Showing papers in "European Journal of Social Theory in 2016"

Relational agency Relational sociology, agency and interaction

Abstract: This article explores how the concept of agency in social theory changes when it is conceptualized as a relational rather than an individual phenomenon. It begins with a critique of the structure/agency debate, particularly of how this emerges in the critical realist approach to agency typified by Margaret Archer. It is argued that this approach, and the critical realist version of relational sociology that has grown from it, reify social relations as a third entity to which agents have a cognitive, reflexive relation, playing down the importance of interaction. This upholds the Western moral and political view of agents as autonomous, independent, and reflexive individuals. Instead, the article considers agency from a different theoretical tradition in relational sociology in which agents are always located in manifold social relations. From this, an understanding is created of agents as interactants, ones who are interdependent, vulnerable, intermittently reflexive, possessors of capacities that can onl...

The reflexive habitus: Critical realist and Bourdieusian social action

Abstract: The critical realist and Bourdieusian conceptions of action fundamentally disagree on a number of fronts: the synthetic versus dualistic relationship between structure and agency; the social nature of the self/body; the link between morphogenesis and reflexivity. Despite these differences, this article argues that re-reading Bourdieu’s theories with attention to some of the core tenets of critical realism (emergence, the stratification of reality, and conjunctural causality) can provide insights into how the habitus is capable of reflexivity and social change. In particular, this article reworks Bourdieu’s theory of habitus by suggesting that social selves are always situated at the intersection of multiple and competing social locations (or field positions) and that the habitus itself is always layered. Reflexivity arises from horizontal disjunctures (between field positions) and vertical disjunctures (across temporal sedimentation).

Theorizing glocalization Three interpretations1

Abstract: This article presents three interpretations of glocalization in social-scientific literature as a means of reframing the terms of scholarly engagement with the concept. Although glocalization is relatively under-theorized, two key interpretations of the concept have been developed by Roland Robertson and George Ritzer. Through a critical and comparative overview, the article offers an assessment of the advances and weaknesses of each perspective. Both demonstrate awareness regarding the differences between globalization and glocalization, but this awareness is far from explicit. Both interpretations fail to draw a consistent analytical distinction between the two concepts and ultimately succumb to reductionism: either glocalization is subsumed under globalization or globalization is transformed into glocalization. Next, a third interpretation of glocalization as an analytically autonomous concept is presented. Working definitions of glocalization and of glocality as analytically autonomous from globalizat...

Republicanism and the political economy of democracy

Abstract: Europe is experiencing rapidly accelerating poverty and social exclusion, following half a decade of financial crisis and austerity politics. The key problem behind Europe's malaise, in our view, is the economic disenfranchisement of large parts of its population in the winner-takes-all-society. This article proposes that we examine the contribution of republican political theory as a distinctive approach that provides us with the conceptual and normative resources to reclaim what we call the political economy of democracy, the constellation of political and economic institutions aimed at promoting broad economic sovereignty and individuals’ capacities to govern their own lives. This article identifies three key ideas that together constitute a distinctively republican approach to political economy: (1) establish an economic floor; (2) impose an economic ceiling to counter excess economic inequality; and (3) democratize the governance and regulation of the main economic institutions.

Non-normative critique Foucault and pragmatic sociology as tactical re-politicization

Abstract: The close ties between modes of governing, subjectivities and critique in contemporary societies challenge the role of critical social research. The classical normative ethos of the unmasking researcher unravelling various oppressive structures of dominant vs. dominated groups in society is inadequate when it comes to understand de-politicizing mechanisms and the struggles they bring about. This article argues that only a non-normative position can stay attentive to the constant and complex evolution of modes of governing and the critical operations actors themselves engage in. The article outlines a non-normative but critical programme based on an ethos of re-politicizing contemporary pervasive modes of governing. The analytical advantages and limitations of such a programme are demonstrated by readings of both Foucauldian studies and the works of and debates regarding the French pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thevenot.

Bourdieu and conscious deliberation: An anti-mechanistic solution

Abstract: Social theorists in recent years have concerned themselves with the matter of the kind and intensity of people’s everyday reflective capacities. In this respect, Bourdieu has mostly been found want...

The Constitution of Space

Abstract: Space is introduced here as a relational arrangement of social goods and living beings at places. Space emerges in the interplay of action and structure, through the processes of spacing and acts of synthesis. Spacing describes the placing of human beings, social goods, and cultural signs for the purpose of forming spatial arrangements. The act of synthesis describes the ability to perceive, imagine, and remember the spatial placing of human beings and social goods as coherent and reliable. The reproduction of institutionalized spaces occurs through repetition in everyday routine. Space is interwoven with cultural notions of class and gender. The chapter concludes with reflections on how space and place are associated and with a discussion of methodological consequences.

Collective identities, empty signifiers and solvable secrets

Abstract: In modern societies collective identity is both an empty signifier and a sacred center: even as its existence is taken for granted, what is or should be is subject to a host of different and often conflicting interpretations. However, the narratives and representations of collective identity are in no way undermined by these public debates; these signifiers are seen rather as a problem that is in principle amenable to solution, as something that ought to be (re)solved. In fact, the empty signifiers of collective identity are constructed as solvable secrets precisely and primarily in public speech, open debate and perpetual critique. This article identifies the public and private modes of dealing with empty signifiers – through collective traumatic repressions, private resentments, public discourses adhering to argumentation ethics, and individual fabulations.

Neo-classical sociology The prospects of social theory today

Abstract: This article calls for a new theoretical synthesis that overcomes the fragmentation, specialization and professionalization within the social sciences. As an alternative to utilitarianism and the c...

Work, recognition and subjectivity Relocating the connection between work and social pathologies

Abstract: Recently, following the social and subjective consequences of the neoliberal wave, there seems to be a renewed interest in work as occupying a central place in social and subjective life. For the first time in decades, both sociologists and critical theorists once more again regard work as a major constituent of the subject’s identity and thus as an appropriate object of analysis for those engaged in critique of the social pathologies. The aim of this article is to present a succinct analysis of Axel Honneth’s thoughts on the concept of work and to propose an approach granting it a more substantial role in social theory. To this end, this article will embark upon a reappraisal of the importance of the material and psychological dimensions of the subject’s interactions in the world of work. It aims to demonstrate that the normative demands associated with these dimensions are, like the normative demands of recognition, immanent and universal. In other words, it will argue that the normative ideals related ...

Invisible streams Process-thinking in Arendt

Abstract: For Hannah Arendt, some of the most distinctive features of the modern age derived from the adoption of a process-imaginary in science, history, and administration. This article examines Arendt’s w...

The ‘knowledge-based economy’ and the relationship between the economy and society in contemporary capitalism

Abstract: According to the main theories of the knowledge-based economy (KBE), the recent transformations of capitalism are the origins of a general societal change. Managerial theories consider KBE to be a ...

Sociologies of the South and the actor-network-theory Possible convergences for an ontoformative sociology

Abstract: This article analyses the contributions of the sociologies or theories of the South to the contemporary debates on the production of theory in the social sciences. Starting with the assumption that...

State-building, market regulation and citizenship in South Africa:

Abstract: Public policy in post-apartheid South Africa has been characterized by a mix of state regulation and ‘neo-liberalism’. This article argues that this mix is rooted in the model of economic modernity adopted in South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, and underpinned by the institutions of a modern state. In an economy transformed by mining and subsequent secondary industrialization, the state played a central role in facilitating capitalist growth, including through the regulation of labour. I argue that, contrary to the conventional understanding, the enduring characteristic of the political economy of modernization in South Africa was not so much the mobilization of cheap African labour, mostly migrants from across Southern Africa, but was rather the institutionalization of high wages and protected incomes for economic, social and political insiders. Anglo-centric institutions and conceptions of industrial and social citizenship were adapted to the colonial context in South Africa. The imperatives of both go...

The individual and society in Durkheim: Unpicking the contradictions

Abstract: In the revisiting of Durkheim’s humanism in recent years, attention has been drawn to his theory of moral individualism and the usefulness of his argument that a reformed democratic capitalism can reconcile individual freedom with collective constraint. Here I investigate Durkheim’s understanding of the relationship between individual and society in greater detail, showing in the process that his thinking was ambiguous and inconsistent. Although he flirted with the notion that capitalist modernity may actively foster and legitimise destructive forms of individualism, his default position was to attribute anti-social drives to a human nature set loose by weak or inadequate social norms, and then to idealise liberal humanism as the ethical remedy for this normative deficiency. I argue that the inconsistencies in his thinking are significant, however, because they testify to the underlying contradiction between the logic of capitalism and the ideals of moral individualism, and to the difficulty of locating the moral individual in a morally irrational world.

Bourdieu and the problem of reflexivity: Recent answers to some old questions

Abstract: The question of the individual’s capacity for agency and, connected to this, to reflexivity, is one that has haunted Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological model. Not infrequently, Bourdieu claimed that he wished to create a model which to some extent reconciled those hoariest of sociological concepts, structure and agency (see, for instance, Bourdieu, 1990b). In a recently translated article, he made the claim that the role of sociology is to bring together objective social structures with agents’ own attempts to make sense of, and to practically deal with, those structures:

Governmentality and guru-led movements in India: Some arguments from the field

Abstract: The concept of governmentality has a textual and philosophical basis as well as being concerned with what might be called the practices of government. This article discusses and develops the govern...

Dissociation, reflexivity and habitus

Abstract: Many theorists, in their search for a better explanation of the dynamics of structure and agency, have expressed the need for a theory in which reflexivity and habitus are reconciled. In this artic...

Intimations of methodological nationalism in classical sociology

Abstract: Nowadays, the widespread view is that classical sociology is tainted with ‘methodological nationalism and it would appear that there has been a significant overlap between social and political space. We disagree with this point of view for three reasons: (1) by dealing with the global world, classical sociology has already glimpsed the possibility of going beyond the nation-state as a unit of analysis; (2) having operated above all with the notion of ‘social’ rather than ‘national’, its categories are transnational; and (3) when classical sociology has dealt with national society, studies have not reified it within its political boundaries. Consequently, in our opinion, classical sociology highlights both analytical categories that go beyond the ontology of the nation-state as well as new socio-political forms defined within the trajectory of modernity under the pressure of globalization processes.

Property, freedom and money Modern Capitalism reassessed

Abstract: Large exchange markets, big money, interest-bearing credit, big landholdings, proletarian masses, imperial expansion and even ‘capital’ or ‘salaried workers’, are not in themselves specific, unique...

Modernity and the embedding of economic expansion

Abstract: The nationally embedded and relatively broad-based economies characteristic of developed industrial countries are usually seen as the incarnation of a modern economy. These economies are largely internally oriented and are based, to a relatively great extent, on production and services based on local and national needs. Their provenance is generally assumed to have been processes of development that began in the sixteenth century and that, in the nineteenth century, accelerated with the expansion of industrial production and the growth of global trade. This article challenges that assumption. It argues that today’s modern economies represent, not the culmination of long-term processes, but a recurring phenomenon within capitalism. It argues that, in the history of capitalism, there have been phases of nationally embedded and global free market capitalism – periods when capital is relatively more, and relatively less, free from the regulation of nation state. Today’s nationally embedded economies represent...

Arendt’s ‘conscious pariah’ and the ambiguous figure of the subaltern:

Abstract: Hannah Arendt’s Jewish writings were central to her thinking about the human condition and engaged with the dialectics of modernity, universalism and identity. Her concept of the ‘conscious pariah’ attempted both to define a role for the public intellectual and understand the relationship between Jews and modernity. Controversially she accused Jewish victims of lack of resistance to the Nazis and argued that their victimization resulted from apolitical ‘worldlessness’. We argue that although Arendt’s analysis was original and challenging, her characterization of Jewish history as one of ‘powerlessness’ is exaggerated but, more importantly, her underdeveloped concept of ‘the social’ is insensitive to the complex modalities of resistance and consciousness among subaltern Jewish communities. Furthermore, her lack of interest in religious observance obscures the importance of Judaism as a resource for resistance. This is illustrated by the ‘hidden transcripts’ of Jewish resistance from the early modern period.

Anomie’s Eastern origins The Buddha’s indirect influence on Durkheim’s understanding of desire and suffering

Abstract: Durkheim’s claim in Suicide that humanity’s ‘inextinguishable thirst’ (soif inextinguible) causes suffering was adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument that the will-to-live’s ‘unquenchable thi...

Beyond global modernity, global consciousness and global governmentality: The symmetrical anthropology of globalization

Abstract: The article combines the research strategies developed by Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann to problematize how we interpret the world when discussing globalization. Two previous approaches – global modernity and global consciousness – interpret the world as completely objective (nature transcends culture). Another approach – global governmentality – interprets the world as completely subjective (culture transcends nature). Against these approaches, this article proposes a new one: the symmetrical anthropology (or sociology) of globalization. Inspired by Latour’s variable ontologies, it considers multiple descriptions of the world and multiple descriptions of society simultaneously. It considers globalization as one description of society and searches for the description of the world corresponding to it. It distinguishes three descriptions of the world: (1) the world as natural order; (2) the world as external object; and (3) the world as levels of organization. It is argued that the description of the worl...

The perception of value: Adam Smith on the moral role of social research

Abstract: Scholars have sometimes argued that we should conceive of social research as a form of moral inquiry, at least in part, but none have made clear exactly how and why observational research can make a distinctive contribution to moral insight. Returning to an era before the modern distinction between social science and the humanities became entrenched, this article argues that Adam Smith provided a clear and forceful rationale for the moral role of social research, especially history. Smith believed that moral understanding relies on emotional reactions to richly described cases, preferably where our own interests are not at stake. These meditations on particular cases, in turn, provide the basis for moral generalizations that can inform future encounters with particular cases. This perspective led Smith (along with his friend David Hume) to the view that historical writing makes a more important contribution to moral understanding than abstract philosophy does. This article reconstructs Smith’s arguments a...

Adorno reading and writing sociology

Abstract: In the context of recent attempts to more adequately engage with Adorno’s approach to sociology and social theory, this article argues that such a project requires a more complete understanding of the philosophical basis of Adorno’s critical material perspective on knowledge and language. In particular, the interpretation of Adorno within sociology has been hampered by a fundamental misunderstanding regarding his methodology of critique and composition, which prioritizes the content of Adorno’s claims regarding sociology and social theory, over their rhetorical and performative character. This character is identifiable in Adorno’s prose, and grasped through a close attention to his account of the negative dialectic. Using Bernstein’s articulation of the ‘complex concept’ as an analytical framework, and Adorno’s introduction to Durkheim as its material, the article argues that the inability to grasp the rhetorical character of Adorno’s critical interpretive approach prevents an understanding of his potenti...

Beneath rationalization: Elias, Foucault, and the body1

Abstract: Elias and Foucault ended up making the same core discovery about the same fundamental social process, which we term the ‘social constraints towards self-discipline’ process. We show how three distinct biographical and intellectual factors were important in guiding them toward this discovery: (1) their shared exposure to philosophical traditions associated with Heidegger’s break from Husserl; (2) their common, sustained contact with ‘clinical’ practices; and (3) the traumatic events each experienced in relation to intentional injury and death.

The limits of autonomy in Latin American social policies Promoting human capital or social control

Abstract: Latin American social protection systems show that the fundamental ambivalence of modernity is captured by the twin notion of liberty and discipline in the context of a plurality of modes of socio-political organization. According to this understanding, this article analyses the potential of the so-called Conditional Cash Transfer programmes, which are widespread in the region, to strength or reduce personal autonomy. These programmes are promoted by claiming their virtues to reduce poverty and impose good behaviour on poor people in order to improve the ‘human capital’ of future generations. However, numerous elements challenge these alleged virtues: arbitrary selection of beneficiaries, interference in people’s lives, stigmatization of recipients, inability to achieve universal coverage and act in a preventive manner with regards to urgent needs, the creation of poverty traps and informal working, etc. Taking these elements into account, this article explains how these programmes do not improve people’s...

Theodor W. Adorno’s homecoming:

Abstract: Theodor Adorno has often been portrayed as the prototypical example of the permanent exile, even though, after living fifteen years in Britain and the US, he returned to Germany in 1949 and spent the last twenty years of his life there. This article traces Adorno’s reflections on his homecoming and analyses how his experiences of exile and return shaped his mature thought. Conceiving homecoming not simply as a return to one’s origins but as a continuation of a radical experience of the foreign, it builds on the remarkable continuity of Adorno’s theory of intellectual experience over time. The article also explores homecoming in relation to Adorno’s thought on language and translation, an aspect that has been little studied in the existing literature, both in terms of the articulation of a philosophy of language where the foreign plays an important role, and in terms of how language and translation were directly connected with Adorno’s return.

From Marx to Giddens via Weber and Habermas The politics of social thought in Iran

Abstract: This article investigates the political role of social theories in contemporary Iran. It focuses, specifically, on how the 1979 Revolution marks a passage in Iranian political and social thought fr...