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Social ontology studies the nature and properties of social reality while social metaontology examines the relationship between ontology and the social sciences, which is often treated as a normative question. However, social sciences themselves contain ontological theses, raising the descriptive question of how these internal ontologies relate to the rest of the social sciences. This paper argues that important parts of sociology have an anti-foundationalist metaontology. This descriptive claim is used to build a normative argument against foundationalism and is supported by examining the works of Durkheim and Weber and how their metaontological beliefs continue to influence many sociologists. [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]

The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge, which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains. The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating achievements of this work and directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency is a conceptual problem for youth studies. While the term is used in many analyses of young people's lives, this paper argues that the nature and conceptual meaning of agency remain ambiguous: agency is a ‘black box’ which while fundamental to youth sociology remains unpacked. Ontological and epistemological confusion about the concept means that appeals to agency in contemporary youth sociology beg the very questions they claim to answer. Nevertheless, the concept has become central to the conceptual and political basis of youth research, coming to stand for practices that are ‘bounded’ by structures and resist existing states of affairs. This limits the explanatory power of theoretical frameworks in youth studies, and does not serve the ethical commitments of a politically engaged discipline. Identifying conceptual and normative problems raised by the way agency is deployed, this paper argues that a conceptually powerful and politically engaged youth sociology must move beyond the problem of agency as it stands, and incorporates theoretical perspectives on youth subjectivities and social action that indicate possibilities for how this might take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes recent sociological debate about transdisciplinarity (Carroll 2013; Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015; Mišina 2015) as a springboard for elaborating on the sociological relevance of metatheory and metatheorising, with particular attention to Critical Realism. Sociologists need to more forcefully acknowledge the importance of engaging with metatheory if they are to think more productively and creatively about how the philosophical assumptions which shaped the production of theories, research design, research practice, and the organisation of our field facilitate and delimit the production of insights about the multifaceted nature of sociological objects and practice. As metatheorising promotes the neglected procedure of conceptualisation (as opposed to operationalisation) and because it is transdisciplinary (shedding disciplinary boundary maintenance while remaining rigorous and methodical), it should be routinely utilised by social scientists to yield conceptual synthesis and fuller, more adequate forms of explanation of their particular objects of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new interpretation of Émile Durkheim'sThe Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912) as the basis for reconsidering the Tarde–Durkheim debate of 1903 and the distinctions between a theory of social force and a theory of social assemblage. Resisting traditional interpretations of Durkheim's scientism, this essay traces how concepts of force and energy are centrally developed inElementary Formsto draw new lines between epistemology to ontology for twentieth-century theory. I argue that Durkheim develops an ‘energetic epistemology’ that conceives of the human capacity for shared meaning as a product of invested energy in the form of continually enacted and evolving material practice, thought, and attention. According to Durkheim, when a member of a collective perceives a god or feels belief, he or she actually perceives the accumulated energy of on-going creation and maintenance of objects and ideas by members of a collective. Sacred objects, images, and ideas bear the trace of collective energy the more they are carefully crafted, maintained in spaces that are specially arranged, and written into behavioural codes. This reading of Durkheim allows us to consider him in a lineage of social constructivists and, particularly, in relation to Ludwik Fleck, who has been largely confined to different theoretical discussions when his contributions to sociology have been acknowledged at all. By reconsidering Durkheim, we have occasion to rethink his sociology and understand how he redrew the lines between thought and action, between epistemology and ontology, through the material framework of energy and force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore some of the negative aspects of friendship. In so doing we do not seek to join the debate about whether or not friendships are more or less important than other relationships but rather to explore precisely how significant friendships can be. Based on written accounts submitted to the British Mass Observation Project, we analyse how friendship, when it goes wrong, can challenge one's sense of self and even produce ontological insecurity. Friendship, it is argued, is tied into the process of self-identification and so staying true to friends, even when the relationships becomes uneven or tiresome, can be a sign of ethical standing. Meeting 'old' friends can also become very challenging, especially if one does not wish to be reminded of the self one once was. The paper contributes to the growing interest in relationships beyond kin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of music that somehow plays itself, or emerges from a nonhuman intelligence, is a common, transculturally present theme in folklore, science, and art. Over the centuries, this notion has been expressed through the development of various technological means. This paper explores aspects of my ongoing encounter with computers in improvised music, as exemplified by my most recent interactive computer music compositions. These works involve extensive interaction between improvising musicians and computer music-creating programs at the performance ("real-time") level. In both theory and practice, this means that both human musicians and computer programs play central organizing and structuring roles in any performance of these works. This paper seeks to explore aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and social implications of this work. In addition, the nature and practice of improvisation itself will be explored, since an understanding of this ubiquitous musical activity is essential to establishing the cultural and historical context of the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Sociology was born with scientific vocation, its current status as a scientific discipline seems not to enjoy good health. Departing from this idea, the purpose of the paper is threefold: first, several arguments for explanations of social phenomena through mechanisms will be reviewed. Such explanations can offer a suitable way to Sociology to be able to develop as an authentic science. Second, the idea that such explanations can be computational programmes created by agent-based modelling will be justified. Finally, it will build new arguments about how such explanations can avoid the ambiguity and the obscurity conceptual that a part of sociology suffers; reduce its theoretical fragmentation and strengthen the multidisciplinary dialogue with the purpose of researching in depth social reality as well as being able to design effective policies against several social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Sociology was bom with scientific vocation, its current status as a scientific discipline seems not to enjoy good health. Departing from this idea, the purpose of the paper is threefold: first, several arguments for explanations of social phenomena through mechanisms will be reviewed. Such explanations can offer a suitable way to Sociology to be able to develop as an authentic science. Second, the idea that such explanations can be computational programmes created by agent-based modelling will be justified. Finally, it will build new arguments about how such explanations can avoid the ambiguity and the obscuríty conceptual that a part of sociology suffers; reduce its theoretical fragmentation and strengthen the multidisciplinary dialogue with the purpose of researching in depth social reality as well as being able to design effective policies against several social problems.` [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prevalence of phenomenological perspectives in most modern scientific fields addressing religion and spirituality, including psychology of religion, ontological inquiries retain an important position in certain fields, such as modern sociology (e.g., Weber, Giddens' concept of ‘ontological security’). Ontological and phenomenological approaches, alongside certain principles that function as interpretative tools in the social sciences (e.g., reductionism, teleology, supervenience), can be synthesised to construct a pluralistic methodology for understanding anew the dynamics between the ‘psychological’ and the ‘spiritual’. This paper attempts to articulate an ‘evolutional’ approach to the spiritual as an ‘emergent’ property arising from multiple factors beyond the psychological and the metaphysical (such as social and cultural constructs). This holistic understanding of the spiritual will be then applied to Jung's notion of the ‘Self’ to understand further its spiritual and/or ontological potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It focuses specifically on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification, it is argued that the enactment of stakeholders in strategic planning processes can be gainfully understood as the production of stakeholder subjectivities by way of practices of ontological choreography which can generate territorial attachments and rearticulate existing attachments into a specifically territorial format. From this perspective, stakeholderness is never an ontologically pregiven property to be uncovered by diligent analysis. Rather, we might come to see that stakeholder subjectification is a process through which actors learn to be affected, and where these affections further come to be articulated as territorial attachments engendering, or at least prompting, a 'caring for place'. Still, as relational effects, subjectivities are always potentially precarious achievements and it is important not to take for granted that the subjectivities enacted in a specific situation or setting will be easily transposable to other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational sociology models social phenomena using the concepts of emergence and downward causation. However, the theoretical status of these concepts is ambiguous; they suppose too much ontology and are invoked by two opposed sociological interpretations of social reality: the individualistic and the holistic. This paper aims to clarify those concepts and argue in favour of their heuristic value for social simulation. It does so by proposing a link between the concept of emergence and Luhmann's theory of communication. For Luhmann, society emerges from the bottom-up as communication and he describes the process by which society limits the possible selections of individuals as downward causation. It is argued that this theory is well positioned to overcome some epistemological drawbacks in computational sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of live sociology in situations of pain and suffering is the focus of this article. An outline of the challenges of understanding pain is followed by a discussion of Bourdieu's 'social suffering' (1999) and the palliative care philosophy of 'total pain'. Using examples from qualitative research on disadvantaged dying migrants in the UK, attention is given to the methods that are improvised by dying people and care practitioners in attempts to bridge intersubjective divides, where the causes and routes of pain can be ontologically and temporally indeterminate and/or withdrawn. The paper contends that these latter phenomena are the incitement for the inventive bridging and performative work of care and live sociological methods, both of which are concerned with opposing suffering. Drawing from the philosophy of total pain, I highlight the importance of (1) an engagement with a range of materials out of which attempts at intersubjective bridging can be produced, and which exceed the social, the material, and the temporally linear; and (2) an empirical sensibility that is hospitable to the inaccessible and non-relational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the use of participatory action research (PAR) with children diagnosed with mental health issues. We argue that critiques from the sociology of childhood are useful for guiding PAR with children. First, we describe and critique values and assumptions that underlie research and practice with children who experience mental health issues. Second, we outline key qualities of the sociology of childhood, discuss their implications for PAR with children diagnosed with mental health issues, and touch on ethical issues. Five themes are explored: (a) values, (b) ontology/epistemology, (c) views about children, (d) agency/power in children’s relationships with adults, and (e) intervention/change focus. We conclude by encouraging community psychologists to consider PAR with children diagnosed with mental health issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a defining aspect of technology is the role that it plays in extending human capabilities. The conception of extension defended here is first compared with some well known extension theories from the philosophy of technology and then developed both by considering extension as a form of 'enrolment' and by integrating this conception of extension within a more general, ontological, conception of material artefacts. By drawing attention to the 'extension' aspect of technology, however, the intention is not only to distinguish technology from other material artefacts, but also to attempt to contribute to understanding of the peculiar position technology occupies in modern societies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary sociology has made sense of bodily difference by mobilising a number of tropes. 'Wounded' (or vulnerable), 'monstrous' and 'abject' stand out by virtue of their ubiquity though they do not exhaust the repertoire. These categories highlight the conceptual tensions between the sociology of the body and Disability Studies. In this paper, I will examine the value of these tropes to Disability Studies and suggest that while they can help to clarify the processes that bring about the misrecognition of disabled people, understanding the nature and scope of the lives of disabled people in modernity requires a more embodied language rather than one that has been generated from a sociological imaginary that is strongly influenced by a non-disabled subject position in which repulsion for the other -- which one must become -- is never fully resolved. Disability has had little impact on sociological theories of the body and when sociology ventures into disability it has tended to conflate it with an ontology of human frailty or gloss it with tropes that may be instructive about the generic or gendered modernist structure of exclusion but it tells us little about the specific forms of invalidation experienced by disabled people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent paper in this journal by Hardcastle et al. in 2005 argued that Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory (ST) might usefully inform sociological nursing research. In response, a critique of ST based upon the Realist Social Theory of Margaret Archer is presented. Archer maintains that ST is fatally flawed and, in consequence, it has little to offer nursing research. Following an analysis of the concepts epiphenomenalism and elisionism, it is suggested that emergentist Realist Social Theory captures or describes a more coherent explanatory vision of social reality than other perspectives and nurse researchers are advised to consider its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the treatment of ontology offered by critical realism. It addresses much of the material elaborated upon in two editions of this journal. Three main groups of criticisms are made here of the critical realist treatment of open systems. It is argued that critical realism, particularly in the project in economics emanating from Cambridge, UK, tends to define systems in terms of events. This definition is shown to be problematic. The exemplar of a closed system provided by critical realism of the solar system is shown to be flawed in that it is not closed according to the closure conditions identified by critical realism. Second, the negativity of the definitions adopted is problematic for heterodox traditions attempting to build positive programmes. Furthermore, the dualism of the definitions is also inconsistent with Dow's approach, which has ramifications for the coherence of post Keynesianism. Third, the definitions tend to polarize open and closed systems and ignore the degrees of openness evident in reality. The polarization of systems leads to polarized methodology and unsustainable arguments to reject so-called “closed-systems methods.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the network has become embedded in social thought and imagery, articulating what at root is inarticulable. The network metaphor occupies an ontological space, but this space, insofar as it is posed as a philosophical question, seems to assume a network-like shape itself. It may be particularly rewarding to read the constellations studied by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from this point of view, in light of the analysis of the preconditions of networks. This paper examines how the question of the ontology of networks is addressed by these thinkers, especially with regard to the historicity of ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that bracketing approaches to the sociological study of supernatural, paranormal, and occult proponents do not truly 'bracket' the reality-claims made by those being studied, but instead impose ontological limits on what can be considered 'supernormal'. It is argued that such boundaries and definitions tend to rule out alternative ontological perspectives of the kind that researchers typically encounter among religious, paranormal, and occult proponents. It is also argued that, unlike earlier reductionist approaches to the supernormal, the bias of bracketing approaches is not necessarily based on an underlying sceptical outlook of researchers, but rather reflects an inherent ontological limitation within the sociological enterprise itself. It is recommended that bracketing should be replaced by a reflexive, dialogical approach that emphasises the ontological positioning of social analyses with respect to supernormal claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorising the interplay of structure and agency is the quintessential focus of sociological endeavour. This paper aims to be part of that continuing endeavour, arguing for a stratified social ontology, where structure and agency are held to be irreducible to each other and causally efficacious, yet necessarily interdependent. It thus aims not to be part of that on-going journey in search of the 'ontological holy grail'. Instead, it offers a way of linking structure and agency which enables the practical education researcher concretely to examine their relative interplay over time. The methodological key to teasing out their relative interplay is held to be analytical dualism. It will be argued that such a methodological device is precluded by Giddens' structuration theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the application of Foucauldian perspectives within sociology. While Foucault's epistemology has generated novel historical and philosophical interpretations, when transposed to sociology, problems arise. The first of these concerns the association of knowledge and power, and the concept of 'discourse'. Foucault suggested that there are 'rules' of discursive formation which are extraneous to the 'non-discursive' realm of 'reality'. This formulation is consequently both deterministic and incapable of supplying explanations of why some practices become discursive which others do not. This determinism is reflected in some sociological analyses of embodiment, offering a model of the 'body' which is passive, and incapable of resisting power/knowledge. Secondly, Foucault's notion of the 'self' moves to the other extreme, inadequately addressing the constraints which affect the fabrication of subjectivity. Sociological accounts do not always recognize the ambiguities which consequently result from efforts to use Foucauldian positions. It is argued that post-structuralists other than Foucault may offer more to sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the article by researcher Hidetada Shimizu on the distinction between individualism and sociocentrism. Difference between ontisch and ontologisch questions; Explanation of what constitutes finitude; Significance of Shimizus's paper.