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This article presents a commentary on papers about the sociology of religion. The question of the influence of the sociology of religion on general sociology and on the general intellectual debate is easier to pose than to answer. There is a growing awareness that there are well-developed sociologies other than those which dominate Western social science. Reading Emile Poulat's paper about the founding of the Conférence Internationale de Sociologie des Religions, one is struck by the fact that the sociology of religion is presented as a world of its own. It is as if the sociology of religion does not need any external or outside justifications for its existence and development. Meanwhile, James Beckford points out that there have been various studies describing and revealing some important social tendencies. There has been proliferation of studies of religious movements, charismatic renewals and fundamentalist uprisings with visible and dramatic effects on social life and societal frameworks. Industrial society had a fairly stable structure and an institutional build-up based on rules that are centrally enforced by state authorities and shared norms. The information society displays a much greater variety of codes, world views and cosmologies.

Classical analyses of differences among the sciences has measured social but not cognitive structure. This paper suggests a method for describing differences among fields in the processes of knowledge growth. The method examines closely what is said about a particular scientific paper when it is cited in later works, and traces changes over time, if they occur. A comparative analysis of cases drawn from neuropharmacology and the sociology of science is used to illustrate the approach. The two papers analyzed shown strong differences in the level of generality at which the contents of the original papers are cited. Lack of change over time in how the sociology of science paper is cited is attributed to the lack of attention to its main empirical knowledge claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'place-making' emerged in media studies in 2015, but to date, there has been little theoretical engagement with the term. The primary research question this scoping review answers is how is 'place-making' defined across disciplines and which methodologies have been applied to creative and digital projects? A bibliometric analysis of 1974 publications from Web of Science (published in the last 30 years) were analysed to (1) define 'place-making' across disciplines, (2) model common themes in scholarship, (3) identify the methodologies used and (4) understand the impacts on citizens. The results show that 'place-making' first appeared in geography/urban studies in 1960s, was then adopted as 'creative placemaking' in the creative industries, and in the past 5 years (since 2015), it has appeared as 'digital placemaking' in media studies. It also highlighted areas (i.e. gaps) for future research into 'creative placemaking' and 'digital place-making' practices for cultural heritage sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the social theoretical foundations of a sociology of media and communication by making use of the cultural–historical school in psychology. Such perspective gains relevance in digital capitalism and the blurring of production and Internet usage. The paper first revisits Habermas's influential notion of communicative action and agency. Second, it uses activity theory as an alternative, more promising way of theorising because it links communication closer to work. A model of communicative action is introduced and a conceptual link between media and human tool use is established. Third, the paper elaborates on the notion of activity in the digital world and posits that digitalisation can be understood as a 'machinisation' of mental and communicative-coordinative work. The developed perspective, the paper concludes, allows critical media and communication sociology to operate with meaningful concepts of communicative expropriation, exploitation and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Trumpism during the rise of New China, book review on "Sketches in the Theory of Culture," and sociology's promise.

It is well-established in the literature on the economic dimensions of US college sport that it has become a site of professionalized, value-producing work that does not equitably compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for the production of value therein. Yet, while these interventions make highly compelling political economic claims, few focus on how college athletes themselves experience the system and thus the exploitation they might endure. Drawing on testimony from semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 former college football players, we aim to expand discussions of exploitation beyond debates over compensation through our analysis of the contrast between 'work' and 'play' that exists in the lives of campus athletic workers. Utilizing a non-deterministic Marxian theory of exploitation, this paper explicitly interrogates the way capitalist ideology permeates college football by centering the important tension between 'work' and 'play' that contributes to that ideology as experienced and understood by college football players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical theory has already marked that technology often threatens civil liberties, personal autonomy, and rights. Heidegger, later Marcuse, emphasized how technology is not value-free in its own revealing power of the surrounding environment, external and inner nature. Throughout this paper, I explore how the aesthetic approach engages with critical theory and contributes to the sociology of media and communication. For this, I will theoretically survey the terms of sociality under the forces of immediate communication, ubiquitous surveillance, and the compression of time and space that Baudrillard and Virilio once problematized through the lens of critical technology theory to adapt it to media and communication studies. I contend that techno-aesthetics that converge with Rancière's dissensus can provide practical suggestions on an updated vocation of critical sociology. This article discusses the potential of aesthetic and social criticism of media for democratizing technology that Feenberg inserted. It is urgent to acknowledge the changing spatio-temporal aesthetic regimes that affect the societal imagination and limits of sociality and action to determine the next steps for achieving a commons-based society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers interested in the structure of scientific fields have documented increases in specialization and collaboration. How, if at all, are these two trends related? Is specialization so severe that scholars cannot collaborate unless they share specific research interests? Or, have specializing tendencies promoted research that joins specialty areas and broaches new topics? We answer these important questions for a single discipline, sociology, using both qualitative interviews and latent profile analysis. We empirically identify three collaborative styles that depend on both the areas and extent of specialization in coauthors' research programs. The prominence of the reinforcing generalist profile suggests that specialization in science mainly serves to encourage scholars to work with others in their specialty area. However, the existence of two other styles - a more complementary one and one that is characterized by migration into new intellectual terrain - suggests that subfields within sociology are permeable enough to permit boundary-spanning, original research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that the Zionist policies implemented by Israel had and continue to have a grave impact not only on the Palestinians in historic Palestine alone but also follows them in the diaspora, where some Palestinians have taken refuge. This article argues that Israel's apartheid regime, exposed by various international Human Rights Organizations, is not a recent discovery. Apartheid, the exclusion of the natives, and their racialization have accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception. Crucial questions raised in this paper include how Palestine and the Palestinians are conceived by Zionism, in and outside of Israel, and how they are perceived by the West, especially within the Canadian context. This paper pays special attention to comparing the experience of Palestinians with that of North America's Indigenous population, specifically concerning Israel's and Canada's colonial policies towards the Indigenous peoples. It also discusses the impact of Israel's policies of silencing and vilification that doggedly follow Palestinians into the diaspora: vilifications and silencing enacted by the Israel lobby through its various Zionist (Jewish) branches, whose primary role is to silence and vilify the Palestinians and curb criticism of Israel and Zionism. This policy, it is argued, is strongly supported by Canada, structurally, institutionally and through media propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, sexual field theory has emerged as the cutting edge of the sociology of sexuality. This paper turns Bourdieu's own formulation of field back upon sexual field theory to investigate sites where sexual field theorists break from Bourdieu and what questions these sites of divergence raise. I pinpoint two unresolved issues in sexual field theory: (1) the ambiguous boundaries of sexual fields and (2) the obfuscation of power. Both points relate to the autonomy of sexual life, which sexual field theorists may overstate. This paper recommends new lines of analysis which may advance field theory more broadly, the sociology of sexuality, and the feminist reinvention of Bourdieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology is one of the major disciplines to foster understanding and protection of the livelihoods of local people. For instance, the discipline can describe the linkage between the environment and people and the effects of environmental change on local groups of people in a Delta country such as Bangladesh. However, the imperial philosophy of modernity that dominates the discipline and which is evident in the Sociology department at the University of Dhaka (UofD) underscores a considerable distance between academic conceptualizations of local perspectives on issues such as climatic change and the actual views of the local people of Bangladesh. Grounded on this assertion, this paper explores a question: What are the challenges for Sociology to represent Delta people and protect their social justice? The paper depends on the content analysis of sociological practices at UofD: imperial modernity and climatic adaptation. The findings of the paper argue that Sociology has been failing to represent the local meanings of climatic change due to the domination of imperial conceptualizations of modernity. Climate finance conceptualized by a Western perspective, and Sociology, as a discipline, fails to represent locally contextualized meanings related to climate finance; thus, the marginalized groups of people are increasingly facing survival challenges responsible for climate apartheid. Only a decolonized Sociology can challenge this imperial domination and play an effective role in reducing the discipline's gap of understanding of the local people and in promoting social justice in Delta Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with Manuel DeLanda's Deleuze-inspired 'assemblage theory' from a perspective sympathetic to Pierre Bourdieu's field theory. It first outlines DeLanda's proposed new 'philosophy of society', focusing on his major works in this vein, and registers some scepticism as to its originality for sociology. It then introduces and responds to DeLanda's critique of Bourdieu. Rather than simply reject assemblage theory outright, however, I draw on selected insights from DeLanda to push field theory in new directions. More specifically, I conceptualise the interplay of fields and assemblages and use notions of 'exteriority' and 'possibility space' to help conceive individual plurality of social positioning and its effects for subjectivity and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the first ethnographic account of Foxconn in Zhengzhou—the world's largest iPhone manufacturing base—this paper argues that a new labor regime features 'hegemonic precarity' has arisen since capital's move to inland China. Despite being offered formal contracts with long-term benefits, inland Foxconn workers choose a more precarious employment status. I argue that this surprising pattern is a result of the interaction between dynamics at the point of production and that of social reproduction. Through the mechanism of 'hoarding of time', Foxconn's management pays relatively high wages to a minority of workers while keeping the majority's wages minimal. Meanwhile, changing dynamics in the realm of social reproduction makes Foxconn workers, especially women with children, constantly struggle between work and the family. Working together, these factors have led to extremely high turnover rates, bleak prospects for labor solidarity, and the rise of 'gig manufacturing' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a list of books related to sociology. "The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain," by Bernard Porter; "Affirmative Action in the United States and India: A Comparative Perspective," by Thomas E. Weisskopf; "Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity," by Jeffrey Ogbar; Others.

The article has two aims: firstly, it provides a holistic account of Zygmunt Bauman's oeuvre, and secondly, it presents an extensive up-to-date and multilingual bibliography of his published writings. The authors discuss Bauman's prolificacy, as well as the stylistic, formal and substantive heterogeneity of his work. Taking this into account, they reflect on the curious reception of his oeuvre in the wider disciplinary field of sociology. The bibliography attached to the paper provides the most complete account of Bauman's writings. Building on previous bibliographies, and drawing on archival research in the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Papers at the University of Leeds, the bibliography spans 63 years from his first publication to his most recent. Many of these papers – both in English and Polish – are presented for the first time in the list of his works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Settler colonial projects erase Indigenous peoples and their histories to justify expropriation of sovereign land. Educational curriculum plays a central role in settler colonialism by denying both long-standing connections to the land and dehumanizing those on it, relegating them to objects to be controlled or assimilated by colonizers, positioned as the colonized land's rightful owners. This has long been the case for Palestinians. Violent expulsion from their land began with the settler colonial Zionist project in the late-19th century, a time of global colonization, and continues into the present, alongside the denial of Palestinian subjectivity and 'permission to narrate' their own history in public, political, and academic discourses. This paper examining US-based college-level introductory sociology textbooks finds that they replicate and perpetuate colonial narratives through Orientalist ascriptions and Palestinian de-Indigenization, while eliding the settler colonial and apartheid conditions under which they live, thereby contributing to the settler project themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces Palestinian women's political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists' analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates that the highly cited documents which clustered together were significant documents according to specialists. The succession of cluster maps suggested that the specialty had undergone a rather radical shift in research focus. In this regard too, the data reflected accurately the perceptions of the specialists. The citations provided, in effect, a physical and measurable manifestation of a collective mental switch from a static to a dynamic conception of collagen. Several specialists interviewed stressed the close knit character of their specialty, a few major centers of research, a small number of leading researchers and a high level of informal communications among researchers. There seems to be little doubt that the co-citation clusterin methodology has identified, at least in this case, a research specialty with all the characteristics ascribed to "invisible colleges." On the other hand, the collagen specialty differs in one important respect. There is no evidence in collagen of a self-conscious or deliberate revolutionary program being carried out by a group of researchers when the specialty underwent its conceptual shift in the early 1970's.

This paper sets out to conduct an embodied and situated aural analysis of what silence in Northern Norway is about, with the aim of bringing forward the background noise. The paper brings together theories on construction of the rural, time-space relations, soundscape ecology, and on affect and power, and it merges academic traditions about how to communicate findings from non-visual biased studies. This interdisciplinary framework provides a novel structure for both analysing material and communicating findings from embodied studies of listening out. The study found that silence in Northern Norway is about not listening to the economy of scale, to the commodification of the natural conditions and the suppression of lifestyles and territory. The paper illustrates how power is an inherent part of listening and how listening is a practice that is enacted to create emotions that are associated with a specific time-space relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 contact tracing app was announced to the British public on 12th April 2020. The UK government endorsed the app as a public health intervention that would improve public health, protect the NHS and 'save lives'. On 5th May 2020 the technology was released for trial on the Isle of Wight. However, the trial was halted in June 2020, reportedly due to technological issues. The app was later remodelled and launched to the public in September 2020. The rapid development, trial and discontinuation of the app over a short period of a few months meant that the mobilisation and effect of the discourses associated with the app could be traced relatively easily. In this paper we aimed to explore how these discourses were constructed in the media, and their effect on actors – in particular, those who developed and those who trialled the app. Promissory discourses were prevalent, the trajectory of which aligned with theories developed in the sociology of expectations. We describe this trajectory, and then interpret its implications in terms of infectious disease public health practices and responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Historically, clinical reasoning has largely been considered from an empirical, biomedical standpoint. This epistemology, rooted in imperial rule, is influential in how healthcare practitioners practice. An empirical approach to healthcare often oversimplifies the complex nature of clinical reasoning by obscuring the influence of imperial ideologies on decision-making. This can perpetuate inequitable approaches to healthcare delivery which deepen social, political and economic divides globally. This paper aims to explore and challenge this standpoint by exploring how power, imperialism and performativity influences healthcare provision and decision-making amongst healthcare practitioners in dysphagia rehabilitation. Methods: Qualitative exploratory interviews were undertaken with seven South African trained SLPs with experience working in dysphagia. To allow for participation and collaboration from participants, three data collection tools were employed within the interviews: oral histories, cognitive mapping and arts-based tasks. An initial modified thematic analysis followed by a further ideological analysis were undertaken to analyse the data collected. Results: The results suggest that the participants felt influenced by several manifestations of power within healthcare. We argue that this demonstrates that imperial practices can influence knowledge, interaction and context and therefore affect how healthcare practitioners make decisions. Conclusion: By acknowledging the impact of imperialism and power dynamics on healthcare provision and clinical reasoning we can potentially begin to transform the epistemology from which we approach healthcare provision in favour of one which is better suited to the current realities of healthcare to allow for equitable service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time plays an integral role in understanding how the social is possible. However, most discussions of sociological classical thinkers—such as Georg Simmel—remain starkly underexplored in terms of their theories' temporal presuppositions. While most responses to Simmel's work credit him for his major contributions to the sociology of space, in this paper I aim to systematically reconstruct his explicit and implicit temporal assumptions and explore how these inform some of his social-theoretical writings and his sharp temporal diagnosis of modernity. For this purpose, I re-evaluate some of his central works using a theory distinction between social-theory, which aims to answer what constitutes the social, versus theory-of-society, where the key focus is what form or forms human societies have taken so far, and especially what form modern society takes. By offering a new reading of Simmel's philosophical and sociological writings, I formulate a comprehensive social theory of time, in which time is both located within individual consciousness and reciprocally mediated by a culturally fixed and supra-individual timeframe, thus highlighting the temporal tensions between individual flexibility and social standardization and coordination. Simmel's diagnosis of modernity reveals a conceptualization of time in spatialized terms, a monetization of time, and an acceleration of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns a little-known debate between Jürgen Habermas and György Márkus. Habermas argued that the Marxian paradigm of production was obsolete in the light of his own proposal for a 'communicative turn' in contemporary critical theories that avoids reductivism by focusing on moral learning processes connected to language and communicative interaction. This paper sets out Habermas's critique of the paradigm of production and Márkus's rebuttal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology today faces a number of serious challenges to its integrity as a discipline. As a synthesis of Weberian and Durkheimian traditions, the work of Randall Collins represents an innovative vindication of sociology in the early 21st century. This article explores Collins's interaction ritual theory to demonstrate its contemporary utility. However, to highlight the importance of Collins's work, it seeks to advance and refine it theoretically. Specifically, it seeks to develop Collins's argument about the role of emotions and, specifically, effervescence, in rituals. This paper argues that, while important, effervescence alone cannot be sufficient to ensure the conformity which is a typical feature of interaction and essential to explaining social order. Drawing on Goffman, Asch and Scheff, the paper argues that effervescence is underpinned by more robust mechanisms of honour and shame, themselves immediately connected to access to collective goods. In this way, the paper affirms the importance of Randall Collins's work for sociology today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is reminiscence and a critique of Robert K. Merton's work in the sociology of science. The author got to know Merton very well as he served as his student assistant, and colleague for 15 years from 1960. Merton's works which are most discussed are his doctoral dissertation on Puritanism and science, his paper on scientific norms, and his paper 'The Matthew Effect'. He is criticized for not generalizing far enough from his work on the Puritan thesis and for not paying close enough attention to the empirical data, which cast doubt on the validity of his theory of the Matthew Effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special issue contributes to the exploration of transversal solidarities counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand and a xenophobic populism on the other. It tracks contours of a multifarious countermovement, traversing 'race', class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the common and the renewal of democracy. The emphasis is on the understanding of contending urban justice movements, welcoming communities and their liaisons in a multiscale (local, national, transnational) perspective. A collection of theoretically informed papers discusses cases from urban contexts of Europe and the United States, all riveted by schisms of class, 'race'/ethnicity and gender, occupied by the 'migration' issue and challenged by contending movements for social cum environmental sustainability. Exploring examples of social movements and forms of mobilisation in different contexts, the overarching aim is to retrieve options for transversal solidarities transcending identities while focusing on commonalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worker misclassification is a form of precarious employment in which employers illegally designate their employees as 'independent contractors' to cut labor costs. Non-standard employment arrangements and the emergence of the misclassification problem are expressions of neoliberal economic reform and attendant shifts in managerial strategy. Although scholars and government statisticians have documented the prevalence of worker misclassification, extant research on labor-organizing campaigns in response to this practice is lacking. This paper presents case studies of two successful organizing campaigns against worker misclassification: (1) a United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBCJA) effort in the Northeastern construction industry and (2) a Teamsters campaign focused on the West Coast port trucking industry. Both campaigns employ similar frames highlighting competition, free markets, and the necessity of industrial change to achieve these ideals. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects and limitations of these organizing strategies given the countervailing political and economic headwinds posed by neoliberal restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some texts appear more than once across the corpus of Zygmunt Bauman's work. This has led to accusations of self-plagiarism and a lack of scholarly rigour. This paper is an explanation of why texts reappear. It pays attention to a number of frequently overlooked texts from the 1970s which are of fundamental importance for any understanding of Bauman's work. It is contended that if: (a) there is an understanding of the stakes and purpose of sociology as it is framed in Bauman's work; and (b) attention is paid to the argument of Hermeneutics and Social Science; then (c) the repetition of texts across the work becomes explicable and unproblematic. The paper argues that dealings with Bauman's work need to be more aware of the less well-known texts. They also need to be alert to different – and incommensurable – ways of practising sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides some information about British organization Study Group and its activities since its formal inception at the 1969 Easter BSA conference. At that time sociology of science was not really firmly established as a distinct sub-area of sociology and most people interested in it were primarily either sociologists of organizations and of education or connected with then growing "science of science" area. Papers presented at recent meetings of the group reflects a wide range of interests. Most papers profounded that a sociology of scientific knowledge is possible and the theoretical and epistemological implications of this view have been extensively discussed. A major means of demarcating this area from others has been the emphasis on theoretical aspects of understanding scientific knowledge. Some papers were concerned with issues in the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science, as well as with general questions of sociological theory. Science is perceived more as one part of the cultural system rather than as entity separate from society.

The prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses and medication use has increased over time around the world, but significant regional differences remain. This paper aims to determine and explain disparities in ADHD prevalence and medication use among school-aged children in two distinct school systems, in Flanders (Belgium) and Québec (Canada). We present detailed descriptive and comparative analyses of data from 35 schools, 114 teachers, and 1046 parents (children) that were collected as part of a comparative international project. The data concern teacher and parent suspicions, teachers' ratings of ADHD-related behaviors in children, teachers' views of medication use, and teachers' beliefs about ADHD. The results show that, compared with Flanders, Québec had significantly more children diagnosed with ADHD and more frequent suspicions of ADHD in children by teachers and parents. We refer to the conceptual, institutional, and interactional levels of medicalization to interpret our findings and conclude that social and cultural readings of children's behaviors differ greatly between regions. Medicalization of children's behaviors is more common in Québec than in Flanders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of partisanship, rightwing media, and social media on attitudes about contemporary conspiracy theories. Mainstream scholarly views that 'both sides' of the political aisle indulge routinely in such theories are challenged. I adopt a Gramscian hegemonic framework that examines rising rightwing conspiracy theories as a manifestation of mass false consciousness in service of a political-economic system that serves upper-class interests. Issues examined include the QAnon movement, 'big lie' voter fraud conspiracism, and Covid-19 conspiracy theories, and the way they related to partisanship, rightwing media, and social media. I provide evidence that Republican partisanship, rightwing media consumption, and social media consumption are all significant statistical predictors of acceptance of modern conspiracy theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses Trump's failed self-coup, its authoritarian backwash, and threats to democracy. It analyzes his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which contributed to his 2020 election loss and deepened the political polarization that led to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. The essay also discusses how the forty-year acceleration of economic inequality and sociopolitical de-democratization generated a legitimacy crisis of the hegemonic, neoliberal regime that opened way for Trumpist ethnoracial nationalism. The Trump presidency and pandemic increased the intensity of the political-economic contradictions and transparency of the attenuated relationship of democracy and capitalism. In the consequent "interregnum," fundamental threats to democratic electoral institutions persist, yet a clear, realistic vision of an alternative democratic regime and the political bloc to bring it into being have yet to be forged. The fate of American democracy rides on overcoming the remarkable denial and normalization of the Trump coup attempt and on forging new safeguards for electoral institutions. Preventing a recurrence, however, requires a progressive transformation of Trumpism's de-democratized seedbed – neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying theories from sociology and social psychology concerned with the intersection of culture and cognition to in-depth interviews, this paper empirically explores the Norwegian majority population’s perceptions of cultural diversities using a dual-process (DP) methodological and analytic approach. Globalization has produced a mix of new anxieties, opportunities, and curiosities, leaving most people juggling conflicting objectives of self-preservation and selfrealization, and making cognitive self-regulation and behavioural flexibility valorized skills of contemporary life. Instead of identifying xenophobic and cosmopolitan attitudes at opposite ends of a spectrum, the current paper argues in line with current research and theory in studies of DP cognition that they commonly co-exist, albeit in separate automatic and discursive cognitive systems, within the same individual. As a result, people’s perceptions of cultural and ethnic diversities tend to be ambivalent and contextually malleable – for example, in cases where their deep dispositions appear incompatible with their own self-concept or dominant cultural expectations. Most centrally, the current research proposes concrete strategies to elicit responses from both cognitive systems in the context of interpretive interviews. Secondly, the paper proposes clues that help to identify from which cognitive system interviewees’ conflicting cosmopolitan and xenophobic attitudes originate, thereby enabling researchers to further delineate the specific characteristics of these attitudes, including the mode of cultural learning through which they form, their flexibility or robustness to change, their role in behaviour motivation, and the extent to which they are conscious and controllable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how working-class activists challenged and overcame political fear narratives during the anti-water charges campaign in Ireland (2014–2016), with specific focus on the ‘sinister’ narrative, an attempt by the government and its supporters to frame working-class protestors as violent, irrational and extremist. Rather than subscribing to the position that political fear is ubiquitous or the reflection of a general societal malaise, this paper follows Jeffries’ argument that political fear is mediated, contested and contradicted. While political fear operates most effectively when targeting expectations for normal living, it is these same expectations that offer fertile ground for opposing fear threats. Drawing on interviews from activists, this paper shows how the ‘normal living’ becomes a key context in which ‘deviance framing’ around class and gender can be reappropriated/reframed by activists, particularly through the deployment of counter spectacles and through the reframing of what constitutes legitimate emotional responses to government-initiated fear threats. Finally, while political fear can have an individualising effect, this paper demonstrates how subjective and individual acts of transgression are mediated through a collective and community lens as the crucial element in overcoming political fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as an introduction to the special section on Global Culture Revisited which commemorates the 30th anniversary of the publication of the 1990 Global Culture special issue. It examines the development of interest in the various strands of globalization and the question of whether there can be a global culture. The paper discusses the emergence of alternative global histories and the problematization of global knowledge. It examines the view that the current Covid-19 pandemic signals a turning point, or change of epoch, that marks the end of peak globalization (Gray, Mignolo). The paper also discusses the view that global was always a limited cartographic term which failed to adequately grasp our terrestrial location on the earth (Latour). Currently, there is considerable speculation about the emergent politics of a new world order, with civilizational states set alongside nation-states, opening up an epoch of greater pluriversality, and at the same time greater uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier companion paper published in the journal, I drew on an ethnographic analysis of the care pathway field to argue that the growing popularity of pathway methodology can be explained, in part, by its effectiveness in aligning clinical and management interests in offering a single solution to shared health service problems. This breadth of appeal disguises tensions between clinical and management agenda which creates challenges in inscribing this multiplicity of interests into the pathway design and implementing the methodology in practice. This helps to explain the challenges of pathway development and implementation and the range of interventions to which the term 'pathway' is applied. In this paper I consider how pathway leaders have responded to these concerns and offer an alternative response, informed by social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents reply of the author to his critics. In this article, he expresses gratitude to David Bloor and Wes Sharrock for their lengthy responses to his article "Rule-Scepticism and the Sociology of Knowledge." According to the author, he has said a little about philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his paper. In his reply, Bloor speaks of "Wittgenstein's reductive approach to meaning" and aligns Wittgenstein with his own reductionist ambitions. Whether Bloor's move is defensible depends on what the author means by "reductionism" or "reductive approach." Bloor is surprised that the author finds his position vis-a-vis reductionism ambiguous. In order to make sense of his assessment, he assumes that he must, have ignored "half of the theory" that he puts forward in his article, "Wittgenstein: Rules and Institutions." The author agrees with Bloor that Barry Barnes' work on designation devices is of great interest. Bloor's discussion of Barnes' theory displays precisely the ambiguity that the author was worried about in his paper. According to Bloor, Barnes' paper shows that a structure of non-intentional processes can provide the underpinning and matrix for sustaining intentional processes and which derive their intentionality from it.

Theories of a new phase of earth history, the Anthropocene, position human world-making activity as a bio-geological force. Social interventions into earth systems have been extensive and malignant, altering the earth's surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. To adapt and respond to emerging planetary dangers requires the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines. In this paper, I argue that a coalition of the arts and sciences might draw upon György Márkus's extensive studies of the topography of 'high' culture. I reconstruct Márkus's conceptual map of the arts and sciences as regions of 'high' cultural activity, each with their own criteria of value yet subject to an integral unity and shared ambition. Both regions of 'high' culture aim to create original works of significance for an engaged public. I then examine the implications of Márkus's claim that the classical vocation of robust, public-oriented culture has run aground. The field of problems that this paper traverses are not the ecological crises of the Anthropocene per se. I attend rather to Márkus's account of the neoliberal erosion of cultural infrastructure where democratic publics might engage with such problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and temperament, of the early 20th-century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid. With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector masquerade as education as a social good while the 'university' itself is skewered with the tragic realism of forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though much research underscores the significance of social inequalities in illness, the health consequences of inequity tend to occupy a marginal position in medical education. Drawing on qualitative interviews with third and fourth year medical students, this paper explores how future doctors understand and would improve health in the United States. While participants with background in public health and policy understand that social inequalities shape health and access to care, many others emphasize individual behaviour and motivation as central to ill health. Emphasizing health behaviour aligns with biomedical understandings of disease, and also captures the hold of neoliberal values over ideas of health and illness. Focus on health behaviour also provides a means of ignoring the racist roots of enduring inequity that underlies much ill health. Making inequity more visible in medical education and practice necessitates recognizing the sway of neoliberal thought over common-sense ideas of health and illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that Bauman's personal experiences deeply shaped his work. In the first part, I draw upon my own research, combining archive documents and interviews data, as well as – for the very first time – details taken from Zygmunt Bauman's own unpublished autobiography, accessed courtesy of the Zygmunt and Janina Bauman Archive project at the University of Leeds. The second part of the paper draws upon my wider ethnographical study into the lived experiences of asylum seekers, conducted between 2017 and 2019 in Southern Europe. I focus here upon their experience of escape and their present life conditions in order to highlight important parallels with Bauman's own experiences as a refugee. The conclusion draws both cases together in order to understand a less overt aspect of Bauman's sociology and to claim that the term 'migrant' is both discriminatory and, in academic terms, incorrect. I argue that this diagnosis is reinforced further by the voices of intellectuals who themselves experienced the status of refugees: namely, Zygmunt Bauman and Hannah Arendt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with a rise of populism seemingly in all corners of the globe, the need to facilitate meaningful communication between different world-views and to resist the closing down of dialogue is pressing. In this paper, I argue that Zygmunt Bauman's sociological method has always been concerned with this problem and that a better appreciation of his writings on hermeneutics provides us with a vital strategy for resisting fundamentalist thinking in today's dark times. To begin, I briefly explore the relationship between hermeneutics and fundamentalism before moving on to elaborate Bauman's method of sociological hermeneutics. In the final section of the paper, I assess the implications that Bauman's method has for the discipline of sociology at a time when the certainty of things is the most avid of dreams dreamed by people harassed and oppressed by the uncertainty of liquid modern life, apparently whatever the human consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways nationalism has been theorised in classical and contemporary sociology. More specifically, the author analyses the relevance of Randall Collins's contribution to theories of nationalism. Since Collins's work is firmly rooted in the classical tradition, including the reinterpretation and synthesis of Weber, Durkheim and Goffman, the first part of this paper zooms in on the classics of sociology and their treatment of nations and nationalism. The second part of the paper outlines the key features of Collins's approach and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of this position. The final part builds on the footsteps of Collins and others to articulate an alternative approach focused on the coercive organisational, ideological and micro-interactional grounding of nationalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue outlines the significance of Randall Collins's contribution to sociology. The first section briefly reviews Collins's main books and assesses their impact on social science. The second section offers a summary overview of the papers that comprise the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the response of Noretta Koertge to the recent discussion in the journal of the book she edited. She describes features of scientific method and explains that scientists devote much of their energies to trying to exclude their own biases from their observations, and she lists the familiar techniques that are used to accomplish a degree of what is commonly called objectivity. It is noted that those who work in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) not only know scientific method and its aspirations, they value and cleave to it. Thus, SSK tries to generalize so that its results can be repeated in other settings, historical details are checked with respondents and, where possible, sources are carefully documented so that they can be checked by others.

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to bring the field of mathematics within the scope of the sociology of science. An analysis is performed to determine whether citations are a rough measure of quality in mathematics. Citations to work published by mathematicians who have been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences are compared with those to the work of a random sample of university-based American mathematicians. The study examines productivity and citation counts, to determine if there is a relationship between a mathematician's age and achievement, and to test the claim that younger mathematicians are more apt to do important work. Finally, this paper explores the difficulties peculiar to the sociological study of mathematics, which account for the reluctance of most sociologists of science to study this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that race must be a central consideration in understanding migration in Korea, where international migrants are rapidly reshaping the national landscape. While migration scholarship on Korea has analyzed various policy trajectories, it has predominantly focused on three aspects—liberal democracy, ethnicity, and gender—largely overlooking the significance of race. First, it assumes that liberal democracy will eventually supersede xenophobia without critically examining its assumptions that are both racialized and teleological in nature. Second, by prioritizing ethnicity, it interprets discrimination against migrants through the notion of uni-ethnicity and a fear of foreignness without delving into Korea’s deeply rooted fixation on race. Third, it overemphasizes gendered migration, regarding Korea’s demographic crisis as a primary reason for accepting migrant women as biological reproducers. This paper contends that all three aspects are intricately connected to race, including Korea’s aspiration for whiteness and abjection of blackness, which significantly shape migration dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have contributed to the development of the animal studies field in recent decades. However, many of these ventures have been anthropocentric, stopping short of sociological calls for animal liberation despite the fact that critical sociological concepts are often the (unspoken) antecedents of such work. Here, we present a systematic review of peer-reviewed sociological articles on human–animal relationships since 1979. Our analysis identified key themes supporting charges of anthropocentrism, but also aspects of politicised animal sociology. Based on this we call for sociological animal studies to incorporate a specifically Emancipatory Animal Sociology: an approach grounded in a social justice and emancipatory praxis that explicitly and critically engages with the material conditions of animals' lives, taking into account the experiences and knowledge of activists and others working directly with animals and, where possible, centres the animals themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]