Outline of a Theory of Practice.
About: This article is published in Contemporary Sociology.The article was published on 1980-03-01. It has received 14683 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Practice theory.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose that any power analysis should necessarily include a pair or dyad of concepts of power, linking agent power and impersonal governance, and sketch some consequences of those concepts for international theory.
Abstract: Realism explains the ruling of the international system through the underlying distribution of power among states. Increasingly, analysts have found this power analysis inadequate, and they have developed new concepts, most prominently structural power. The usage of structural power actually entails three different meanings, namely indirect institutional power, nonintentional power, and impersonal power. Only the first, however, is compatible with the current neorealist choice-theoretical mode of explanation. This is the basic paradox of recent power approaches: by wanting to retain the central role of power, some international relations and international political economy theory is compelled to expand that concept and to move away from the very theory that claims to be based on power. Neorealism does not take power seriously enough. At the same time, these extensions of the concept are themselves partly fallacious. To account simultaneously for the different meanings of structural power and to avoid a conceptual overload, this article proposes that any power analysis should necessarily include a pair or dyad of concepts of power, linking agent power and impersonal governance. Finally, it sketches some consequences of those concepts for international theory.
245 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the initial theoretical underpinnings for a fresh prospective study of desistance, focused on 20-year-old recidivists, with special reference to their age-transitional status and the relevance of community in their lives.
Abstract: This article presents the initial theoretical underpinnings for a fresh prospective study of desistance, focused on 20-year-old recidivists. It is argued that significant crime-free gaps appropriately form part of the subject matter of desistance. An interactive theoretical framework is presented, involving ‘programmed potential’, ‘social context’ (structures, culture, situations) and ‘agency’. It is argued that agency, while rightly attracting increasing interest within criminology, needs to be used with greater precision. Aspects of the social context of the research subjects' lives are summarised, with special reference to their age-transitional status and the relevance of ‘community’ in their lives. Since most criminal careers, even of recidivists, are short, the implications of subjects' movement from conformity to criminality and back to conformity require greater thought among criminologists and criminal justice professionals. However, these broad movements contain significant oscillations, and ‘crime’ is not a unidimensional concept in the lives of the research subjects. Capturing and explaining the complexity of these matters longitudinally is a significant challenge for the research.
245 citations
TL;DR: A new structuralism has begun to emerge in organizational theory as mentioned in this paper, which draws inspiration from the social structural tradition in sociology, but extends that tradition by more broadly conceptualizing social structure as comprised of broader cultural rules and meaning systems as well as material resources, revealing the subtleties of both overt and covert power.
Abstract: Over the past decade, a new structuralism has begun to emerge in organizational theory. This exciting new research program draws inspiration from the social structural tradition in sociology, but extends that tradition by more broadly conceptualizing social structure as comprised of broader cultural rules and meaning systems as well as material resources—revealing the subtleties of both overt and covert power. Building on the insights of Bourdieu and related work in social theory and cultural sociology, new structuralist empirical research focuses on concrete manifestations of culture in everyday practice and has pioneered the measurement of cultural aspects of social structure using a variety of relational methods. In this essay, we revisit mid-century social structural approaches to organizations, review the development of organization theory as a management subfield that increasingly focused on instrumental exchange, highlight key aspects of the new structuralism in organizational theory, and discuss promising new research directions.
244 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how changes in habits are theorized and operationalized within both social psychological and social practice approaches, and the practical implications for promoting environmentally sustainable societies.
Abstract: Understanding human behavior lies at the heart of responses to climate change. Many environmentally relevant behavior patterns are frequent, stable, and persistent. There is an increasing focus on understanding these patterns less in terms of deliberative processes and more in terms of habits and routines embedded in everyday life. Examinations of the ‘habitual’ nature of environmentally consequential activities have been approached from two theoretically distinct perspectives. From a social psychological perspective, ‘habit’ is studied as an intra-individual psychological construct that sustains ingrained behavior patterns in stable settings and obstructs adoption of more environmentally friendly alternatives. Sociologists from the social practice tradition, in contrast, have sought to highlight the ways in which resource-intensive ‘habitual practices’ become established and maintained in society through a commingling of material, procedural, and socio-discursive elements. We reflect critically upon key theoretical differences underpinning these two approaches to repetitive behaviors and review empirical work from both traditions that speaks to the relevance of ‘habitual behavior patterns’ central to addressing climate change. Finally, we examine how changes in habits are theorized and operationalized within both social psychological and social practice approaches, and practical implications for promoting environmentally sustainable societies.
243 citations
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: Social Structure and Personality (SSP) research as mentioned in this paper is concerned with the relationship between macro-social systems or processes and individual feelings, attitudes, and behaviors, and it is considered a perspective or framework rather than a theoretical paradigm because it is not associated with general theoretical claims that transcend specific substantive problems.
Abstract: Social structure and personality (SSP) research is concerned with the relationship between macro-social systems or processes and individual feelings, attitudes, and behaviors. It is considered a perspective or framework rather than a theoretical paradigm because it is not associated with general theoretical claims that transcend specific substantive problems. Rather, it provides a set of orienting principles that can be applied across diverse substantive areas. These principles direct our attention to the hierarchically organized processes through which macrostructures come to have relevance for the inner lives of individual persons and, in theory, the processes through which individual persons come to alter social systems. Although the SSP name implies an exclusive focus on social structures, SSP research is concerned more broadly with social systems, sets of "persons and social positions or roles that possess both a culture and a social structure" (House, 1981, p. 542). Whereas House (1981) notes that social structure can be used to refer to "any or all aspects of social systems," he and other SSP researchers define social structure more precisely as "a persisting and bounded pattern of social relationships (or pattern of behavioral intention) among the units (persons or positions) in a social system" (House, 1981, p. 542, emphasis in the original). This definition encompasses features of the macro-social order such as the structure of the labor market and systems of social stratification as well as processes such as industrialization. In contrast, culture is used in SSP research to refer to "a set of cognitive and evaluative beliefs— beliefs about what is or what ought to be—that are shared by the members of a social system and transmitted to new members" (House, 1981, p. 542). The distinction between structure and culture is not always maintained in practice (a point we discuss in more detail later), but
243 citations