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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]

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]

A serious consideration of pain has largely been absent in sociology, especially physical pain's close neurobiological relative, social pain. Social pain is the process by which rejection and exclusion recruits similar neural circuits as physical pain, generating an affectual response that mirrors the response one feels from physical trauma. Pain is essential to any sociological analysis of motivation and action because, like many affective responses, it is a necessary ingredient in cognition and behavior; and, in many cases, it preconsciously commands and even controls how we think and act. While exploring this concept, it becomes apparent that sociology has an entire set of distantly related concepts that can be classified as different processes of social pain that reveal the structural, cultural, and situational conditions shaping the distribution of social pain. The paper concludes by thinking through the implications social pain portends for neuroscience and sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of the relations between emotions and personhood, with a view to advancing a critical realist account of the role of emotions in social life. It is argued that the constitution of persons has to be approached from an ontological perspective, and that this raises questions about how sociology has addressed the meaning and role of emotions. Margaret Archer's critical realist perspective on them as commentaries on human concerns is broadly endorsed, but some significant correctives are proposed, especially with respect to the important distinction between primary and secondary emotions. To this end, it is argued that the affect spectrum theory advanced by Warren TenHouten can be fruitfully appended to a critical realist theory of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, suicide rates have grown across most demographic groups in the United States, making the sociological study of suicide as imperative now as it was in Durkheim's day. For the most part, however, sociologists study suicide solely using Durkheim's analytic strategy. The following article recovers a text on suicide long since forgotten by sociology. Divided into three parts, the article begins first by revisiting Ruth Cavan's social disorganizational theory of suicide, eventually culminating in a formalization of her theory. Second, the article brings contemporary social scientific ideas to bear on her theory to modify and extend its empirical utility. Third, the article considers the implications this theoretical exercise has for an increasingly vibrant and creative sociology of suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]