Search

This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accomplishments and limitations of cultural sociology in all these areas, the paper indicates ways to strengthen it by setting it in conversation with other and more explicitly critical currents of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces developments in Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. The aim is to introduce the reader to the key components of this theory as it developed from a functionalist focus on societal values through semiotics and linguistic structuralism to a theory of cultural trauma and collective performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of social theory is too often given to celebrity hunting, the polemical vulgarizing of one's putative enemies, or the precocious production of totalizing and redemptive theories purporting to rescue social theory from its perennial crises of meaning, naming and explanation. The constructive task of social theory, however, can be both more modest and productive when attention is given to its substantive concern to provide codes, narratives and explanations of modernity, in all its pluralist and democratic dimensions. This is in effect the self-description of Jeffrey Alexander's own work. This paper provides an empathetic account of Alexander's approach to the practice of social theory via a synopsis of his collected essays in Fin de Siècle Social Theory (1995). In particular, it claims that Alexander's critique of the reductionist propensities of Pierre Bourdieu's macro-sociological theory is exemplary in its constructive cast as a systematic analysis of the universalizing contents of the conceptual and methodological claims themselves. Herein lies the use of reason itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper retraces the conceptual development of Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. It centres on three major conceptual achievements: first, the distinction between inside and outside and its more peculiar variants (like system and environment or friend and foe); second, the elaboration of the temporal axis as a distinct dimension of cultural analysis; and finally, the close focus on performativity that took centre-stage in cultural analysis during the last years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an introduction to academic papers clustered around sociologist Jeffrey Alexander's work and the project of American cultural sociology and published in the scholarly "Thesis Eleven" periodical. Consistent energy towards renewal; European current in American sociology; Youthful engagement with Marxism at Harvard University; Horizon of culture as the unifying theme; Premise of the intelligence of everyday action.