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This paper aims to discern, clarify, criticise, and advocate some uses of phenomenology in sociological research. Phenomenology is increasingly evoked or implicitly employed in sociological endeavours. Little attention, however, is paid to what is entailed in taking a phenomenological approach, and whether it is employed to advance empirical or theoretical knowledge. I build an analytic typology of different empirical and theoretical uses of phenomenology, criticise a range of these uses, and argue that other uses bear significant potential for the advancement of theoretical and empirical knowledge. The paper's main contribution lies in comparing and contrasting the many invocations of phenomenology in contemporary social scientific research to discern their benefits and shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a debate on why Bourdieusian scholars have never fully embraced the "Introduction/Literature review/Data & methods/Results/Discussion" (ILDRD) article format which is mainstream in North American Sociological publications. This paper attempts to argue that Pierre Bourdieu, Jean‐Claude Chamboredon, and Jean‐Claude Passeron developed a different writing format – inspired by Gaston Bachelard's "applied rationalism" ‐‐ and which became more influential among French scholars. The Bourdieu inspired different writing patterns and reasoning, I argue, can be traced in the flagship journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. This paper invites further debate on the differences in approaching article formats in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being a central topic, current theories of motivation in sociology remain underdeveloped. This paper supplements existing sociological theories on motivation with insights from affective and cognitive neuroscience to address this issue. The resulting sociological affective model of motivation treats affect as an independent force that sometimes coordinates with cognition while taking charge at other times. Drawing on recent work in the neuroscience of motivation and reward, the paper shows how two affective mechanisms—wanting and liking—can shed light on various behavioral outcomes of interest while allowing for sharper theorizing of key distinctions that need clarification in the literature. By examining the distinctive contribution of each process, the paper reveals a proactive, desire‐driven agent often overlooked by prevailing sociological models emphasizing a reactive actor responding creatively and deliberately when internal meanings and external cues are incongruent. The paper concludes by outlining the broader implications of this synthetic affective model of motivation for sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an argument for a geography of girlhood, located at the intersection of historical geographies of globalisation and empire on the one hand, and feminist interventions in the geography of childhood and youth on the other. A focus on girlhood, I argue, opens up a debate on the discipline's own implication in a debate on climate science, moral hierarchies of civilisation and reproductive health at which intersection the category of 'girl' was materialised in the 19th century. This focus extends and historicises the argument made by scholars like Nicola Ansel that geographies of childhood speak not only to intimate scales of experience ‐ such as the home and neighbourhood—but instead suggest the ways in which everyday life is implicated in the scale of the global and the geopolitical. Drawing on an inter‐disciplinary scholarship, the paper argues that debates on gender and maturity—converging on the figure of the 'girl'—shaped raced and classed imaginaries of progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through this, the paper demonstrates that 'girlhood' is at the heart of historical geographies of urban planning, social care, and health, as well as indexing the continuities in the transition from a colonial discourse of civilisation to a mid‐20th century concern with development. Finally, the paper asks how to write about girls through an archive that is almost obsessively fixated on them as subjects of education and reform, even whilst they rarely appear in it as speaking subjects. I argue that both an emergent focus on non‐textual objects as sources, as well as the use of ephemeral material—including notes, creative writing exercises from the classroom, school diaries etc.—alongside the official archive might open the scholarship up to a multi‐scalar analysis of girlhood as imbricated in larger global and national discursive and material practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excerpted from my book Generally Speaking, this paper introduces "concept‐driven sociology," a special way of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. As such, it examines the methodological process by which we can "distill" generic patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a "generic sociology" that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, we need to collect our data in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi‐culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross‐contextual commonality, concept‐driven sociology tries to reveal formal "parallels" across seemingly disparate contexts. The paper features the four main types of cross‐contextual analogies concept‐driven sociologists tend to use—cross‐cultural, cross‐historical, cross‐domain, as well as cross‐level—disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in examining climate change adaptation has arisen in many disciplines in the past two decades; however to date, sociologists have given only sparse attention to the issue. This is both a missed opportunity for sociologists and a detriment to the study of adaptation. In this paper, we set out the following research agenda: bringing core concerns of sociology into the critically important conversation of how society will respond to climate change. We identify five broad themes in which sociologists can begin their work on adaptation: (1) structures and resource access, (2) social cohesion and future planning, (3) constraints of social stratifications, (4) power and agency in decision‐making, and (5) justice in process and outcomes. After summarizing existing sociological work on adaptation and detailing our research agenda, we draw examples from our own work in Bangladesh to illustrate how this agenda might be taken up. In doing so, we point to several places where sociological insights come into play in questions related to development, organizations, expertise, migration, gender, and labor. We believe a robust sociological analysis can produce a clarified, reparative, and just conceptualization of adaptation that will contribute to the growing global discourse on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores modes of expectation among care‐experienced young people when navigating educational success. Luhmann's theoretical framework is used to conceptualise experiences of educational success and the role of uncertainty. We identify three modes of expectation: trust, risk and danger. To illustrate these modes, we draw on selected examples from an interview study with 28 care‐experienced young people focusing on their experiences of support and aftercare while transitioning out of care. The trust mode of expectation is based in a confidence that the future entails a positive outcome—in the case of this study, regarding educational success. This expectation is characterised by the young person's feelings of belonging, underpinned by a safety net of unconditionally supportive caregivers. The risk mode of expectation is characterised by the young person's feeling of being overwhelmed and burdened by the complexity of the educational system in combination with unknown future circumstances when leaving care. The battle against child welfare services to keep supportive measures increases levels of uncertainty. The danger mode of expectation emerges when educational success is disrupted by the interference of child welfare services. The system is seen as unpredictable and powerful, making the young person withdraw from formal support. We conclude that educational success for care‐experienced young people is closely linked to their mode of expectation with regard to managing the uncertainty of the future and that their mode is highly dependent on their social, institutional and biographical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand social issues and practices such as those related to climate change and technological change that are clearly future‐oriented – collectively experienced events that are "not yet" – and co‐constructed by different actors, we need nuanced conceptualizations of how people think about, negotiate and co‐create futures that allow us to understand not only what people (can) think and do about future‐related issues but also how that happens, what for and with which implications. However, so far, one of the key theoretical approaches that has conceptualised how people make meaning in situations of change and uncertainty – the socio‐psychological social representations theory (SRT) – has not often engaged with the future or with different forms of temporality. By contrast, the French pragmatic sociology of engagements and critique (PS) has engaged with these notions, conceptualising them in relation to materiality and a plurality of moral orientations – two dimensions often seen as key to how collective futures are made and imagined. To offer a more nuanced and systematic conceptualization of how people represent the future and with what consequences, this paper will present, compare and synthesise SRT and PS, as a first step towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on social change and representations of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists tend to see G. H. Mead's conceptualization of self as fundamentally correct. In this paper, we develop a critique of Mead's notion of the self as constituted through social interactions. Our focus will be on Mead's categorial distinction between the socially constructed self and subjective experience, as well as on the tendency of post‐Meadian sociologists to push Mead's position in ever more radical directions. Drawing inspiration from a multifaceted understanding of selfhood that can be found in Husserlian phenomenology, we then propose that the most basic level of selfhood is anchored in irreducible subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of diagnosis has shown that diagnosis not only serves to label the underlying cause of disease but also to provide access to services and resources. Elaborating on this double‐affordance of diagnosis, this article examines how precision medicine reconfigures diagnosis as a label and as a process in regulatory and clinical settings. Reporting from an ethnographic case study of the introduction of immunotherapy for lung cancer, the paper unfolds the uncertainties involved in dissecting diagnosis into layers and examines the efforts and negotiations it takes to enable these layers to work both as clinical entities and regulative entities with the purpose of delineating access to treatment. I suggest that the work of subdividing diseases into molecularly defined categories for the purpose of delineating treatment‐eligible populations can be labelled 'diagnostic sub‐stratification' and argue that it is pertinent to understand the political capacity of this strategy. Diagnostic sub‐stratification involves a push of diagnosis from the clinic 'up' into the regulatory system and 'out' into the laboratories, obscuring who is accountable for the diagnostic categories employed to define patients' treatment access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on 2 years' worth of ethnographic observation of team meetings to explore decision‐making in an NHS clinical genomics service. The focus of discussions was on ambiguous genomic results known as VUS or Variants of Uncertain Significance, which may be pathogenic but which also may turn out to be benign. In examining decision‐making around such results, we note how, in contrast to much policy and promotional material in this area, clinicians in these meetings (clinical geneticists and genetic counsellors) place great emphasis on parental phenotypes and whether the parents of a patient share the symptoms and signs of the suspected condition. This information is then combined with the result of genomic tests to decide whether the variant a patient has is responsible for their condition. This article explores the way in which clinicians attempt to flexibly enrol parents into genomic explanations through informal diagnosis of their possible phenotypes and the way in which actually meeting parents allows some clinicians to trump explanations based on documentary or photographic data. The paper sheds light on the way that earlier scholarly understandings of such decisions (around, say dysmorphology) remain relevant and explores claims that laboratory tests overrule clinical decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion paper offers a critical provocation to my mental health nursing colleagues. Drawing upon David Graeber's account of bullshit work, work that is increasingly meaningless for workers, I pose the question: Is mental health nursing a bullshit job? Ever‐increasing time spent on record keeping as opposed to direct care appears to represent a Graeberian bullshitisation of mental health nurses' work. In addition, core aspects of the role are not immune from bullshit. Professional rhetoric would have us believe that mental health nursing is a therapeutically beneficent occupation organised around ideals of care and compassion and providing fulfilling work for practitioners. Yet, there are some key characteristics of the experience of mental health nursing work that afford alternative judgements on its value and meaningfulness. Not least of these is the fact that many mental health nurses feel quite existentially unsettled in the practise of their work and many service users do not recognise the professional ideal, especially when compelled into increasingly coercive and restrictive services. In this context, Graeber's thesis is explored for its applicability to mental health nursing with a conclusion that many aspects of mental health nursing work are commensurate with bullshit but that mental health care can possibly be redeemed from bullshitisation by authentically democratising reforms. Engaging with posthumanist ideas, this exploration involves a flexing of aspects of Graeber's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]