indirect approach to the metatheoretical question, "what does social theory look like in terms of scope and structure?" by analyzing a form of social theory that sociologists tend not to think of as social theory: namely, judge-made law produced in Federal appellate courts. We argue that judges engage in social theorizing on a routine basis, and that they arrive at some of their theoretical claims through a process of theorizing that has features in common with sociological theorizing. The social theorizing of judges holds up a mirror to our own. By recognizing and examining judicial social theorizing as a form of structured, social theorizing, we aim to facilitate a clearer understanding of the social conditions enabling (and constraining) the production of social theory within sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actor-Network Theory, as a theoretical and methodological approach, is particularly insightful when applied to domains of social activity that are in flux, thus making it particularly useful for ethnographic research about unsettled socio-technical systems. Drawing from field research conducted over the last decade, this paper presents two empirical cases that reveal how ANT enables researchers to trace the associations that form the socio-technical objects of political and journalistic practice. We focus on “black-boxed” technical objects, exploring two distinct, yet complementary, analytical moments that emerged during our respective fieldwork. First, we detail the work that an electoral map performs in stabilizing networks of political representation and creating new capacities to act. We then go inside a journalistic organization to reveal a moment of breakdown when the black box of a content management system unravels and fails to do what it is seemingly supposed to do, throwing news production into a tenuous state. The paper concludes by interrogating our empirical findings through the lens of cultural practices, highlighting a few ways sociologists might need to supplement ANT-analysis with a more robust understanding of culture and symbolic belief systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines a previously published paper that compares the traditions of pragmatism and ethnomethodology to address how the latter contributes to the former by developing a social science methodology with which to carry out its agenda. By examining the postulations of social theorist Harold Garfinkel and philosopher John Dewey, the article discusses topics such as the influence of analytical distinctions upon human behavior. Political scientist James Scott is quoted in reference to emerging thought.

The article examines the relationship between the postulations of ethnomethodology by sociologist Harold Garfinkel and the concepts underlying pragmatism. The author allows that both reject the separation between individual and object that is the staple of most philosophy and social theory, while remaining committed to an experiential analysis predicated upon empirical methods. Referencing a previous paper written by Mustafa Emirbayer and Douglas Maynard, the author focuses on the distinction between Garfinkel being a pragmatist and Garfinkel influencing pragmatism.

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deep methodological and substantive fragmentation of the social sciences has led to the development of theories that can think larger social wholes only at the cost of disfiguring reductionism. Any effort at creating new synthesizing frameworks must be able to integrate advances made in a wide variety of subfields, and therefore needs to reconsider the ontology of social life as a unifying basis. Given post-structuralist critiques, this has to happen in a critical fashion. Due to its anti-reductionist stance, the social hermeneutics of Vico and Herder offers a good starting point for an ontological re-orientation. However, since their work has also inspired highly problematic essentializations of culture/people as the principal way to connect everyday interaction and large-scale phenomena, a move that has been criticized for very good reasons, their social hermeneutics must be adjusted to the needs of our time. This paper proposes a renewed social hermeneutics that analyzes social life as a dense thicket of action-reaction effect flows mediated by discursive, emotive and sensory understandings. Wherever action-reaction effect flows are replicated in self-similar forms, institutions emerge. Since replication is contingent on stabilized understandings the question arises how understand ing, a process, can come to be objectified as a transposable form. The answer provided here is that repeated validations in action, in comparison with other persons, and in mnemonic invocations pick out and actualize understandings as interpretative devices. But this means that the work of stabilization is deferred to another level, because stabilized understandings require enduring validation, which can only issue from institutionalized social environments. The enduring features of social life must therefore be thought of as the result of a process of institutiosis, in which institutionalized forms buttress each other. Features of institutiosis are identified, which lead to more or less stable arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates precisely how issues of access-in this case differential access to informants and the scenes that they populate in three sites-can reveal substantive findings. In the case it features, a comparative study of small cities with growing populations of lesbian couples, actors' disparate and place-specific sexual identities produced disparate and place-specific responses to research. Integrationist sexual identities impeded access, whereas identity-politics orientations facilitated it. The paper identifies three mechanisms via which sexual identities influenced access: directly, by shaping informants' orientations to the research topic, and, indirectly, by influencing local networks and institutions that emerge from and reinforce local identities. By explicating one ethnographer's path from methodological trouble to substantive insight, the article traces the utility of an expansive and flexible reflexivity that begins with but extends beyond the researcher's identity and role. This reflexivity, the article proposes, encourages identification of substantive findings and the development of social theory, and can advance a comparative sociology of ethnographic access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines a previously published paper that compares the traditions of pragmatism and ethnomethodology to address the emergent properties of language and culture. By applying the lens of social theory, the author fashions a comment on the postulation that human actions can transcend strict deterministic causality to manifest creativity, novelty and innovation. Empirical methodologies within typification are discussed as a means of understanding emergent behavior. The author urges that the norms and rules governing human culture and sociality are revisable.

The article examines the relationship between the postulations of ethnomethodology and the concepts underlying pragmatism. Referencing a previous paper written by M. Emirbayer and D. Maynard, the authors focus upon their own work with human cognition, trust, and public experience. By analyzing additional reference materials, such as the book “Soziale Systeme,” by N. Luhmann, the article evaluates the attitudes of sociologist Harold Garfinkel, as well as the political philosophies and social theories underlying both ethnomethodology and pragmatism.

Classic theoretical arguments by seven Black and Jewish sociologists—informed by their experience of "double-consciousness"—comprise an important legacy in sociology. Approaches that ignore the role of racism and slavery in the rise of Western societies suppress and distort this legacy in favor of a White Christian Hero narrative. By contrast, Durkheim, a Jewish sociologist, took Roman enslaved and immigrant guild-workers as a starting point, positing the "constitutive practices" of their occupations as media of cooperation for achieving solidarity across diversity. His argument marks a transition from the treatment of social facts as durable symbolic residue in homogeneous cultures, to the qualitative study of constitutive social fact making in interaction in diverse social situations. Because making social facts in interaction requires mutual reciprocity, troubles occur frequently in contexts of inequality. Like W.E.B. DuBois, who first theorized double consciousness as a heightened awareness produced by racial exclusion, Harold Garfinkel looked to troubles experienced by the marginalized as clues to the taken-for-granted practices for making social order, calling them "ethno-methods." Together with other Black and Jewish sociologists—Eric Williams, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Erving Goffman, and Harvey Sacks—they challenge popular interpretations of classical social theory, center Race and marginality, and explain how features of practice that unite/divide can be both interactional and institutionalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the use of actor-network theory (ANT) in ethnographic research, political and normative implications of bringing ANT into the study of democratic life, and the use of ANT in social theory.

Sociology has a long history of social theory and ethnographic research in the area of sexuality. Although it has been largely overlooked, this body of work prefigures later advances by social constructionists and queer theorists. This article reviews some of the early theoretical and empirical contributions to the sociology of sexuality, organized into five broad themes: the denaturalization of sexuality and its origins; the historicization of sexuality; the analytic shift from “deviants” to “deviance”/margins to center; the destabilization of sexual categories and identities and emphasis on the fluid and diverse meanings of sexual acts; and the theorization of sexuality and gender as performance. This article suggests that sexual stigma may contribute to the marginalization of sexuality studies in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary communication studies have suffered from a lack of fertile social theory. Only recently have students of communication begun to examine seriously the origins and consequences of their work. In the process they have reconsidered the Chicago School. Increasingly the intellectual power of the Chicago School is recognized for its portrayal of communication as a human activity for building, maintaining, and altering consensus. This contrasts with the typical view that sees communication as a means of domination, coercion, or repression. This article examines that conflicting definition of communication, especially in terms of the ways social groups engage in media criticism and enlist public support for their moral concerns. This article concludes that the United States, to avoid fragmentation, needs a public philosophy of communication based on moral consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Qualitative immediacy" (also termed "quality" in its philosophical sense and "esthetic quality") is of fundamental importance within the pragmatic conception of meaning as interpretive act, and yet it has been virtually ignored by social scientists. The concept is traced through its foundations in Peirce's philosophy, its development in Dewey's theory of esthetic experience, and its relation to the general pragmatic conception of the self. The importance of the "I " in Mead's view of the self is seen as similar to Firstness in Peirce and esthetic experience in Dewey. Those turning to qualitative approaches ought to consider qualitative immediacy as a genuine addition to our understanding of human communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article develops a critique of the notion that anomie invariably results from socio-cultural dislocation (sudden, rapid and wide-spread social change). In exploring and developing the concept of communality (communitas), the author argues that persons can and not infrequently do respond to serious disruption in social life by meaningfully reaffirming social bonds. Informed by this recognition, social theory is able to better clarify its potential contribution to the minimization of the socially and psychologically destructive consequences of structural and cultural dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the genealogy of etiquette, with reference to sociology. It is a commonplace to encounter a professor who spends his days in the laborious accumulation of psychological statistics, sticking pins into babies and plotting upon a chart the ebb and flow of their yells, and his nights chasing poltergeists and other such celestial fauna over the hurdles of a spiritualist's atelier, or gazing into a crystal in the privacy of his own chamber. The public and social utility of psychology remains very small, for it is still unable to differentiate accurately between the true and the false, or to give us any effective protection against the fallacies, superstitions, crazes and hysterias which rage in the world. The safety of human society lies in the assumption that every individual composing it, in a given situation, will act in a manner hitherto approved as seemly. That is to say, he is expected to react to his environment according to a fixed pattern, not necessarily because that pattern is the best imaginable, but simply because it is determined and understood. If he fails to do so, if he reacts in a novel manner-conducive, perhaps, to his better advantage or to what he thinks is his better advantage then he disappoints the expectation of those around him, and forces them to meet the new situation he has created by the exercise of independent thought. Such independent thought, to a good many men, is quite impossible and to the overwhelming majority of men, extremely painful.