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In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the “real” physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conceptualization of social behavior from that basis. Formalism tends to lead toward a conceptually independent sociology that in principle requires only minimal reference to the empirical and ontological storehouse of other disciplines, while behavioral-realist theory leads to an interdisciplinary sociology that can be located within a hierarchy of behavioral sciences, leading to questions regarding the relationship between sociology and other disciplines as well as issues of transdisciplinary unification and possible interdisciplinary reduction. I explore the consequences of this split for the project of explanatory sociological theory within the context of how it has manifested itself in sociological network theory and social psychology. I close with a critique and assessment of formalist tendencies in sociological theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: To date, “highbrow omnivorousness” hypothesis has been examined mainly for the case of musical taste. In this paper we attempt to extend this framework to a relatively unexplored cultural domain, that of television consumption. Using data from the 2001 Eurobarometer we hypothesize that highbrows will be more likely to consume a wide variety of other forms of popular culture, namely television programming. The results fail to unambiguously confirm the highbrow omnivorousness hypothesis: in some EU countries, highbrows consume a wider variety of television programming than non-highbrows, in other countries, highbrows are indistinguishable from non-highbrows, while in a third group of countries, highbrows are snobbier than non-highbrows in their television consumption choices. We attempt to explain this cross-national heterogeneity in the highbrow/non-highbrow difference in television consumption using organizational theory of culture production. In our “contingent highbrow omnivorousness” framework, we propose that in commercialized, profit-oriented cultural industry systems, highbrow snobbery rather than omnivorousness will be the norm. In relatively less commercialized, profit-oriented contexts, highbrow the snobbery effect will be weaker. Classifying countries by the degree of market orientation of the television production field yields results that are consistent with this hypothesis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Has the image of Che Guevara lost its power to evoke radical politics in the face of pervasive commodification? The commercialization of this 1960s political icon has called into question the power of the market to shape collective memories. Meanwhile, antisystemic movements of the left continue to erect his image at protest events. In light of this contest over how Che Guevara is remembered, we investigate, using data from a survey of Spanish citizens, who is most likely to recall him. We find qualified support for the theory of generational imprinting—Che is more often recalled by those generations who saw him rise to prominence during their formative years, although prominent as a collective symbol rather than as a living person. Our results also corroborate the claim that historical figures or events are more salient for, and therefore more likely to be remembered by, some subgenerational units than others. Thus, although the younger generations are in general more likely than their elders to recall Che, he is most frequently remembered by the highly educated leftists who espouse postmaterialist and posttraditionalist values and identify more with their local regions than with the nation of Spain. These patterns suggest that, in contrast to the dire predictions of mass culture theorists, the memory of Che Guevara has become increasingly tied to markers of social, ethnic-regional, and political identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I critically examine Stephen Turner's (1994) critique of practice theory in light of recent neurophysiological discoveries regarding the “mirror neuron system” in the pre-frontal mo-tor cortex of humans and other primates. I argue that two of Turner's strongest objections against the sociological version of the practice-theoretical account, the problem of transmission and the problem of sameness, are substantially undermined when examined from the perspective of re-cently systematized accounts of embodied learning and intersubjective action understanding in-spired by these developments. In addition, I show that the practice-theoretical framework out-lined by Pierre Bourdieu in the Logic of Practice and other works is, in contrast to Turner's por-trayal of a confused hodgepodge of logical errors and empirical impossibilities, largely consistent with the latest neurophysiological evidence and as such fundamentally foreshadowed more recent understandings of the neurocognitive foundations of the perception, understanding and structure of the motor schemes productive of action in the world. Also in line with these newer neurosci-entific developments, the practice-theoretical focus on the body as the central matrix generative of tacit understandings and analogical operations responsible for “higher order” systems of classi-fication emerges as the key to solving some of the thorniest problems in the theory of action: eliminating to need to resort to unwarranted “collective object” explanations for the origins of shared presuppositional frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the "reactionary" aspects of the film, which are seen as a response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service-oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contribution: its attempt to craft a transcendental "counter-myth" capable with dealing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post-industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo-Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender-focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value-rationality from the realm of production in service work - grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism - as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society - grounded in a domesticated version of the experience-based counter-Bourgeois ethic associated with aesthetic modernism - to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be interpreted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late-capitalist situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between different forms of cultural taste and the density of social contacts across alternative types of network relations classified by average tie strength. The author builds on Bourdieu's ([1986] 2001) classic statement on the "forms of capital" (economic, social, and cultural) and the conversion dynamics among them, and on DiMaggio's (1987) connection between cultural tastes and sociability. He hypothesizes that (1) in addition to cultural tastes being determined by network relations, cultural tastes are used to form and sustain those networks. Furthermore he expects that (2) highbrow culture taste will be less likely to be converted into social capital beyond immediate strong-tie circles due to its more restricted, "asset-specific" nature. Because of its generalized appeal, taste for popular culture will be more likely to be associated with weak-tie network density. The results broadly support these hypotheses: a model that specifies an effect of culture on network density provides a better fit to the data than the traditional conception of networks as determining taste. In addition using log-linear models and instrumental-variable methods, I show that popular culture consumption has a positive impact on weak-tie network density but not strong-tie network density, while highbrow culture consumption selectively increases strong-tie density but has no appreciable effect on weak ties, net of standard socioeconomic variables. These findings help to shed light on the mechanisms that translate mastery of different types of cultural knowledge into integration across distant social positions or closure around strong group boundaries. The author also discusses the implications of the results for current models describing the transformation of cultural into social resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The fact that women are more likely than men to participate in traditional high status leisure activities constitutes one of the most consistent findings in the empirical study of cultural choice. Most explanations of this phenomenon point to the role of early socialization and society-wide cultural norms, but surprisingly, the more proximate influence of labor force participation and embeddedness in gendered occupational cultures has not been empirically explored. In this paper I fill this gap in the cultural participation and gender literature by asking whether extent of involvement in the labor force mediates the gender gap in highbrow consumption. I follow [Erickson, Bonnie H., 1996. Culture, class, and connections. American Journal of Sociology 102, 217–252] in considering the relative usefulness of arts-related culture at work as an important determinant of individual taste patterns. Further, I show how Bourdieu''s own theory of class fractions is compatible with Erickson''s emphasis on highbrow devaluation as a byproduct of the pragmatism of workplace “business culture”. In tandem with an eye toward gender dynamics, this modified Erickson–Bourdieu perspective can then be used to solve the puzzle of the gender difference in highbrow consumption. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: According to world polity institutionalism, an emerging world culture, centered on the value of the individual as a “citizen of the world” has taken hold in most advanced industrial polities. To date, there has been no systematic study of the relationship between broader forms of subjective citizenship such as those of interest to institutional theorists, and the patterns of cultural taste and consumption of concern to sociologists of culture. In order to fill this gap, I analyze the relationship between three different forms of subjective citizenship, national (Spain), international (European community) and postnational (world community), and the propensity to display omnivorous patterns of cultural choice and to draw symbolic boundaries through the expression of cultural dislikes. If both world citizenship and the turn toward inclusive forms of cultural taste and consumption emanate from the same global cultural logic, there should be a positive relationship between patterns of geographic identification most closely connected to the world polity and cultural omnivorousness, and a negative association between world polity identification and taste exclusiveness. Regression results support this view: in relation to subnational forms of subjective citizenship, only postnational identification is positively related to both broad consumption and less exclusive taste. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of international terrorism are reviewed. It then is noted that waves of terrorism appear in semiperipheral zones of the world-system during pulsations of globalization when the dominant state is in decline. Finally, how these and other factors might combine to suggest a model of terrorism's role in the cyclical undulations of the world-system is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To determine whether first-year college students cluster in networks based on subjective perceptions of loneliness. Participants: 492 first-year Notre Dame students completed surveys across two semesters and provided communication data used to reconstruct their social networks. Methods: Subjective perceptions of loneliness are measured using the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA). Correlations between an individual's loneliness and the average loneliness of their alters are compared to associations in random networks created using a rewiring algorithm to determine statistical significance. Results: During their first semester, students are more likely than chance to form ties with other students with similar levels of family and romantic loneliness. In their second semester, students cluster on romantic loneliness but not on family or social loneliness. Conclusions: Students are more likely than chance to form ties with people with similar self-perceived levels of loneliness, but only for certain types of loneliness and during certain periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The similarity between pairs of people is often measured on relatively static traits and at a given point in time. Moving beyond this approach, a burgeoning line of research is investigating temporal dyadic similarity on traits and behaviors, such as health activities. Our study contributes to this line of inquiry by using fine-grained longitudinal data obtained from sensors, mobile devices, and surveys to examine whether we can observe distinct types of dyadic similarity trajectories based on physical activity, and if so, what dyad-level properties predict membership in each trajectory class. Treating daily differences in the steps for dyads as time series, we use k -shape clustering to identify classes of similarity trajectories and logistic regression to examine the link between trajectory class and key dyad-level factors. We identify 21 dyadic trajectory clusters and find that trajectory membership predicts dyadic connectivity in the communication network, as well as racial and religious—but not gender-based—similarity. We conclude by noting how research on dyadic similarity trajectories can be further integrated with ongoing work in social network analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding why people join, stay, or leave social groups is a central question in the social sciences, including computational social systems, while modeling these processes is a challenge in complex networks. Yet, the current empirical studies rarely focus on group dynamics for lack of data relating opinions to group membership. In the NetSense data, we find hundreds of face-to-face groups whose members make thousands of changes of memberships and opinions. We also observe two trends: opinion homogeneity grows over time, and individuals holding unpopular opinions frequently change groups. These observations and data provide us with the basis on which we model the underlying dynamics of human behavior. We formally define the utility that members gain from ingroup interactions as a function of the levels of homophily of opinions of group members with opinions of a given individual in this group. We demonstrate that so-defined utility applied to our empirical data increases after each observed change. We then introduce an analytical model and show that it accurately recreates the trends observed in the NetSense data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how levels of social capital in a new urbanist community change over time. We collected demographic and social capital data in a new urbanist community in 2001 and then again in 2010. The findings indicate that this community experienced an overall decline in social capital over this nine-year period. Additionally, we found that while residents new to the community were less concerned with social capital than long-term residents in the community, the latter group had also declined significantly in their levels of social capital. Overall, the results suggest that planners of new urbanist and other intentional communities should consider the impact of changing demographics when designing new subdivisions. Most importantly, residents and community leaders need to consider alternative means by which social capital can be retained as new residents are integrated into established communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The number of individuals claiming a nonreligious identity in the United States is on the rise, with one-fourth of the overall U.S. public failing to identify with any of the major religious traditions. In this article, we examine whether religious disaffiliation structures social network formation in a social context in which religious identification (and religiosity) is a salient cultural marker. We take advantage of unique data on the personal networks of youth transitioning into a college where religion is a culturally salient facet of everyday life. We hypothesize that, if there is nonreligious homophily, it may result from an attraction of the disaffiliated to each other or from a repulsion away from the religiously affiliated. Results of exponential random graph models suggest that both mechanisms may be at play. We find that religious 'Nones' and affiliated non-Catholics are disproportionately more likely to form and maintain relationships with one another and are relatively less likely to form and maintain relationships with members of their respective religious out-groups. We close by outlining the implications of our findings and delineating promising avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]