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The work of W. E. B. Du Bois is a powerful but unjustly neglected resource for sociological enquiry. Powerful insofar that it cuts against the grain of sociology as it exists today, offering a distinctive set of tools that allow the social world to be approached, conceptualised and studied in new ways. Unjustly neglected insofar that the explicit and implicit racism of sociology has positioned Du Bois as a peripheral figure. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the task of recuperating Du Bois's hidden potency by considering his theory of social time. I argue that Du Bois's essay 'Of the Meaning of Progress' presents an incisive critique of the triumphalist conception of progress that was dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the diffuse desire for a better future common in sociology today. Du Bois rejects the idea that history moves in a necessary and ameliorative fashion towards an ever better world. Instead, drawing on the black experience of slavery and racial violence, Du Bois proposes a notion of ugly progress: a looping conception of time that involves shuffling between the disappointments of the past and utopian hopes for the future. To conclude, I suggest the ugly conception of progress offers a fresh perspective on how marginalised figures from the past, such as Du Bois himself, should be positioned within the discipline of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary research into the field of body pedagogics has produced a growing number of studies concerned with the embodied character of cultural transmission, experience, reproduction and change. This article advances this sociological development by reinterpreting recent writings on situated epistemic relations (SER) and practical epistemological analysis (PEA) as complementary, methodological, techniques that can enhance these investigations. After outlining existing explorations into the body pedagogics of occupational, sporting, religious, educational and other cultures, the author demonstrates how the interlinked approaches to learning made possible by systematizing SER and PEA can be developed into a new approach that increases the effectiveness with which the theoretical and empirical concerns of studies into embodied acculturation are harnessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces Michel Maffesoli's article 'From Society to Tribal Communities', in which he argues that emerging communities, although post-modern, are not entirely new but archaic and rooted in pre-modernity, and that these tribes are further facilitated by new technological developments such as social media. The introduction summarizes the main argument of the article while contextualizing it within both Maffesoli's wider work and secondary literature that critically engages with his unique approach to studying postmodernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long indexed by sociological ideas of structure, the notion of extension is yet disparate and poorly disseminated - as evidenced by popular motifs such as 'the world is at our disposal' eschewing notions of emplacement and embeddedness and instead championing choice and individualised agency. On the assumption that this lacunae relates in part to paradigm debates over incommensurability, the proposal in this inaugural lecture is to explore double-crossing as a methodological device by which to draw insights on extension from major 'gatherings' of Euro-American thought, while respecting the orderings, institutional arrangements, situations and networks each approach imposes. In retracing the 'disposal' of the world through four theoretical perspectives germane to sociology - namely systems, culture, self and language - the objective is to illustrate the methodology of double crossing. Drawing on both my work on social and cultural theory and my field studies in market leaders, I first show how moving back and forth between the older and newer ground within each perspective helps to elicit what gets unsighted from either view. Secondly, inasmuch as the usual way of 'making a clearing' is argued as caught 'in reaction' from extant theory (ending up say talking of parts instead of wholes or consumption in place of production), I advance the methodology of double-crossing by excavating the recessive arrangements and ordering implicit in each perspective and so illuminate the different ways extension is affected by how world is imagined and experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places under critical and reflexive examination the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of lifestyle migration. Developed to explain the migration of the relatively affluent in search of a better way of life, this concept draws attention to the role of lifestyle within migration, alongside understandings of migration as one stage within the ongoing lifestyle choices and trajectories of individual migrants. Through a focus on two paradigms that are currently at work within theorizations of this social phenomenon - individualization and mobilities - we evaluate their contribution to this flourishing field of research. In this way, we demonstrate the limitations and constraints of these for understanding lifestyle migration; engaging with long-standing debates around structure and agency to make a case for the recognition of history in understanding the pursuit of 'a better way of life'; questioning the extent to which meaning is made through movement, and the politics and ethics of replacing migration with mobilities. Through this systematic consideration, we pave the way for re-invigorated theorizing on this topic, and the development of a critical sociology of lifestyle migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biological and physical anthropologists have tended to see the study of human variation and the material body as the defining elements of their subdiscipline(s). Generally, sociologists and social anthropologists, in contrast, have shown little interest in such issues. For them, the body has often been taken for granted, absent-present, as a relatively stable and commanding platform on which a variety of cultural inscriptions can be established and performed. Recent theoretical developments, however, in anthropology, sociology and related fields – informed by the notions of biosociality and nature cultures – contribute to the understanding of an unstable, relational and variable body. Since the material and the social body are fundamentally conflated through continuous processes of relationality and embodiment, this paper argues, the issue of human variation needs to be revised and expanded. Such rethinking has important biopolitical implications, particularly in the context of divisions marked by race, ethnicity, class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically explores sociological arguments for greater biosocial synthesis, centring contemporary developments in public policy to demonstrate how such a reframing of humanity tends to reinforce existing political orders and socially patterned normativities. The case for further amalgamation of the social and life sciences is examined to suggest that production of somatic markers of truth from relational encounters largely relies upon an anaemic and politically contained version of the social as acquired in early childhood. More specifically, the gendered, classed and culturally specific practice of parenting children has come to occupy a new significance in accounts of social brains and environmentally reactive genomes. This is highlighted through a discussion of 'early intervention' as a heavily biologized policy rationale framing opportunities for biosocial collaboration. It is argued that late capitalist objectives of personal investment and optimization are driving this assimilation of the social and life sciences, pursuing an agenda that traces and re-scores long-standing social divisions in the name of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does moderation mean in the twenty-first century? And what might a reasoned project of moderation look like, intellectually, politically and in practice? This paper argues for a sociological reappraisal of the historical origins, intellectual foundations and contemporary salience of moderation. Too often wrongly defined by a sense of what it is not - by its apparent absence of ideology - moderation has come, in recent years, to be associated with 'bland' and incoherent notions of centrism. However, moderation presents sociologists and other scholars with particular analytical and theoretical challenges and opportunities. In a post-secular liberal democracy like Britain, an exploration of what moderation might mean demands an interrogation of the often taken-for-granted assumptions of the social sciences and the ideological extremes more generally. Moderation is about the relations among publics and the possibilities of a deep pluralism that is respectful of difference. However, publics are under threat by markets and the future of sociology, tied to the future of publics, without revivified social and political practices of moderation, may be bleak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can, or should, social theory try to 'see it whole'? This article explores some of the aesthetic, political and conceptual issues that arise when we pose the problem of representing social totality today. It revisits two influential assertions of theory's calling to generate orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society: C. Wright Mills' plea for the 'sociological imagination' and Fredric Jameson's appeal for an 'aesthetic of cognitive mapping'. Mills and Jameson converge on the need to mediate personal experience with systemic constraints, knowledge with action, while underscoring the political urgency and epistemic difficulty of such a demand. The article contrasts these perspectives with the repudiation of a sociology of totality in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. It explores this contrast through the 'panorama' as a visual practice and a metaphor for theory itself. Against Latour's proposal to reduce and relativize totality, it argues that sociology can learn from contemporary artistic efforts to map social and economic power as a whole. 'Panoramic' projects in the arts, such as Allan Sekula's and Mark Lombardi's, can allow us to reflect on sociology's own deficit of imagination, and on the persistence of the desire to 'see it whole' - especially when that whole is opaque, fragmented, contradictory. A live sociology can only gain from greater attention to the critical experiments with forms and methods of representation that are being carried out by artists preoccupied with the staging of social totality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an examination of social displacement processes within the context of globalization and in light of social science studies that have focused on the concept of social fluidity. The article explores both concepts, discusses the similarities and differences between the two theories and examines how they have influenced sociology. It examines how each theory addresses issues such as social and system integration and discusses how academics such as economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek and economist Joseph Schumpeter have contributed to each theory.

Abstract This article is a critical response to John Minger's recently published piece ‘Can social systems be autopoietic?’. It draws attention to instances in this piece where Mingers has misconstrued Luhmann's theory – especially in the central concepts of openness and closure, system-environment relation, interaction, and functionality, but also in the interpretation of the role which Luhmann ascribes to the political system – and it attempts to give a more accurate analysis of these terms, and of their place in Luhmann's overall sociology. The article also asserts, more generally, that to criticize Luhmann from the perspective of action-centred theory, as Mingers has done, fails to reflect on and integrate Luhmann's direct challenge to perspectives of this kind. The article concludes with the argument that legitimate criticism of Luhmann should set out a more immanent account of his sociology, and should not simply have recourse to the more traditional sociological perspectives, which Luhmann has already effectively called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces and criticizes Michael Maffesoli's contributions to sociological theory, with regards to his attempt to formulate a post-modern sociology for post-modern times. While arguing that Maffesoli's sociology is suggestive and insightful about many aspects and features of late-modern life, the article questions whether Maffesoli's approach should be accepted as a fruitful sociological paradigm which others should take up uncritically. Moreover, it also argues that Maffesoli's approach is an ultimately incoherent and one-sided approach to studying the post-modern condition, in that it does not escape the problem of performative contradiction identified by some other notable sociologists. That is to say, Maffesoli has produced a one-sided and flattened out image of modernity that cannot account for the possibility of social and political critique. Any engagement with Maffesoli's sociology, therefore, must be critical, and as a first suggestion it is necessary to argue for a more complex understanding of sociological methodology and modernity than that provided by Maffesoli.

This review provides a critical commentary on the sociology of consumption recently developed by Peter Saunders in the new edition of his Social Theory and the Urban Question and elsewhere. Comment is made on the politics of socialized consumption, the sociology of consumption sector cleavages and the concept of a privatized mode of consumption. Note is also made of the methodological critique of realism and the assertion of a Weberian alternative which underpins the contribution. It is argued that although the approach provides some insights it tends to get locked into a series of unproducive conceptual and methodological polarities in its attempt to undermine the supposed hegemonic position of Marxism within contemporary urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts are being made to associate a supposed 'return to the private' with a parallel phenomenon of a 'return to community'. Both terms, private and community, are central to sociological theory, but are surrounded with confusion and a profusion of historical referents which confirms their importance but obscures their significance. This review of the literature and of the various problematics for which the 'private sphere' is a key concept concludes that it is civil society which determines the modalities of discussion as well as the actual degree of autonomy of the 'private', and thus that an approach from the side of the 'private' (or of 'community') can be of only restricted value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intellectual reasons for the failure of sociology to give sufficient attention to warfare and military organisation as central problems in social theory. These reasons are to be found in the dominance of liberal functionalism and Marxism as paradigms in the development of sociology. A reorientation of social theory is called for and it is suggested that writers in the neo-Machiavellian tradition provide an important corrective to sociological orthodoxy in respect of the role of war and military organisation in social life. The paper goes on to show that these factors are crucial components in an adequate account of one of the most important problems raised by sociology: why did hegemonic capitalism develop originally in the West and not elsewhere. Thus, ironically, those factors which sociology has tended to ignore are actually the key to solving one of its central problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article raised some issues concerning the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work and the relevance his ideas might have for the social sciences, especially for sociology and anthropology. Clammer argues that Wittgensteinianism produces paradoxical conclusions by, on the one hand, rendering sociology impossible while, on the other, logically requiring it but yet providing no clue as to what sociological course we might chart. In reaching this, as he himself admits, preliminary conclusion, Clammer addresses problems raised by Wittgenstein's notions of 'language game' and 'forms of life' and their possible implications for the autonomy of belief systems, the relativity of rationalities and the consequences of both of these for understanding alien cultures. His paper raises important issues about the interpretation of Wittgenstein's position which I would like to consider. Also I want briefly to suggest that there are sociological practices consistent with the ideas contained within Wittgenstein's later work. I do not particularly want to argue that Wittgenstein should be henceforth treated as one of the Founding Fathers of sociology, simply that his work can be taken as an important source of inspiration for certain kinds of sociological work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article informs that sociologists undertaking the teaching of and generalizing about the problems of Africa, Latin America and Asia have immersed themselves in bewilderingly complex and diverse social realities. It is informed that the disintegration of the European empires, punctuated by the success of the Chinese revolution and hastened by the decolonization of India, led to a partial rupture of the umbilical cord that tied the European centres to their far-flung dependencies. When the Bandung Conference was convened, virtually all the post-colonial societies of Africa and Asia were represented, together with what may be loosely referred to as ex-semi-colonial countries, like China and Yugoslavia-- a political self-identification of major significance. Those who were involved with the study and teaching of societies outside Europe and the U.S. have faced more directly than their colleagues a "shifting" reality which called into question some of the basic assumptions and precognitions of conventional sociology.

The article focuses on the social theory. Far from depriving the sociologist of creativity, therefore, the precept of representativeness demands it of him. Indeed, it has already been suggested that if he succeeds in articulating a representative experience, the sociologist plays a part in shaping and extending the particular experiences upon which it is based. But the creativity involved in this is of a particular kind. It is emphatically not the kind which provides a warrant for any and every variety of nebulous, romantic, utopian subjectivism. This article has culminated in the proposition that sociology has been shaped and, in terms of its concepts and methodological principles, permeated by representative traditions of value which have articulated the representative experiences of its times and places. A second major purpose of the article, however, has been to attempt to provide a defence against the manifest dangers which follow from the inadequate ways in which propositions about these elements are all too frequently formulated.

In the course of the 19th century, French social philosophy witnessed the emergence of a concept from obscure beginnings in the realm of jurisprudence and its rapid transition into a cliché which, by the end of the century, had won such widespread ascendancy that had it then been decided to substitute one principle for the official Republican ideals, the trinity 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,' it would undoubtedly have been 'Solidarity'. This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the social philosophy of Emile Durkheim, successor to Saint-Simon and Comte as the exponent of the sociological strand in the Solidarist tradition, and in his turn forerunner of the reformist syndicalism of Leon Duguit.

The article focuses on functionalism that has come to occupy a position of central importance in sociological theory. Though it has not yet received a comprehensive exposition, much has been said about it from various points of view; many criticisms of it have been advanced; and to a great extent, these criticisms have been met. It seems worthwhile, then, to review the development of functionalist theory and to attempt an assessment of its achievement or, at least, of its potentialities as a social theory. In a sense, Functionalism is extremely old in that its assumptions are implicit in practically all the earlier attempts to think systematically about human society. In "The Rules of Sociological Method," sociologist Emile Durkheim maintains that for an adequate explanation of social facts two things are essential. First: it is necessary that one should have a historical account of how these social facts have come to be what they are and second: one requires an analysis of the functions of these social facts in terms of the social ends they serve.

The article presents information on the book "On Theory and Verification in Sociology," by Hans L. Zetterberg. Zetterberg doesn't mind taxonomical exercises but in this book he is bent on pursuing more systematically organised lawlike propositions. The result of the abstractions which follow is not altogether surprising. The abstractions of sociological theory do not make exciting reading and, to use a phrase of the writer's, contemporary sociological theory is hardly "information packed."