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What is the best method for undertaking critical social theory, and what are its ontological and normative commitments? Andreas Reckwitz has developed compelling answers to these questions drawing on practice theory. As a practice theorist myself, I am very sympathetic to his approach. This paper sketches a social theory that extends the reach of practice theory to include non-human animals and allows us to discriminate between importantly different kinds of social formations. In doing so, I argue that a strongly normative basis for differentiating social phenomena is compatible with the methods of social theory and critical social theorists need not shy away from first-order moral commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms 'structural injustice' and 'systemic injustice' are commonly used, but their meanings are elusive. In this paper, I sketch an ontology of social systems that embeds accounts of social structures, relations, and practices. On this view, structures may be intrinsically problematic, or they may be problematic only insofar as they interact with other structures in the system to produce injustice. Because social practices that constitute structures set the backdrop for agency and identity, socially fluent agents reproduce the systems, often unknowingly and unintentionally. The account aims to capture how agents both depend on and enact structures, and do so in ways that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, 'land on the body'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional functionalists in social science, for example, Spencer ([64]), Parsons ([54]), Radcliffe-Brown ([56]), Malinowski ([44]), viewed society on the model of an integrated organism whose parts functioned to meet basic human needs and maintain the society's survival and stability. And shouldn't we include social systems such as transportation systems, medical systems, military systems, and educational systems; after all, these are the subject matter of the social sciences. I IntroductionMethodological individualism i (MI) has been a major topic in the philosophy of social science over the past several decades. In the final sections, I sketch an account of how we might distinguish social systems from other (non-social) systems, and argue that prioritizing the level of systems in social ontology has advantages for social critique. (Kukla and Lance 2014, 26) A social ontology suited to understanding social systems, then, must include the worldly components upon which our attitudes and activities depend; and social explanations will typically be incomplete without including the worldly constraints on the systems we are part of. [Extracted from the article]