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This article develops an alternative vision of public sociology. Whereas public sociology is often defined through the actions of professional sociologists, this article calls for a recognition of reverse tutelage in public sociology. Here, publics are seen as sociological interlocutors who can, and often do, produce sociological theories and analyses that can inform professional sociology. I demonstrate this reverse tutelage by focusing on anticolonial and anti-racist social movements, including the Zapatistas, Black Lives Matter, Palestine Action, and Cops Are Flops. I highlight how they produce sociological theories of power, neoliberalism, race, bordering, and violence that can orient professional sociology toward relational forms of analysis that build connections between different sites of resistance. In doing so, I highlight how the boundary between what Burawoy terms "professional" and "critical" sociology is much more porous than initially theorized and that critical sociology—from wider publics—can significantly shape professional sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authors find John Levi Martin's comments on their paper cogently argued and provocative. The main burden of Martin's comment is that authors should accept a false antimony between external determination and unexplainable chance and consequently are reluctant to see human action as causal. First, authors contend that the conception of human agency as cause entails certain insuperable difficulties in analyzing some forms of human conduct, whether on the individual or the collective level. Second, they believe that chance as others define it is defensible as a component of much social behavior. Although social behavior is self-directed, constructed by the actors. As authors have tried to show in their paper, there is a need to recognize an indeterminate, chance component in certain instances. Such instances are most likely to be those entailing blocked or ambiguous courses of action which require decision making. When human beings encounter problematic situations, many alternative possibilities may be present and the outcomes may resist best efforts to explain them causally. The authors insist that this difficulty is ontological not a product simply of ignorance.

‘Theory’ is one of the most important words in the lexicon of contemporary sociology. Yet, their ubiquity notwithstanding, it is quite unclear what sociologists mean by the words ‘theory,’‘theoretical,’ and ‘theorize.’ I argue that confusions about the meaning of ‘theory’ have brought about undesirable consequences, including conceptual muddles and even downright miscommunication. In this paper I tackle two questions: (a) what does ‘theory’ mean in the sociological language?; and (b) what ought ‘theory’ to mean in the sociological language? I proceed in five stages. First, I explain why one should ask a semantic question about ‘theory.’ Second, I lexicographically identify seven different senses of the word, which I distinguish by means of subscripts. Third, I show some difficulties that the current lack of semantic clarity has led sociology to. Fourth, I articulate the question, ‘what ought “theory” to mean?,’ which I dub the ‘semantic predicament’ (SP), and I consider what one can learn about it from the theory literature. Fifth, I recommend a ‘semantic therapy’ for sociology, and advance two arguments about SP: (a) the principle of practical reason—SP is to a large extent a political issue, which should be addressed with the help of political mechanisms; and (b) the principle of ontological and epistemological pluralism—the solution to SP should not be too ontologically and epistemologically demanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One typical way to motivate a sociological argument is to present the research question as a puzzle. Unlike in physical sciences, sociologists work backward to construct theoretical puzzles from their data. Sociologists risk puzzling for puzzles’ sake, and in so doing, they reify categories and concepts that are not necessary or useful to their empirical material at hand. This essay examines mostly qualitative sociologists’ conventions for puzzling and suggests alternatives rooted in thick description of empirics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about structural sociology as practiced by one of the more important sociologists and social thinkers-Harrison White. The author has chosen this topic because structuralist thinking is an important feature of contemporary social thought; because Professor White's approach to the study of social structure is particularly influential, and because of the author's misgivings about certain features of the structuralist program. The principal claim that is made in "Social Structure" is that preexisting sociology has failed to understand social structure properly. The presently existing, largely categorical descriptions of social structure have no solid theoretical grounding. Furthermore, network concepts may provide the only way to construct a theory of social structure. Categories, White argues, are loose ways of talking about empirically existing structure, which appears only in the form of networks. The author comments on the topic of "culture marginalized." Specifically, it concerns the problematic implications of defocalizing the cultural bases of network structures. He also comments on "culture embedded" and "cultural absence."

This article locates and examines the micro-macro problem in sociology in the context of the larger problem of levels, the latter tending to include solutions to the former. Levels theory is meta-theoretical, for it is presuppositional to substantive or "sectors" theory. Levels theory constitutes the levels and therefore the "kinds" of social reality, while substantive theory looks for causal connections within and among the levels. The priority of levels over sectors theory, however, is only analytic. Historically the influence can be reversed, as levels shift in power relative to each other. The rise of sociologist Emile Durkheim's sacred self in the nineteenth century or social system in the twentieth are dramatic examples of these shifts. The article attempts to clarify the concept of levels, distinguishing several meanings of the term and choosing one to work with in the paper. The body of the article discusses the levels themselves, that is, what they are and how each is characterized. The article finally comments briefly on the connections among levels.

This paper argues that the dominance of linear models has led many sociologists to construe the social world in terms of a "general linear reality." This reality assumes (1) that the social world consists of fixed entities with variable attributes, (2) that cause cannot flow from "small" to "large" attributes/events, (3) that causal attributes have only one causal pattern at once, (4) that the sequence of events does not influence their outcome, (5) that the. "careers" of entities are largely independent, and (6) that causal attributes are generally independent of each other. The paper discusses examples of these assumptions in empirical work, considers standard and new methods addressing them, and briefly explores alternative models for reality that employ demographic, sequential, and network perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the overlaps and divergences between network sociologist Harrison White’s second edition of Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge (2008) and poststructuralist theories from the past three decades. Although poststructuralist thought is barely discussed in White’s work, comparing the approaches reveals significant convergence. I detail two major overlaps: White’s ideas of control compared to Foucault’s concept of discipline, and White’s conception of identity compared to that of feminist poststructuralists. Differences are apparent also, especially as regards treatment of categorical identities such as gender and race. Then, I turn to two ways poststructuralism and White can be put into productive conversation: how focusing on gender as discursive rather than attributional can help network analysts develop theories that better explain the gendered dimensions of social life, and how using blockmodeling methods can aid feminist poststructuralism in understanding what gender looks like without men’s and women’s bodies present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article draws attention to the importance of chance in sociological theory in the recent paper by sociologists Jerome Manis and Bernard Meltzer and their attempt to sketch alternatives to the causal determinism assumed by many sociologists, but they have not correctly specified tie challenges and possibilities in sociological explanation. Manis and Meltzer argue that there exists a class of events which possess the following overlapping features: 1) absence of cause, 2) absence of predictability and 3) absence of regularity in the sequence of the action and its antecedent conditions and that the existence of such events contravenes determinism, a fundamental postulate of science. They maintain that although some events are governed by causal laws, others are not and argue that this latter set includes chaos in the mathematical sense, quantum mechanics, evolution, trends in the arts, global politics and political movements, people actions and many key points in their lives, such as where they work and whom they mate with. The authors conclude that mainstream sociology and its search for causal laws cannot help in studying events in this broad set. This claim is especially significant because the broad set includes human action.

How do we go about understanding the "classic texts" of sociological theory? This paper begins by reviewing tile historicist position of Jones, with its foundations in the work of Quentin Skinner and other historians of political theory, This position then is criticized from the standpoint of the neo-Deweyan pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Specifically, Rorty's pragmatism encourages us to revise Skinner's and Jones's historicism on three specific points: the acceptance of treatments of classical texts that are undeniably anachronistic but nonetheless unobjectionable; the restriction of Skinners notion of an agent's "privileged access" to his or her intentions; and the adoption of a view of the history of sociological theory as a succession of vocabularies a view that encourages a new kind of dialogue between historians of sociological theory and theorists themselves. The last point is articulated in a concrete example of the interpretation of one of Durkheim's most characteristic arguments. The conclusion again stresses the benefits to be derived from viewing sociological theory - both past and present-from this pragmatist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The micro-macro distinction is a superficial distinction between place/size on one hand and sorts of action on the other. The smallness and face-to-faceness of something is no guarantee that it doesn't have a heavy institutional overlay. Sociologist Nicos Mouzelis refers to the "logic of the interaction situation," yet he clearly rejects the argument that it has a logic and claims that it unfolds situationally. This is a contradiction: Mouzelis assumes a logic while denying the grounds for arguing that there is a logic. All of the three dimensions contrasted in his conclusion are institutional, and none are interaction order "sui generis." The whole point of the term "sui generis" is that it does not depend on these phenomena for its order. He has not identified interaction order with sorts of encounters. Nor has he identified the interaction order with micro phenomena or based his distinction on then macro-micro distinction.

In the 1950s and 1960s Freudian theory was deemed to be a vital part of the sociological tradition, but since then it has fallen from favor, largely because of the simplifications and misinterpretations both by Freud's sociological critics and by his supporters. Chief among such misunderstandings is the tendency to view Freud's social theory as a variant of that of Hobbes, in which a selfish and asocial human nature is made social through the imposition of external constraints; these constraints, as Durkheim stated, eventually are "internalized" into the personalities of social beings. Against such a claim this paper argues that Freud's views differ profoundly from those of Hobbes and that the myth of the Hobbesian Freud has so distorted Freud's most fundamental concepts that their social theoretical significance has been largely obscured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popper `s logic of scientific disco very and Kuhn `s paradigm switches in science have been considered competing schools of thought in the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge. In the present paper the author establishes a unified three-dimensional frame work that synthesizes the quintessential ideas of these schools. Theories are tested for confirmation or falsification in the first dimension; their scope conditions are defined and redefined in the second dimension; and they replace their predecessors to become a dominant theory or possibly even a new paradigm in the third dimension. The development of fertility theory is examined in the three-dimensional framework. This framework helps us understand important aspects of theory construction, and thereby shed light on how to build viable sociological theory. Also discussed are major problems in formulating sociological theory. The overcoming of these problems is a necessary condition for a theory to be examined in the Three-dimensional framework, and thereby to become a candidate of a new theoretical paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents sociologist John F. Galliher's comments on the author's paper on addiction. Galliher suggests that the author's paper is guilty of the following failings. Firstly it is an attack on sociologist Alfred Lindesmith that is ideologically consistent with those mounted by sociologist Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, secondly it misleadingly casts the intimate relationship between physical reactions and human learning in Lindesmith's theory of addiction as a mindbody dualism, and it ignores the variable impact of drugs on the human actor depending on the cultural and symbolic context. Anslinger was an early and active proponent of a federal war on drugs, and his attacks on Lindesmith were based on his commitment to prosecuting drug users as criminals rather than providing addicts with therapy. The author holds that his article does not even vaguely imply an endorsement of this policy or the federal war on drugs. The author abhors the prosecutorial frenzy embodied in the war on drugs and its transparently repressive, racist, and classist consequences.

The image of Max Weber as an "interpretivist" cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber's sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber's late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of the orders sociologists seek to understand is not chaos. Action is rendered interpretable, rather, to the extent persons orient themselves to possibilities and probabilities, which remain real but unknowable. In this framework, interpretation and probability are allies, not antagonists. Weber's systematic use of the probabilistic notion of Chance as a central resource for concept formation and sociological explanation seriously challenges current understandings of probability as a purely statistical, atheoretical concern. We outline the conceptual difference it makes when basic categories of sociology are understood as rooted in Chance, and we point to the larger implications of Weber's probabilism for contemporary debates around issues of prediction, action, and interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite frequent references in the sociological literature to Durkheim's theory about the division of labor, sociologists have made few attempts to test it. The paucity of attempts and the very debatable outcomes thereof are due largely to Durkheim's use of the traditional discursive mode of theory construction. A discursively stated theory's logical structure is likely to be obscure, and for that reason alone tests of it are difficult and controversial. Rather than perpetuate the exegetical tradition in sociological treatments of the subject, this paper restates Durkheim's theory in accordance with a particular formal mode. That restatement identifies the theory's shortcomings and problems. But the eight premises imply only one testable theorem, and the theorem's predictive accuracy appears minimal unless “population concentration” is substituted for “density” in the first axiom. Nonetheless, the restatement clearly shows how extension of the theory (additional postulates) could further its testability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response of the author to sociologist James R. Abbott comments on his article. According to the author his article was designed as a methodological rather than a value analysis. It argues that should a social scientist aim to project moral values through his or her research reports, whatever the content of these values, it would be, logically, efficient to cast the work in a methodological individualist frame of reference. Whether the methodological individualist projects conservative or liberal values is irrelevant. The author gave Adorno as an example of a liberal methodological individualist. Yet, although the very section headings refer to topics such as the ontological basis of methodological individualism, the relation of a frame of reference for constructing research concepts to the projection of moral judgements, the role of concrete versus abstract concept referents, the distinction between interpretation and explanation in relation to motivational analyses, and slippages between cognitive generalizations and moral laws in history, Abbott misses his methodological concerns and converts his article into an unfriendly attack on Digby Baltzell's values.

The article focuses on sociologist Reinhard Bendix. Bendix pursued a comparative analysis of basic concepts like kingship, aristocracy, and representation in order to show what historical diversities hide behind such apparently simple terms. He wrote articles about the position of the social sciences and of intellectuals in the twentieth century, placing these reflections in the context of earlier claims made for reason and knowledge, and drawing contrasts between the social and the natural sciences. And he built bridges between concepts or theories and the available evidence through the large-scale sociohistorical and institutionally comparative studies. His interest was in comparison as a natural byproduct of biography. There he reflected briefly on his experience of Berlin compared to the U.S., his interest in comparing German and American bureaucratic behavior as well as new experience of the U.S. as a world power encountering other cultures. He worked on the intellectual background to problems of comparative inquiry. He has also discussed nineteenth-century evolutionism, with its arguments about developmental stages and epochs.

The article presents information on a reply to an essay "Jasso's Principle," by Stephen P. Turner. Turner does not challenge either Guillermina Jasso's (1988a) characterization of the goal of sociology &mash; to accumulate a body of reliable knowledge about human behavioral and social phenomena — or of sociological analysis as an enterprise consisting of the two activities — theoretical analysis and empirical analysis — or any aspect of the principles of theoretical analysis discussed in Jasso. Instead, Turner criticizes, on both logical and empirical grounds, the theory used by Jasso as an example, but without offering an alternative example, neither another theory nor a reformulation of distributive-justice theory. Working in the scientific tradition, and distinguishing between theoretical and empirical analysis, Jasso considered the goals and methods of theoretical sociology. Turner's remarks reflect pervasive misunderstanding of many aspects of the scientific method, including the process of theoretical derivation, the part played by hypothetical entities, and the variety of permissible operations.

This article offers an account of a conceptual framework in Max Weber's writings offering leverage on empirical, normative, and theoretical questions. Weber relied on the notion of Voraussetzung —presupposition—across his work to distinguish the criteria of concepts of empirical phenomena, accounts of such phenomena, and conditions shaping evaluative stands among alternative courses of action. Weber also refers to Denkvoraussetzungen —presuppositions of thought—which refer to sets of fundamental principles structuring experience. Presuppositions of thought represent historically specific metaphysical and ontological orientations. Based on a systematic analysis of Weber's work, this article reconstructs the three main forms taken by the concept Voraussetzung in Weber's writings (i.e., structuring logics, value stands, and presuppositions of thought). This article challenges sociologists to identify presuppositions of thought and to describe their ramifications throughout society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, sociologists who study society and the environment have focused on resolving the debate regarding the relationship between economic development and environmental degradation. Studies from a family of critical perspectives tend to find that economic development is antithetical to environmental protection, whereas a suite of more optimistic perspectives has uncovered more hopeful findings. We attempt to resolve these differences by situating this debate within the larger framework of the anthro-shift. The anthro-shift explains how the society-environment relationship changes over time. The theory assumes this relationship is the product of interrelations among the state, market, and civil society sectors. We focus on two distinctive qualities of the anthro-shift: the role risk plays as a pivot for reorienting how society interacts with the natural environment and the multidirectionality of the theory, highlighting how it combines elements of many of the dominant critical and optimistic perspectives into a broader framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on sociologist Darin Weinberg's paper "Lindesmith on Addiction: A Critical History of a Classical Theory," In the paper Weinberg takes up the attack on sociologist Alfred Lindesmith's theory of addiction, which was for decades an object of scorn by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and sociologist Harry Anslinger, the bureau's longtime director. Without attributing any particular motives to Weinberg, given what is known about official policy, it is not surprising the NIDA and other U.S. government agencies encourage and support criticisms of Lindesmith' s work. In any case, Weinberg correctly noted that Lindesmith made the symbolically mediated interpretations his subjects conferred upon their actions and experiences the central element of his theory. Weinberg argued that the position of Lindesmith and other symbolic interactionists was selected by these sociologists more for tactical than intellectual reasons to compete for professional advantage with other disciplines, especially psychology. The consequent prominence given to symbolic interpretations, Weinberg claims, created a dualism which is untenable on both epistemological and phenomenological grounds.

Sociologists are increasingly attentive to the mechanisms responsible for cause-and-effect relationships in the social world. But an aspect of mechanistic causality has not been sufficiently considered. It is well recognized that most phenomena of interest to social science result from multiple mechanisms operating in sequence. However, causal chains—sequentially linked mechanisms and their enabling background conditions—vary not just substantively, by the kind of causal work they do, but also structurally, by their formal properties. In this article, the author examines the nature of causal chains, identifies major structural dimensions along which they differ, and makes a case that a mechanism-based explanation would be enhanced if causal chains and their structures were brought to the analytical forefront. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological theorists have long understood the central role of status distinctions in producing social inequality. Although empirical studies have demonstrated how status hierarchies are reproduced in a broad range of cultural domains, there remains little research into where legitimating cultural practices take place, where they do not, and the role of space itself in producing status differences. As a result, sociologists lack a clear understanding of how status hierarchies give shape to cities and how the structure of cities might be practiced hierarchically. On the basis of interviews at a high-end shopping center in Istanbul, Turkey, I examine how consumers enact social rank in physical space with specific reference to the social contours of their city. Through privileging particular forms of consumption practices within socially and spatially exclusive venues, elites map legitimating values upon the physical shape of the city itself, providing a spatialized understanding of how status inequalities are distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have long been interested in understanding the emergence of new social kinds. We argue that sociologists’ formation stories have been mischaracterized as noncausal, descriptive, or interpretive. Traditional “forcing-cause” accounts describe regularized relations between fixed entities with specific properties. The three dominant approaches to causality—variable causality, treatments and manipulations, and mechanisms—all refer to forcing causes. But formation stories do not fit the forcing-causes framework because accounts of formation violate the assumptions that ground forcing-cause accounts and instead emphasize eventfulness, assemblage, and self-representation. Yet these accounts are, we argue, fundamentally causal. In particular, formation stories provide the historical, empirical boundaries for the functioning of forcing-cause accounts. We catalog the breadth of formation stories in sociology and use examples from diverse literatures to highlight how thinking of formation stories as causal accounts can improve our understanding of the relationship of history and culture to causal analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociologists have yet to theorize interactions with sonic materiality. In this article I introduce an analytical concept for the observation of interactions with sound. Sound has material effects in all situations. But the audibility of sonic objects is a relation of situated actors to material arrangements. Sonic object settings are dynamic material arrangements in which sonic qualities emerge for interpretation. The concept synthesizes research on sonic materiality, audibility, and interaction. After outlining the concept, I present an empirical illustration from an audio firm’s R&D laboratory arranged to support a new technology called object-based audio. I observed engineers conducting two concurrent but contrasting experiments; results indicate how settings both enable and constrain the interpretation of sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a new theory of conflict escalation, Randall Collins engages critical issues of violent conflict and presents a compellingly plausible theoretical description based on his extensive empirical research. He also sets a new challenge for sociology: explaining the time dynamics of social interaction. However, despite heavy reliance on the quantitative concept of positive feedback loops in his theory, Collins presents no mathematical specification of the dynamic relationships among his variables. This article seeks to fill that gap by offering a computational model that can parsimoniously account for many features of Collins’s theory. My model uses perceptual control theory to create an agent-based computational model of the time dynamics of conflict. With greater conceptual clarity and more wide-ranging generalizability, my alternative model opens the door to further advances in theory development by revealing dynamic aspects of conflict escalation not found in Collins’s model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A perennial concern among scholars of globalization is the relationship between global social formations and national and subnational political and economic developments. While sociological understanding of “the global” has become increasingly rich, stressing the complex relationship between material and cultural pressures, an undertheorized nation state often sits on the receiving end of the sociologist’s model of globalization. The goal of this article is to help move the sociology of globalization out of the analytical trap of global-national dualism by developing an account of the transnationalization of political authority. Building on neo-Marxist and Weberian theories of the transnational, or global state, which explicate the macro-structural dynamics that have led to the transnationalization of the state as such, I look at the process of the transnationalization of political authority from an institutional perspective, one that focuses on processes of transnationalization within, and across, specific state agencies. These theoretical points are empirically motivated through an historical investigation of the transnationalization of monetary authority and its relationship to the international diffusion of policies of austerity from the era of the classical gold standard through the economic crisis of 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociologists have argued that markets are politically constituted, yet we lack an understanding of the causal mechanisms through which political mobilization organizes and reorganizes markets over time. In this article I show how the concept of cultural framing—already widely used by economic sociologists—can be further developed to explain how mobilization reproduces markets in some moments while reorganizing them in others. Specifically, I link the concept of cultural framing to rent-seeking mobilization within markets to better explain when political contestation will lead to new market institutions and when it will fail to do so. I illustrate the value of this approach through an analysis of deregulation in the U.S. airline industry and conclude by discussing the consequences of the model and empirical case for the politics of markets, the rise of neoliberalism, and economic policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In contemporary sociology the once prominent study of public opinion has virtually disappeared. None of the leading theoretical models in the closest disciplinary subfield (political sociology) currently provide ample or sufficiently clear space for consideration of public opinion as a possible factor in shaping or interacting with key policy or political outcomes in democratic polities. In this article, we unearth and document the sources of this curious development and raise questions about its implications for how political sociologists have come to understand policy making, state formation, and political conflict. We begin by reconstructing the dismissal of public opinion in the intellectual reorientation of political sociology from the late 1970s onward. We argue that the most influential scholarly works of this period (including those of Tilly, Skocpol, Mann, Esping-Andersen, and Domhoff) face an underlying paradox: While often rejecting public opinion, their theoretical logics ultimately presuppose its operation. These now classical writings did not move toward research programs seeking engagement with the operation and formation of public opinion, even though our immanent critique suggests they in fact require precisely this turn. We address the challenge of reconceptualizing how public opinion might be productively integrated into the sociological study of politics by demonstrating that the major arguments in the subfield can be fruitfully extended by grappling with public opinion. We conclude by considering several recent, interdisciplinary examples of scholarship that, we argue, point the way toward a fruitful revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops and defends a theory of 'network failure' analogous to more familiar theories of organizational and market failure already prevalent in the literature on economic governance. It theorizes those failures not as the simple absence of network governance, but rather as a situation in which transactional conditions for network desirability obtain but network governance is impeded either by ignorance or opportunism, or by a combination of the two. It depicts network failures as continuous rather than discrete outcomes, shows that they have more than one cause, and pays particular attention to two undertheorized-if not undiscovered-types of network failure (i.e., involution and contested collaboration). It thereby contributes to the development of sociology's toolkit for theorizing networks that are 'neither market nor hierarchy.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists of culture studying “fan activism” have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a growing body of work by social movement scholars on “movement societies,” and more particularly on a nascent thread of this approach we develop that theorizes the appropriation of protest practices for causes outside the purview of traditional social movements. Theorizing that the Internet, as a new media, is positioned to accelerate the diffusion of protest practices, we develop and test hypotheses about the use of movement practices for fan activism and other nonpolitical claims online using data on claims made in quasi-random samples of online petitions, boycotts, and e-mailing or letter-writing campaigns. Results are supportive of our hypotheses, showing that diverse claims are being pursued online, including culturally-oriented and consumer-based claims that look very different from traditional social movement claims. Findings have implications for students of social movements, sociologists of culture, and Internet studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that, in order for white racial consciousness and practice to shift toward an antiracist praxis, a relational understanding of racism, the “self,” and society is necessary. We find that such understanding arises from a confluence of propositional, affective, and tacit forms of knowledge about racism and one's own situatedness within it. We consider the claims sociologists have made about transformations in racial consciousness, bringing sociological theories of racism into dialogue with research on whiteness and antiracism. We assert that sociological research on white racism and “whiteness” tends to privilege propositional and tacit/common sense knowledge, respectively, as critical to shifting white racial consciousness. Research on antiracism privileges affective knowledge as the source of antiracist change. We examine some of Perry's recent ethnographic research with white people who attended either multiracial or majority white high schools to argue that the confluence of these three types of knowledge is necessary to transform white racial praxis because it produces a relational understanding of self and “other,” and, by extension, race, racism, and antiracist practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of “brotherliness” as presented in Max Weber's sociological studies of religion. It argues that Weber presents a complex, if at times implicit, understanding of a number of contrasting forms of brotherliness: charismatic, Puritan, mystic, and medieval Christian. The article suggests that although these contrasting forms have been largely overlooked by Weberian scholars, they add an important dimension to Weber's understanding of the costs and paradoxes of Western rationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the place of postmodernism in sociology today by making a distinction between its epistemological and empirical forms. During the 1980s and early 1990s, sociologists exposited, appropriated, and normalized an epistemological postmodernism that thematizes the tentative, reflective, and possibly shifting nature of knowledge. More recently, however, sociologists have recognized the potential of a postmodern theory that turns its attention to empirical concerns. Empirical postmodernists challenge classical modern concepts to develop research programs based on new concepts like time-space reorganization, risk society, consumer capitalism, and postmodern ethics. But they do so with an appreciation for the uncertainty of the social world, ourselves, our concepts, and our commitment to our concepts that results from the encounter with postmodern epistemology. Ultimately, this article suggests that understanding postmodernism as a combination of these two moments can lead to a sociology whose epistemological modesty and empirical sensitivity encourage a deeper and broader approach to the contemporary social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of emergence is a central thread uniting Durkheim’s theoretical and empirical work, yet this aspect of Durkheim’s work has been neglected. I reinterpret Durkheim in light of theories of emergence developed by contemporary philosophers of mind, and I show that Durkheim’s writings prefigure many elements of these contemporary theories. Reading Durkheim as an emergentist helps to clarify several difficult and confusing aspects of his work, and reveals a range of unresolved issues. I identify five such issues, and I show how Durkheim’s writings on emergence suggest potential responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work by political sociologists and social movement theorists extend our understanding of how religious institutions contribute to expanding democracy, but nearly all analyze religious institutions as institutions; few focus directly on what religion qua religion might contribute. This article strives to illuminate the impact of religious culture per se, extending recent work on religion and democratic life by a small group of social movement scholars trained also in the sociology of religion. In examining religion's democratic impact, an explicitly cultural analysis inspired by the new approach to political culture developed by historical sociologists and cultural analysts of democracy is used to show the power of this approach and to provide a fuller theoretical account of how cultural dynamics shape political outcomes. The article examines religious institutions as generators of religious culture, presents a theoretical model of how religious cultural elements are incorporated into social movements and so shape their internal political cultures, and discusses how this in turn shapes their impact in the public realm. This model is then applied to a key site of democratic struggle: four efforts to promote social justice among low-income urban residents of the United States, including the most widespread such effort—faith-based community organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker. The original contexts of his thought are not well understood and greatly distorted by associating him with the concerns of Parsons. Shils provides a fully comparable alternative to the thought of Habermas and Foucault, with essentially similar roots: practice theory, the dissolution of Marxism in the twenties, and Carl Schmitt. Though Shils was indebted to the American sociological tradition, with respect to these issues his sources were outside it: in Hendrik de Man, T. S. Eliot, and Michael Polanyi. It is shown how Shils responded to Schmitt's argument about the inherent conflict between democracy and liberalism in terms o fan account of civility and tradition, and how this argument results in a critique of Foucault, Habermas, and collectivistic liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sociologist Digby Baltzell. The author does not agree with sociologist Samuel Klausner that Baltzell was consciously, or for that matter unconsciously, applying methodological individualism or any other kind of meta-theory or social epistemology he had learned from his teachers at Columbia. The author and Baltzell were drawn together in the 1960s by their common dislike of the radical student movement, although their negative views of it had a somewhat different slant. With Baltzell's broad historical perspective, he saw the sound and fury as yet another outbreak of the futilely utopian millenarianism to which Western society had been prone since at least the late Middle Ages. Baltzell and liberal sociologists were in entire agreement on the very American belief in full equality of opportunity with no barriers of "race, color, or creed," as the old slogan ran, limiting the upward social mobility of the ambitious and talented of whatever origin. Where Baltzell differed from liberals and most sociologists was in his conservative defense of a hereditary upper class with its own solidarity, style of life, and distinctive institutions, assimilating into its ranks capable individuals who were not to the manor born and transmitting to them its own sense of the responsibilities of political leadership.

The ways in which values are assimilated to social research differ according to the theoretical frame of reference informing the research. An example from the writings of E. Digby Baltzell illustrates how a moral commitment shaped his assumptions about the nature of the social matrix and his research strategies. A Western moral rhetoric fares well if the researcher chooses a methodologically individualist framework. The framework assists a moral rhetoric by providing it with concrete rather than abstract social actors and with a basis for explanation in terms of motive rather than situational forces. Along the way moral statements can appear in the form of empirical generalizations and historical laws. Should sociologists deem ethically neutral social research desirable, this study suggests that concentration on scientific method, without exploring the value bases for selecting a frame of reference, is not a promising approach. A value analysis, especially around Weber's "value relevance," may function propaedeuticly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that a theory's assumptions always are and ought to be unrealistic. Further, we should attempt to make them more unrealistic in order to increase a theory's fruitness. Many sociologists believe that a theory,s assumptions ought to be empirically realistic. I contend that this criticism probably stems from the confusion of a theory's assumptions with its scope conditions. While Friedman's (1953) similar prescription is associated with the instrumentalist philosophy of science, I maintain that it is also consistent with the realist view if "unrealistic" is taken to mean "incomplete" rather than "untrue. "I discuss a recent theory of the value of children by Friedman, Hechter, and Kanazawa (1994) to point out holy assumptions differ from scope conditions and holy empirically plausible and realistic hypotheses can be logically deduced from highly unrealistic assumptions. I then discuss Kollock's (1993a, 1993b) revision of Axelrod's (1984) Cooperation Theory as an example of when assumptions need to be revised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sociologist Everett C. Hughes and his works. Through the essays written for specific occasions, freely developing a small number of concepts, his work offers a collection of subtly elaborated ideas that outline an analytic perspective on social reality. But these essays, in form and in content, scarcely resemble what is understood today as "theory." One can read Hughes's essays with this double reference, which he recommended and applied himself to: the works of the time when he was trained as a sociologist, but also to the period in which he did his own research. Everett Hughes, like anthropologist Robert Redfield, belonged to the second generation of sociologists trained in the University of Chicago, Department of Sociology. Closely linked to the reform movement of the Progressive Era, he used to characterize the relation of researchers to their own social origins. Hughes is an emancipated sociologist who uses the latest work in social science, but never forgets what he owes to his predecessors and to the accumulation of knowledge to which they contributed.

Sociologist Max Weber's most extensive and definitive exposition of the postulate of Wertfreiheit can be found in the Logos of 1917 under the title "Der Sinn der Wertfeiheit der ökonomischen und soz-iologischen Wissenschaften," the meaning of Wertfreiheit in the economic and social sciences. He begins with the following sentence "By value judgments is to be understood, when not stated otherwise or when it is obvious, as the practical bestowing of value to a phenomenon which can be influenced through our actions as something capable of being censured or of being approved." To be sure, Weber, offers shortly afterwards, in his lecture Wissenschaft als Beruf, Science as a Vocation, to also provide the proof through the works of the historians that wherever the man of science applies, his own value judgments, the full understanding of facts ceases. Yet, in principle, Weber's claim orients itself to the refraining of science from making value judgments of phenomena that are still in flux, and which can be influenced by human actions.

The concept of social structure is crucial in social analysis, yet sociologists' use of the term is often ambiguous and misleading. Contributing to the ambiguity is a tendency to imply the meaning of "social structure" either by opposing it to agency or by contrasting it to culture, thus reducing "structure" to pure constraint and suggesting that "culture" is not structured. Even more damaging is the tendency to conflate these two contrasts To add to the confusion, these contrasts are often mapped inappropriately onto other dichotomies prevalent in social theorizing, including material versus ideal, external versus internal, static versus active, and objective versus subjective, to produce a conceptual prism in which structure, agency, and culture are all poorly understood. This article attempts to disentangle these concepts from the aforementioned system of contrasts, to specify the connections between structure and agency, and to make a case for the inclusion of culture in the sociological conception of social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologist Daphne Spain has marshaled a great deal of evidence which suggests a correlation between women's low social status in relation to men's and the degree of spatial gender segregation. Specifically, Spain hypothesizes that the lower a woman's status in a society, the greater the degree of spatial segregation that may be observed between women and men in that society. This physical exclusion of women from men's spaces helps to perpetuate or exacerbate women's low status and subjugation primarily by keeping women from acquiring the types of socially valued knowledge that traditionally has remained sequestered in men's spheres of influence; these are schools, the workplace, and, to a lesser extent, the household. The spatial segregation of women at the macro or social structural level, as described by Spain, tells a grim tale of the everyday experiences of these women at the micro level, especially with regard to what happens-or rather, doesn't happen in face-to-face interaction. Cut off from the spaces in which socially valued knowledge is produced and protected largely by men, women are blocked from engaging in the forms of interaction through which such knowledge may be enacted or received. Sociologists argue that the ideal community, wherein heterogeneity is celebrated and in which the forces of racism, sexism, arid homophobia do not operate to devalue certain groups, can be realized only if face-to-face interaction among members is assured in various contexts.

Under the sway of the postulate of determinism, sociologists (with some exceptions) have given little direct attention to sheerly fortuitous events Such events are analytically distinguishable from those which are considered the results of chance only because we currently lack knowledge of their causation Exemplifications of pure chance abound in the various arts and sciences, including sociology (especially in work by symbolic interactionists). Direct, explicit consideration of random, accidental, or chance phenomena requires approaches that emphasize both the processes of behavior and interaction and the case-study method of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideology often has been regarded by sociologists as an elusive and muddy concept. We believe that the understanding of this core concept can be improved by the use of constructs drawn from a pragmatic, interactionist perspective. We argue specifically that !) ideologies are based on a set of relatively simple metaphors and images to which people respond on the basis of their shared experience and expectations; 2) ideologies are not purely cognitive, but depend principally on emotional responses; 3) ideologies are presented at such times and in such ways as to enhance the public impression (and justin, the claims and resources) of presenters and/or adherents; ideological enactment is fundamentally dramaturgical and interactional; and 4) ideologies are linked to groups and to the relationships between groups, which in turn depend on a set of resources in order to enact ideologies effectively. Ideologies are symbolic, affective, behavioral, and relational. In focusing on these themes, we avoid some overabstract conceptions of ideology that are endemic in social scientific literature. Instead we emphasize how ideologies can be linked to lived experience and to social interaction--a microsociological grounding of ideology. To understand the dynamics of ideology we examine ideologies about the environment, drawing from an ethnographic investigation of amateur mushroom collectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metatheoretical codifications of the sociological writings of George H. Mead, Joseacute; Ortega y Gasser, and Alfred Schutz highlight the importance of the idea of life and of a commitment to a realist perspective. The authors turn common concern with the life concept in three directions: evolutionary emergence, historical rationality, and phenomenological analysis. In spite of differences, these directions share an empirically grounded starting point in the situated individual and its environment, and end with suggestions for a universalist rationality. Preliminar3' metatheoretical principles from these authors offer a start toward a vital realist sociology fitted to the universal conditions of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a justification by the author of the "Sociological Theory" symposium article, "Postmodern Social Theory: Representational Practices," of the criticisms made by other writers. The author wrote this article for an audience of professional sociological theorists, especially those who were suspicious of postmodernism and dismissive of feminist postmodernism. The author's focus was on the constitutive power of language. According to the author, the criticism that the author has slurred teachers by calling them merely teachers, when she was doing precisely the opposite, is ironic. In the author's opinion, feminist political practices are inseparable from personal practices, including the practices of academic hiring, writing, valuing and excluding. Theory is built from "lived experience" and uses and the theoretical tools it needs to address historically situated and culturally reproduced power imbalances. Narrative social theory that accounts for variegated, situated experiences is a choice. Modernist and postmodernist texts can both exist.

This article presents information related to the symposium in "Sociological Theory," on postmodernism. According to the author, by expressing the importance of undergraduate publics and a joyful attitude toward students, writer Mary F. Rogers opened a fresh perspective in this symposium. She referred to a vocation that has been fragmented and supplanted by mundane professionalism and careerism. Her effort, however, to explain theorists' interests in postmodern theories by their professional locations and their alleged disengagement from under-graduates is problematic. As in the case of postmodernism, science should be read in the plural and grasped realistically and critically in all its complexities and contradictions. Its conflicting qualities, powers and potentialities remain a decisive, contested twain. Positions that ignore this reality can easily overlook the irrational aspects of oppression and underestimate the dangers of anti-modern revolutions.