Search

Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that their peer review experience was dominated by interpretive challenges: extensive criticisms, suggestions, and subsequent revision concerning conceptual and theoretical issues but limited attention to methodological and empirical aspects of the work. Salient differences between original submissions and published papers include intensive reworking of theory and discussion sections as well as growth and turnover in citations and hypotheses. We consider implications of the dominance of interpretive challenges in successful revision and possible sources of variation across scholarly fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to develop a nuanced and qualified account of the distinctive ways in which religion can inform political conflict and violence. It seeks to transcend the opposition between particularizing stances, which see religiously informed political conflicts as sui generis and uniquely intractable, and generalizing stances, which assimilate religiously informed political conflicts to other forms of political conflict. The paper specifies the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious understandings of right order, as well as the distinctiveness of religion as a rich matrix of interlocking modalities and mechanisms that—in certain contexts—can contribute to political conflict and violence even when the stakes are not distinctively religious. At the same time, the paper shows that many putatively religious conflicts are fundamentally similar to other conflicts over political power, economic resources, symbolic recognition, or cultural reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pushes interactionist sociology forward. It does so by drawing out the implications of a simple idea, that to understand the situation--the mise en scene of interactionist theory--we must understand it in relation not only to past-induced habits of thought and action but to future situations anticipated in interaction. Focusing especially on the rhythmic nature of situations, the paper then argues that such a recalibration both unsettles core tenets of interactionism and helps solve some problems in the sociology of culture. As an illustration, it focuses on two such puzzles--the place of disruption in interaction and the relationship between the notion of "boundaries" and of "distinctions" in the sociology of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and sexuality studies, it is a curiously aspatial and atemporal concept. This paper seeks to re-embed it within space and time by situating its emergence within colonial and imperial histories. Based on this discussion, it ends with three lessons for contemporary work on gender and sexuality and a broader theorization of sex-gender-sexuality regimes beyond the heterosexual matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its enduring insights, Durkheim’s theory of suicide fails to account for a significant set of cases because of its overreliance on structural forces to the detriment of other possible factors. In this paper, we develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the role of culture in vulnerability to suicide. We argue that by focusing on the cultural dynamics of excessive regulation, particularly at the meso level, a more robust sociological model for suicide could be offered that supplements structure-heavy Durkheimian theory. In essence, we argue that the relevance of cultural regulation to suicide rests on the (1) degree to which culture is coherent in sociocultural places, (2) existence of directives related to prescribing or proscribing suicide, (3) degree to which these directives translate into internalized meanings affecting social psychological processes, and (4) degree to which the social space is bounded. We then illustrate how our new theory provides useful insights into three cases of suicide largely neglected within sociology: specifically, suicide clusters in high schools, suicide in the military, and suicides of “despair” among middle-aged white men. We conclude with implications for future sociological research on suicide and suicide prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power is the ability to send and bind someone else to act on one’s behalf, a relation that depends upon habits of interpretation. For persons attempting to complete projects, power involves communicating with, recruiting, and controlling subordinates and confronting those who are not in such a relationship of recruitment. This leads to a basic theoretical vocabulary about power players and their projects—a model of rector, actor, and other. As multiple relations of sending and binding become mutually implicated, chains of power—understood as simultaneously social and symbolic—emerge. The vocabulary presented for analyzing power is developed with reference to a series of instances, including the exploitation of labor and police violence. Finally, the paper analyzes a case study of an imperial encounter on the American frontier and examines therein a shift in how political power was represented, with implications for the sociology of transitions to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce the idea of the dual process framework (DPF), an interdisciplinary approach to the study of learning, memory, thinking, and action. Departing from the successful reception of Vaisey (2009), we suggest that intradisciplinary debates in sociology regarding the merits of "dual process" formulations can benefit from a better understanding of the theoretical foundations of these models in cognitive and social psychology. We argue that the key is to distinguish the general DPF from more specific applications to particular domains, which we refer to as dual process models (DPMs). We show how different DPMs can be applied to a variety of analytically distinct issues of interest to cultural sociologists beyond specific issues related to morality, such as culture in learning, culture in memory, culture in thinking, and culture in acting processes. We close by outlining the implications of our argument for relevant work in cultural sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Color is a central feature of social life, yet its value in sociological theory is ambiguous. This paper establishes an approach to a social theory of color by focusing on color perception. Using theories from materiality studies and cultural sociology, I argue that color perception is an unstable and contestable phenomenon shaped by social and material factors. My argument is empirically grounded in a case study of a blockbuster museum show called Gods in Color. The show toured 21 cities in Europe and North America from 2003 to 2015. Its centerpiece—brightly painted reconstructions of ancient Greek and Roman marble sculptures—triggered a vigorous debate about the limits of science in correcting historical optics. The case has broader implications for sociological theories of authenticity, materiality, and aesthetic knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconceptualizes "individualism" as a discursive strategy of action through which everyday Americans attempt to manage the cultural dilemma of engaging in externally imposed social obligations within a broader individualistic culture. While classic formulations have treated individualism as a strong cultural force directing actors toward voluntaristic and privatized lives, my analysis--grounded in an inductive analysis of 17 qualitative studies of religious Americans--finds individualism working primarily as a discursive strategy, through which actors frame their participation in activities influenced by external authority and communal obligation in ways that emphasize their own agency and autonomy. This revised conceptualization suggests that American individualism may not be as "deep" or powerful as is often assumed. More generally, it offers a novel approach for conceptualizing and further studying the dynamic relationship between broadly "national" and more local and communal cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durkheim’s theory of suicide remains one of the quintessential “classic” theories in sociology. Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, it has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. Rather than defend Durkheim’s theory on its own terms, this paper elaborates his typology of suicide by sketching suicide’s socioemotional structure. We integrate social psychological, psychological, and psychiatric advances in emotion research and argue that (1) egoistic, or attachment-based suicides, are driven primarily by sadness/hopelessness; (2) anomic/fatalistic, or regulative suicides, are driven by shame; and (3) mixed-types exist and are useful for developing a more robust and complex multilevel model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]