Showing papers in "Sociological Theory in 2009"

The Meaning Structure of Social Networks

Abstract: This essay proposes to view networks as sociocultural structures. Following authors from Leopold von Wiese and Norbert Elias to Gary Alan Fine and Harrison White, networks are configurations of social relationships interwoven with meaning. Social relationships as the basic building blocks of networks are conceived of as dynamic structures of reciprocal (but not necessarily symmetric) expectations between alter and ego. Through their transactions, alter and ego construct an idiosyncratic “relationship culture” comprising symbols, narratives, and relational identities. The coupling of social relationships to networks, too, is heavily laden with meaning. The symbolic construction of persons is one instance of this coupling. Another instance is the application of social categories (like race or gender), which both map and structure social networks. The conclusion offers an agenda for research on this “meaning structure of social networks.”

Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: An Unfinished Agenda*:

Abstract: Can feminists count on welfare states—or at least some aspects of these complex systems—as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of “welfare states” investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate models of politics focused on “big” structures and systems, including those focused on “welfare states.” Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, (in)dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including “defamilialization,” the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family “reconciliation,” gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself, then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor (including care) and of gendered political power.

Herder's Heritage and the Boundary-Making Approach: Studying Ethnicity in Immigrant Societies*

Abstract: Major paradigms in immigration research, including assimilation theory, multiculturalism, and ethnic studies, take it for granted that dividing society into ethnic groups is analytically and empirically meaningful because each of these groups is characterized by a specific culture, dense networks of solidarity, and shared identity. Three major revisions of this perspective have been proposed in the comparative ethnicity literature over the past decades, leading to a renewed concern with the emergence and transformation of ethnic boundaries. In immigration research, “assimilation” and “integration” have been reconceived as potentially reversible, power-driven processes of boundary shifting. After a synthetic summary of the major theoretical propositions of this emerging paradigm, I offer suggestions on how to bring it to fruition in future empirical research. First, major mechanisms and factors influencing the dynamics of ethnic boundary-making are specified, emphasizing the need to disentangle them from o...

Global Labor: Algocratic Modes of Organization*

Abstract: This study investigates a practice that allows workers based in India to work online on projects for corporations in the United States, representing a new mode of labor integration. In the absence ...

Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online*

Abstract: Sociologists of culture studying “fan activism” have noted an apparent increase in its volume, which they attribute to the growing use of the Internet to register fan claims. However, scholars have yet to measure the extent of contemporary fan activism, account for why fan discontent has been expressed through protest, or precisely specify the role of the Internet in this expansion. We argue that these questions can be addressed by drawing on a growing body of work by social movement scholars on “movement societies,” and more particularly on a nascent thread of this approach we develop that theorizes the appropriation of protest practices for causes outside the purview of traditional social movements. Theorizing that the Internet, as a new media, is positioned to accelerate the diffusion of protest practices, we develop and test hypotheses about the use of movement practices for fan activism and other nonpolitical claims online using data on claims made in quasi-random samples of online petitions, boycott...

Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the "Black Box" of Personal Agency

Abstract: The concept of agency, although central to many sociological debates, has remained frustratingly elusive to pin down. This article is an attempt to open up what has been called the “black box” of personal agency by distinguishing clearly between two contrasting conceptions of the phenomenon. These two conceptions are very apparent in the manner in which the concept is defined in sociological reference works, resembling as it does a similar contrast in the treatment of the concept of power. The two are referred to as type 1 and type 2 or the power of agency as compared with agentic power, the essential contrast being that the first refers to an actor's ability to initiate and maintain a program of action while the second refers to an actor's ability to act independently of the constraining power of social structure. The nature of these two forms of personal agency is then illustrated by referring to material taken from Weber's essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this essay itself being...

Fragile and Resilient Trust: Risk and Uncertainty in Negotiated and Reciprocal Exchange*

Abstract: Both experimental and ethnographic studies show that reciprocal exchanges (in which actors unilaterally provide benefits to each other without formal agreements) produce stronger trust than negotiated exchanges secured by binding agreements. We develop the theoretical role of risk and uncertainty as causal mechanisms that potentially explain these results, and then test their effects in two laboratory experiments that vary risk and uncertainty within negotiated and reciprocal forms of exchange. We increase risk in negotiated exchanges by making agreements nonbinding and decrease uncertainty in reciprocal exchanges by having actors communicate their intentions. Our findings support three main theoretical conclusions. (1) Increasing risk in negotiated exchange produces levels of trust comparable to those in reciprocal exchange only if the partner's trustworthiness is near-absolute. (2) Decreasing uncertainty in reciprocal exchange either increases or decreases trust, depending on network structure. (3) Even when reciprocal and negotiated exchanges produce comparable levels of trust, their trust differs in kind, with reciprocal exchange partners developing trust that is more resilient and affect-based.

Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey*

Abstract: Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how “political articulation” has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline.

Genocide as Social Control

Abstract: Genocide is defined here as organized and unilateral mass killing on the basis of ethnicity. While some have focused on genocide as a type of deviance, most genocide is also social control—a response to behavior itself defined as deviant. As such, it can be explained as a part of a general theory of social control.Black's (1998)theories of social control explain the handling of conflicts with their social geometry—that is, with the social characteristics of those involved in the conflict. Here, Blackian theories of social control are extended to specify the social geometry of genocide as follows: genocide varies directly with immobility, cultural distance, relational distance, functional independence, and inequality; and it is greater in a downward direction than in an upward or lateral direction. This theory of genocide can be applied to numerous genocides throughout history, and it is capable of ordering much of the known variation in genocide—such as when and where it occurs, how severe it is, and who participates.

Critical Human Ecology: Historical Materialism and Natural Laws

Abstract: We lay the foundations for a critical human ecology (CHE) that combines the strengths of the biophysical human ecology tradition in environmental sociology with those of historical materialism. We show the strengths of a critically informed human ecology by addressing four key meta-theoretical issues: materialist versus idealist approaches in the social sciences, dialectical versus reductionist analyses, the respective importance of historical and ahistorical causal explanations, and the difference between structural and functional interpretations of phenomena. CHE breaks with the idealism of Western Marxism, which dominated academic neo-Marxist thought in the latter half of the 20th century, and advocates instead the pursuit of a materialist, scientific methodology in dialectical perspective for the explanation of social and ecological change. In turn, this project also involves a critique of the ahistorical and functionalist tendencies of traditional human ecology, while sharing human ecology's basic starting point: the ecological embeddedness of human societies.

Humans, Animals, and Play: Theorizing Interaction When Intersubjectivity is Problematic*

Abstract: Simmel (1949) argues that humans have an “impulse” toward sociability, defined as noninstrumental, playful association that is enjoyed as an end in itself. While sociability as conceived of by Simm...

Relational Understanding and White Antiracist Praxis

Abstract: In this article, we argue that, in order for white racial consciousness and practice to shift toward an antiracist praxis, a relational understanding of racism, the “self,” and society is necessary...

Toward a General Theory of Institutional Autonomy

Abstract: Institutional differentiation has been one of the central concerns of sociology since the days of Auguste Comte. However, the overarching tendency among institutionalists such as Durkheim or Spencer has been to treat the process of differentiation from a macro, “outside in” perspective. Missing from this analysis is how institutional differentiation occurs from the “inside out,” or through the efforts and struggles of individual and corporate actors. Despite the recent efforts of the “new institutionalism” to fill in this gap, a closer look at the literature will uncover the fact that (1) it has tended to conflate macro-level institutions and meso-level organizations and (2) this has led to a taken for granted approach to institutional dynamics. This article seeks to develop a general theory of institutional autonomy; autonomy is a function of the degree to which specialized corporate units are structurally and symbolically independent of other corporate units. It is argued herein that the process by which these “institutional entrepreneurs” become independent can explain how institutions become differentiated from the “inside out.” Moreover, this article offers five dimensions that can be operationalized, measuring the degree to which institutions are autonomous.

Fact‐Totems and the Statistical Imagination: The Public Life of a Statistic in Argentina 2001*

Abstract: Statistics are key elements of contemporary life. They figure prominently in the media, in political discourse, and in daily conversations. They also weigh heavily within the economic and political...

Toward a Unified Stratification Theory: Structure, Genome, and Status across Human Societies*

Abstract: While social scientists and geneticists have a shared interest in the personal characteristics instrumental to status attainment, little has been done to integrate these disparate perspectives. Thi...

Does Habitus Matter? A Comparative Review of Bourdieu's Habitus and Simon's Bounded Rationality with Some Implications for Economic Sociology*

Abstract: In this article, I revisit Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and contrast it with Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality. Through a discussion of the literature of economic sociology on status and Fligstein's political-cultural approach, I argue that this concept can be a source of fresh insights into empirical problems. I find that the greater the change in the social environment, the more salient the benefits of using habitus as a tool to analyze agents' behavior.

Bourdieu's Gift to Gift Theory: An Unacknowledged Trajectory*:

Abstract: This article offers to unravel lines of both continuity and change in Bourdieu's repeated return to the topic of the gift throughout his intellectual career. While this periodical revisiting of the gift may seem at first like mere repetition, a closer reading reveals three successive and cumulative phases in his gift theory, each adding a new layer of analytical and normative inflections. Emerging from these three phases is a trajectory marked by systematic theoretical consolidation but also growing dilemmas and inner tensions, even to the point of self-contradiction: starting from a critical debunking of the disinterested gift as sincere but obfuscating fiction, it culminates with a positive, prescriptive valorization of disinterestedness as something which needs be cultivated in our very own times. Challenging his vision, as it were, “from within,” these inner tensions and developments amount to an intriguing, inverted case of Bourdieu's own idea of “double truth,” all the more significant since it pert...

Body to Body: On the Political Anatomy of Crowds*

Abstract: This article challenges the negative image that, since the late 19th century, has been associated with crowds, and it does so by focusing on a number of bodily-anatomic aspects of crowd behavior. I first demonstrate that the work of one of the leading crowd psychologists, Gustave Le Bon, instigated a racist body politics. As a contrast to Le Bon's political program, I examine Walt Whitman's poetry and argue that the crowd may embody a democratic vision that emphasizes the social and political import of sexuality and body-to-body contact. Further, I dispute classical crowd theory's idea of an antagonistic relationship between crowds and individuality. Following Elias Canetti, I claim instead that the bodily compression of crowds in fact liberates individuals and creates a democratic transformation. The analysis results in a rehabilitation of crowds and briefly suggests how a reinterpretation of crowd behavior may inform current debates in social theory.

Cultural Performance and Political Regime Change

Abstract: The question about how culture shapes the possibilities for successful democratization has been a controversial issue for decades. This article maintains that successful democratization depends not only on the distribution of political interests and resources, but to seriously challenge a political regime, the advocates of democracy require cultural legitimacy as well. Accordingly, the central question is how democratic ideas are connected to the broader culture of a social community. This issue will be addressed in the case of South Korea. The Minjung democracy movement challenged the military regime by connecting democratic ideas concerning popular sovereignty and human rights with cultural traditions. The dissidents substantiated democratic values by (1) articulating an alternative concept of political representation against the authoritarian regime, (2) increasing the cultural resonance of their concept by linking democratic ideas to traditional narratives and practices, (3) developing a rich dramaturgical repertoire of collective action, and (4) mobilizing public outrage by fusing the above three elements within historical situations.

The Evolved Actor in Sociology

Abstract: In this article, I show that principles from both evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology inform a model of the actor that is usually implicit in sociological research on the family and social stratification. Making this evolved actor model explicit can unify and explain existing empirical sociological findings in these areas, and suggest new hypotheses for future research. I suggest the same is true in many other areas of sociology as well, and that explicitly incorporating a fully developed evolved actor model into sociology can both unify the discipline and reconnect it with the other life sciences.

Feminist Practice Meets Feminist Theory

Abstract: It is always welcome to have a smart, committed feminist engage seriously with big questions of social and political theory, all the more so when her work takes the variety of writings considered "radical feminist theory" seriously enough to make them a central part of her project without simultaneously limiting herself only to those works. Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom puts thinkers as different from one another as Hannah Arendt and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, Emmanuel Kant and Monique Wittig into the same paragraphs, if not the same sentences. Moreover, her argument also offers a Eurocentric impulse to push American feminists past the stale equality-difference debate and the anxiety about collective action by "women" that seems to accompany it here. As a person who works on European feminism, I especially appreciate this attention to feminist writings about collective action that have not received the attention in the United States that they merit. Finally, Zerilli deserves a third round of applause for taking the rhetorical work of claims-making as the serious political action that I also think it is. Rather than taking political arguments as merely "theory," she considers them as efficacious in their own terms, as means of making political subjects and actions "real-izable" by opening up new spaces in which struggles can and do occur. To meaningfully grant her those three kudos, this essay outlines the sense of her argument for those who have not yet read the book, as well as evaluates some of her claims. To do so, I take up each of these three praiseworthy contributions in more detail. I then turn to ask a few questions about the limits of her arguments, particularly as they might apply to creating the actual spaces for action that she expects political claims to do. The first thing to note about the work of feminist theoretical reflection that Zerilli offers is the scope of the previous work that she draws into her frame of reference. What Zerilli actually means by the "abyss of freedom" is the radical uncertainty about the outcomes of their actions that challenges all actors who seek to "make a difference" in the world. But a second "abyss" addressed by Zerilli is the gulf usually seen between the philosophical concerns and approaches with which she deals. On the one side, she anchors herself in two of the classic authors of nonfeminist political philosophy, Emmanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. On the other side, she builds directly upon two classics of contemporary European feminist theory - Monique Wittig's Les Guerillieres (1969/1985) and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective's manifesto (1987). This latter book was actually translated into English under the title of Sexual Difference (1990), but as Zerilli points out, would more properly have been called "What's Wrong with Rights." Stretching herself across the vast gulf between the classic thinkers on politics and second-wave feminists who attempt to theorize from their political practices, Zerilli attempts to provide a bridge strong enough to support liberatory feminist political claims. To construct such a structure

Culture, Personality, and Emotion in George Herbert Mead: A Critique of Empiricism in Cultural Sociology*

Abstract: Focusing on Mind, Self and Society, I contend that George Herbert Mead's theory is incapable of explaining the interactions in a song by Oscar Brown Jr., “The Snake,” and that a satisfactory explanation of these actions, which illuminate everyday conduct familiar to us all, requires the conceptualization of personality systems grounded in affect and cultural systems understood as symbolic logics that make intelligible certain activities. My argument is important not primarily as a critique of Mead, but of rational-choice and other cognitive theories that reduce emotions to cognitions, and of the currently dominant sociological and anthropological conceptualizations that reduce culture to forms of social practice.

The new aesthetic-political avant-garde: Linda Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

Abstract: Arendt, H. 1977. “What is Freedom.” In Between Past and Future. London: Penguin. ———. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Blumenberg, H. 1975. Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burke, K. 1969. The Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hallyn, F. 1990. The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler. New York: Zone. Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. 1990. Sexual Difference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Schutz, A. 1932. Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt. Wien: Springer. Simmel, G. 1908. Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker&Humblot. Wittig, M. 1985. Les Guerilleres. Boston, MA: Beacon.

The Institutional Foundations of Free Action

Abstract: Although the very first word in the title of Linda Zerilli's book is "feminism," one does not have to read it as a contribution to feminist literature. The reason is given in the last word of the title, which is "freedom." For the book's central concern is the defense of an Arendtian anti-sovereign, pro-relational understanding of political action as freedom, which is as relevant for general political theory, in fact for general politics, as it is for feminism. So I will offer a reading here, which for the most part takes Zerilli's book as a general exercise in political theory building. That is to say that I will completely refrain from wrestling with the question of what kind of intervention it aspires to make in ongoing feminist discourses. This said, I would misunderstand the author profoundly if I did not at least also read the book as a political act. After all, it is a performance in a wider genre, which might be called in analogy to litterature engagee a theorie engagee, that is, a writing practice with a political agenda. In effect, then, the book offers a theory of political action as freedom while at the same time performing such an act. This offers us readers an opportunity to see how well the theory does in self-application. My point in playing this old trick of criticism is not to call attention to a possible performative selfcontradiction of the text for the sake of judging its value in terms of the seemingly transcendental value. Instead, my intention in using this ruse is to reveal, in a somewhat single-minded fashion, especially one significant substantive blindspot of Zerilli's conceptual apparatus, the question of the institutional foundations of political action as freedom. Moreover, I will show that this blindspot derives especially from an overreliance on Arendt's notion of freedom, while suggesting that there are other conceptions of freedom that might have served Zerilli's critical purpose just as well, while directing our attention precisely to the enabling conditions of institutional arrangements. Finally, we shall see at the end how my somewhat theatrically wielded sword of criticism is in part blunted by Zerilli's own theoretization of the particular quality of the claims she is making as akin to aesthetic judgments rather than to truth-capable constatives. Throughout the book, Hannah Arendt is not only Zerilli's main source of inspiration but she is in fact Zerilli's authorizing spirit and we shall see in a minute what this means. It is from the author of the Human Condition (1998) and related essays (especially 1977) that she derives her notion of freedom as action. According to Arendt, freedom is not a matter of choice, not a property of the will, but instead a property of action. She captures the difference between what she calls freedom as sovereignty and her own model of freedom in action with the distinction between the formulas "I-will" and "I-can" (Arendt 1977:157ff). As a matter of fact, I think, Arendt would have been better off referring to her own model in terms of "I-do," since she greatly emphasizes that freedom is strictly in actu not in posse. In all admirable brevity, Arendt (1977:151) says: "for to be free and to act are the same." In that vein, she also emphasizes that free action has nothing to do with intellect, or with any kind of symbolically facilitated understanding. And yet, she admits that to realize a goal, action needs both intellect and will. But then, for Arendt, free action is not action for something else: it is based neither on a "because" nor on an "in order to." Thus, it is not meaningful action in the sense that Alfred Schiitz (1932)