Showing papers on "Social theory published in 2011"

A Social Capital Framework for the Study of Institutional Agents and Their Role in the Empowerment of Low-Status Students and Youth

Abstract: This article builds on a sociological account of working-class minority youth development and differential access to social capital—defined in terms of key resources and support provided by institutional agents (Stanton-Salazar, 1997, 2001, 2004). The article elaborates on the concept of institutional agents—specifically, high-status, non-kin, agents who occupy relatively high positions in the multiple dimensional stratification system, and who are well positioned to provide key forms of social and institutional support. The article focuses on the kinds of institutional support such agents are able to provide, and on the multiple and simultaneous [help-giving] roles assumed by those who provide this support. Drawing from empowerment theory in critical social work, the article provides a discussion about manifesting one’s capacity as an institutional agent in ways that not only entails providing key resources, but also that enables the authentic empowerment of the student or young person. Influenced by Fre...

Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings

Abstract: Preface 1) Introduction -Getting Connected -Networks as Information Maps -Leaders and Followers -Networks as Conduits -The Point of View 2) Basic Network Concepts, Part I: Individual Members of Networks -Introduction -What Is a Network? -Sociological Questions about Relationships Connections Propinquity Homophily Individual-Level Homophily Homophily and Collectivities -Dyads and Mutuality -Balance and Triads -Where We Are Now 3) Basic Network Concepts, Part II: Whole Social Networks -Distributions Dyads and Triads Density Structural Holes Weak Ties -"Popularity" or Centrality -Distance Size of the Interpersonal Environment The "Small World" -Multiplexity -Roles and Positions Named Positions and Relationships Informal Positions and Relationships Informal Relations and Hierarchies Embeddedness of the Informal within Instituted or Named Networks Observed Roles -Summary 4) Basic Network Concepts, Part III: Network Segmentation -Introduction -Named and Unnamed Network Segments Primary Groups, Cliques, and Clusters -Segmenting Networks from the Point of View of the Observer Segmenting Groups on the Basis of Cohesion Resistance to Disruption Structural Similarity and Structural Equivalence Core/Periphery Structures -Where We Are Now 5) The Psychological Foundations of Social Networks -Getting Things Done -Community and Support -Safety and Affiliation -Effectiveness and Structural Holes -Safety and Social Networks -Effectiveness and Social Networks -Both Safety and Effectiveness? -Driving for Status or Rank -Cultural Differences in Safety, Effectance, and Rank -Motivations and Practical Networks -Motivations of Corporate Actors -Cognitive Limits on Individual Networks -Where We Are Now 6) Small Groups, Leadership, and Social Networks: The Basic Building Blocks -Introduction -Primary Groups and Informal Systems: Propositions -Pure Informal Systems -How to Find Informal Systems -Asymmetric Ties and the Influence of the External System -Formalizing the System -Where We Are Now 7) Organizations and Networks -The Contradictions of Authority -Emergent Networks in Organizations The Factory Floor -Information-Driven Organizations -Inside the Box, Outside the Box, or Both -Bridging the Gaps: Tradeoff s between Network Size, Diversity, and Social Cohesion -Where We Are Now 8) The Small World, Circles, and Communities -Introduction -How Many People Do You Know? -The Skewed Distribution of the Number of People One Knows -Formal Small World Models -Clustering in Social Networks -Social Circles -The Small World Search -Applications of Small World Theory to Smaller Worlds -Where We Are Now 9) Networks and Diffusion -Networks and Diffusion-An Introduction The Basic Model Exogenous Factors in the Adoption of Innovation - Influence and Decision-Making The Current State of Personal Influence Self-Designated Opinion Leaders or Influentials Characteristics of Opinion Leaders and Influentials Group Influence -Epidemiology and Network Diffusion Social Networks and Epidemiology Social Networks and HIV-AIDS Transporting Disease-Large-Scale Models -Tipping Points and Thresholds Threshold - Where We Are Now 10) Networks as Social Capital - Introduction The General Idea of Social Capital Social Capital as Investment -Individual-Level Social Capital Social Support Individual Networked Resources: Position and Resource Generators Correlates of Individual Social Capital Other Indicators of Networked Resources -Social Capital as an Attribute of Social Systems Theorists of Social System Social Capital Bowling Alone Recent Findings on Social System Social Capital and Its Consequences -Where We Are Now 11) Ethical Dilemmas of Network Research -Networks as a Research Paradigm -Anonymity, Confidentiality, Privacy, and Consent -Who Benefits - Cases and Examples Survey Research Organization Research Terrorists and Criminals Networks and Terrorism: The CASOS Projects -Conclusion: More Complicated than the Belmont Report 12) Coda: Ten Master Ideas of Social Networks -Introduction -The Ten Master Ideas Bibliography Notes Index

Critical consciousness: current status and future directions.

Abstract: In this chapter, the authors consider Paulo Freire's construct of critical consciousness (CC) and why it deserves more attention in research and discourse on youth political and civic development. His approach to education and similar ideas by other scholars of liberation aims to foster a critical analysis of society—and one's status within it—using egalitarian, empowering, and interactive methods. The aim is social change as well as learning, which makes these ideas especially relevant to the structural injustice faced by marginalized youth. From their review of these ideas, the authors derive three core CC components: critical reflection, political efficacy, and critical action. They highlight promising research related to these constructs and innovative applied work including youth action-research methodology. Their conclusion offers ideas for closing some of the critical gaps in CC theory and research. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Governance, the state and sustainable tourism: a political economy approach

Abstract: Collective actions are often needed to promote the objectives of sustainable tourism in destinations. Governance is the basis of these collective actions. This paper contends that research on the governance of tourism and sustainability would benefit from greater use of social theory. It shows how one social theory, a strategic-relational political economy approach, can offer insights into state interventions affecting tourism and sustainability in destinations. The paper uses a literature review and case studies incorporating ideas from this approach to understand the state's influences on tourism and sustainability. Case studies are taken from Germany, China, Malta, Turkey and the UK. A range of distinctive perspectives and themes associated with this approach are assessed. They include the approach's holistic, relational and dialectical perspective, its focus on the state's roles in regulating the economic and political systems, its concern with the interactions between agency and structure, and the ad...

Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life

Abstract: This article provides an overview of a series of experiments in what the author calls critical making, a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration. Although they share much in common with forms of design and art practice, the goal of these events is primarily focused on using material production—making things—as part of an explicit practice of concept elaboration within the social study of technology.

Intercultural communication and ideology

Abstract: Preface and methodology Chapter 1: Key Discussions Essentialism Neo-Essentialism Cosmopolitanism Imagined Certainty versus Acknowledged Complexity Chapter 2: Critical Cultural Awareness Models of Awareness A Reconstructed Narrative Critical Interpretivism A Decentred Reading Opening up Cultural Possibilities Chapter 3: Cultural Complexity Informants An Emergent Methodology Statements of Cultural Identity Competing Social Theories Complexity and Politics Thinking about China Chapter 4: The Indelible Politics of Self and Other Othering The Morality of 'Helping' Struggling with Identity Recognition Understanding the Discourse Politics of Othering Chapter 5: Un-Noticed Periphery Identities Claiming the World 'Westernization' and Modernity Chapter 6: A Grammar of Culture Negotiating Culture Particular Content and Universal Process Particular Social and Political Structures Particular Cultural Products Underlying Universal Cultural Processes Chapter 7: Discourses of Cultural Disbelief Penetrating Professional Discourses Sustained Disbelief The Intercultural Line and the Third Space Chapter 8: Creative Cultural Engagement Qing and the Seminar Learning from the Margins Chapter 9: Culture, Real or Imagined? The Centrality of Ideology The Fact of Ideology Cultural Realism Conclusion Glossary

A Social Constructionist Approach to Disability: Implications for Special Education

Abstract: Proponents of a social model of disability derive their arguments from social constructionism. They combine different disabling conditions under one term: disability. Subsequently, they apply the specific viewpoint of the disability rights social movement of people with physical disabilities to other conditions such as intellectual disabilities, autism, sensory disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders. Based on flawed premises and a romantic concept of social inclusion, special education is condemned as segregationist. The result is an unjust and uniform educational policy toward people whose disabilities are not physical.

Schools, teachers, and curriculum change: A balancing act?

Abstract: Educational change is a fact of life for teachers across the world, as schools are subjected to constant and ubiquitous pressures to innovate. And, yet, many school practices remain remarkably persistent in the face of such innovation. This paradox of innovation without change is perplexing for policymakers and practitioners alike. This paper investigates the gap between policy and practice, between innovation and the changes in social practices that occur in response to such innovation. It draws upon empirical data from two case studies in Scotland—schools responding to new curriculum policy—exploring contrasting approaches to the management of innovation. One is a laissez faire approach, and the other a more directive managerial strategy. Through an analytical separation of culture, structure, and agency, derived from the social theory of Margaret Archer, the paper sheds light on the social processes that accompanied innovation in these two settings demonstrating how teacher culture and differing management styles impact upon externally initiated policy.

Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences

Abstract: For the past fifty years anxiety over the problem of naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side pursues the idea of social science as another kind of natural science, while the other radically rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. All of the various developments in social scientific theory since then have reflected this dichotomy between naturalism and post-modernism. "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" suggests a third way, reframing this debate and offering a synthetic vision that sets out a new understanding of sociological interpretation. Analyzing the work of writers such as Theda Skocpol, Clifford Geertz, Leela Gandhi, Roy Bhaskar, Foucault, and Habermas, Isaac Ariail Reed delineates three epistemic modes of social research: realism, normativism, and interpretivism. Reed argues that the last mode provides a way forward for an anti-naturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena. Both an examination of and a theoretical meditation on how social investigators do their work, "Interpretation and Social Knowledge" is an ingenious and fruitful exploration of what makes the human sciences uniquely capable of revealing and explaining our world.

Voter Turnout: A Social Theory of Political Participation

Abstract: This book develops and empirically tests a social theory of political participation. It overturns prior understandings of why some people (such as college-degree holders, churchgoers and citizens in national rather than local elections) vote more often than others. The book shows that the standard demographic variables are not proxies for variation in the individual costs and benefits of participation, but for systematic variation in the patterns of social ties between potential voters. Potential voters who move in larger social circles, particularly those including politicians and other mobilizing actors, have more access to the flurry of electoral activity prodding citizens to vote and increasing political discussion. Treating voting as a socially defined practice instead of as an individual choice over personal payoffs, a social theory of participation is derived from a mathematical model with behavioral foundations that is empirically calibrated and tested using multiple methods and data sources.

Science, normativity and skill: Reviewing and renewing the anthropological basis of Critical Theory

Abstract: The categories and contours of a normative social theory are prefigured by its ‘anthropological’ presuppositions. The discourse/communicative-theoretic basis of Habermasian theory was prefigured by a strong anthropological demarcation between an instrumentally structured realm of science, technology and labor versus a normatively structured realm of social interaction. An alternative anthropology, bolstered by current work in the empirical sciences, finds fundamental normative needs for orientation and ‘compensation’ also to be embedded in embodied material practices. An emerging anthropologically informed concept of skill that goes beyond old manual versus intellectual dichotomies and brings forth internal criteria of autonomy and authenticity can serve as a new bridge between categories of social justice, such as Sen and Nussbaum’s basic human ‘capabilities’, and new cutting-edge work in the empirical human sciences and thereby provide Critical Theory with a renewed point of departure that is both norma...

Potentials and Limitations of Comparative Method in Social Science

Abstract: Comparison is a common research method with outstanding merits and with widespread application. The aim of this article is to discuss systematically some of the methodological strategies of using this mode of research in social science. To do so a few typologies regarding the functions and leverages of comparative analysis are presented first. In the next step various ways in which comparative research is applied in social theory are exemplified, with especial attention paid to comparative studies of large-scale, macro-level historical process of social change. This article ends with a discussion of the limitations of comparison as a method of generating historical generalisations.

Cultural capital and agency: connecting critique and curriculum in higher education

Abstract: This paper explores some of the unresolved tensions in higher education systems and the contradiction between widening participation and the consolidation of social position. It shows how concepts of capital derived from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam provide a powerful basis for critique, but risk a deficit view of students from less privileged backgrounds. These students are more likely to attend lower‐status institutions and engage with an externally focused curriculum. The paper argues for greater attention to agency, and community and familial capital, in conceptualising the resilience of those from less privileged backgrounds. While the recognition of ‘voice’ is important, a curriculum that acknowledges the context independence of knowledge is essential if these students are not to be further disadvantaged.

In search of the blue flower? Grand social theories and career research: The case of Bourdieu’s theory of practice

Abstract: Responding to the various calls for more interdisciplinarity in career research over the last few decades, we identify five touchstones for theoretical concepts to advance the interdisciplinary dialogue on careers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we outline its contributions to such a dialogue in the light of these touchstones. In spite of some potential pitfalls, the theory of practice not only invites interdisciplinary dialogue, but also provides a unifying framework for generating new questions in career research and systematically integrating concepts from other disciplines. Overall, this is but one example of how grand social theories can stimulate interdisciplinarity in career research.

Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms

Abstract: Introduction Pierre Demeulenaere Part I. Action and Mechanisms: 1. Ordinary rationality: the core of analytical sociology Raymond Boudon 2. Indeterminacy of emotional mechanisms Jon Elster 3. A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences Dan Sperber 4. Conversation as mechanism: emergence in creative groups Keith Sawyer Part II. Mechanisms and Causality: 5. Generative process model building Thomas J. Fararo 6. Singular mechanisms and Bayesian narratives Peter Abell 7. The logic of mechanismic explanations in the social sciences Michael Schmid 8. Social mechanisms and explanatory relevance Petri Ylikoski 9. Causal regularities, action and explanation Pierre Demeulenaere Part III. Approaches to Mechanisms: 10. Youth unemployment: a self-reinforcing process? Yvonne Aberg and Peter Hedstrom 11. Neighborhood effects, causal mechanisms, and the social structure of the city Robert J. Sampson 12. Social mechanisms and generative explanations: computational models with double agents Michael W. Macy with Damon Centola, Andreas Flache, Arnout van de Rijt and Robb Willer 13. Relative deprivation in silico: agent-based models and causality in analytical sociology Gianluca Manzo.

IR in Dialogue… but Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics

Abstract: In an effort to reconceive the conduct of ‘dialogue’ within world politics, it is necessary for us to find new subject-positions from which to speak. This article develops a typology of six distinctive intellectual strategies through which ‘decolonising’ approaches to social theory can help rethink world politics by bringing alternative ‘subjects’ of inquiry into being. These strategies include pointing out discursive Orientalisms, deconstructing historical myths of European development, challenging Eurocentric historiographies, rearticulating subaltern subjectivities, diversifying political subjecthoods and re-imagining the social-psychological subject of world politics. The value of articulating the project in this way is illustrated in relation to a specific research project on the politics of the liberal peace in Mozambique. The article discusses a number of tensions arising from engaging with plurality and difference as a basis for conducting social inquiry, as well as some structural problems in the profession that inhibit carrying out this kind of research.

Recentring care: interrogating the commodification of care

Abstract: We trace how the category of care comes to be constituted historically and in social theory in ways that privilege the autonomous individual as economic agent and, in the process, renders care a problematic residual to social order and social theory. We investigate how theoretical categories, social relations, institutional orders and discursive practices separate care and economy in ways that constitute those in need (including the impoverished) as less valuable, subordinate and a drain on society. We then highlight a global trend towards the commodification of care within market logics of choice, even as the particular expression of these processes is worked out in and through the histories and cultures of places. We further argue that this repositioning of care within market relations of exchange obscures the fundamental interrelatedness of all humans and obscures the possibility of thinking more inclusive and less hierarchical forms of sociality.

Securing ‘supportive environments’ for health in the face of ecosystem collapse: meeting the triple threat with a sociology of creative transformation

Abstract: In this paper, we reflect on and explore what remains to be done to make the concept of supportive environments--one of the Ottawa Charter's five core action areas--a reality in the context of growing uncertainty about the future and accelerated pace of change. We pay particular attention to the physical environment, while underscoring the inextricable links between physical and social environments, and particularly the need to link social and environmental justice. The paper begins with a brief orientation to three emerging threats to health equity, namely ecological degradation, climate change, and peak oil, and their connection to economic instability, food security, energy security and other key determinants of health. We then present three contrasting perspectives on the nature of social change and how change is catalyzed, arguing for an examination of the conditions under which cultural change on the scale required to realize the vision of 'supportive environments for all' might be catalyzed, and the contribution that health promotion as a field could play in this process. Drawing on sociological theory, and specifically practice theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we advocate rethinking education for social change by attending more adequately to the social conditions of transformative learning and cultural change. We conclude with an explication of three key implications for health promotion practice: a more explicit alignment with those seeking to curtail environmental destruction and promote environmental justice, strengthening engagement with local or settings-focused 'communities of practice' (such as the Transition Town movement), and finding new ways to creatively 'engage emergence', a significant departure from the current dominant focus on 'risk management'.

The governance of the prior

Abstract: This essay asks how critical indigenous theory might intervene in the field of critical theory. What originates here that does not in other disciplinary phrasings and phases and cannot without doing some violence to the tasks indigenous critical theory sets for itself? It begins to answer this question by introducing a form of liberal governance – the governance of the prior – that critical indigenous theory illuminates. And it argues that rather than referencing a specific social content or context, social identity or movement, critical indigenous theory disrupts a network of presuppositions underpinning political theory, social theory and humanist ethics (obligation) which are themselves built upon this form of liberal governance.

The impact of network structure on breaking ties in online social networks: unfollowing on twitter

Abstract: We investigate the breaking of ties between individuals in the online social network of Twitter, a hugely popular social media service. Building on sociology concepts such as strength of ties, embeddedness, and status, we explore how network structure alone influences tie breaks - the common phenomena of an individual ceasing to "follow" another in Twitter's directed social network. We examine these relationships using a dataset of 245,586 Twitter "follow" edges, and the persistence of these edges after nine months. We show that structural properties of individuals and dyads at Time 1 have a significant effect on the existence of edges at Time 2, and connect these findings to the social theories that motivated the study.

Governing through disorder: Neoliberal environmental governance and social theory

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the spread of an array of market-inspired environmental governance approaches, often associated with neoliberal ideas, programs and policies. Drawing on the governmentality framework and focusing on the examples of biotechnology patenting and the financialisation of climate and weather, the article argues that the conceptual underpinnings of these approaches lie in a novel understanding of the ontological quality of the biophysical world. The latter is conceived as fully plastic, controllable, open to an ever-expanding human agency. Neoliberal governance operates through, rather than despite, disorder – that is, through contingency, uncertainty, instability. In the public realm this idea constitutes a sort of shared horizon of meaning; but environmental social theory has a difficult time accounting for it. By reviewing three major perspectives, namely ecological modernization, neo-Marxism and poststructuralism, it is shown that behind contradictions and reticence in their assessments of neoliberal governance lie difficulties in making sense of the latter's theoretical core. This sets a challenging research program for social theory.

Who volunteers? Constructing a hybrid theory

Abstract: This paper describes three major theoretical perspectives in research on volunteering: social theories that stress the importance of context, roles, and integration; individual characteristic theories that emphasize values, traits, and motivations; and resource theories that focus on skills and free time. It unites research from multiple disciplines into a single hybrid model, performs a preliminary test of the model on a nationally representative US dataset, and concludes with recommendations for scholars and practitioners. Using the 1995 Midlife in the US dataset, we operationalized concepts from each theoretical category and found that variables measuring each perspective played a substantial and independent role in predicting volunteering. Our hybrid model, which includes significant variables from each theory, offers some directions for recruitment and retention by showing how social roles and networks can constrain or encourage volunteering at different stages of the life course. As social roles and networks are both highly predictive and easily observed, volunteer managers can use them to recruit and retain volunteers. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Different Things Make Different People Happy: Examining Social Capital and Subjective Well-Being by Gender and Parental Status

Abstract: This paper addresses a number of key challenges in current subjective well-being (SWB) research: A new wave of studies should take into account that different things may make different people happy, thus going beyond a unitary ‘happiness formula’. Furthermore, empirical results need to be connected to broader theoretical narratives. Using a re-examination of the social context of well-being as its case study, this article therefore resorts to sociological theory and fills a gap by investigating how social capital is correlated in different ways with the SWB of men, women, parents, and non-parents. Ordered logit and OLS regression analyses systematically examine slope heterogeneity using UK data from the European Social Survey. It turns out that civic engagement is not at all associated with higher life satisfaction for mothers, while the relationship is positive for men and strongest for childless women. Moreover, informal socialising is positively and more strongly associated with life satisfaction among women, although only when OLS is used. In sum, the social context of well-being varies considerably by gender and parental status. Mothers do not seem to benefit from formal social capital, indicating a “motherhood penalty” (see Correll et al., Am J Sociol 112(5):1297–1338 in 2007) regarding the psychological rewards usually associated with volunteering. Given the high levels of formal social capital among mothers, the findings also highlight the importance of the homo sociologicus concept. Consequently, SWB research can be successfully used to provide new insights into long-standing interdisciplinary theory debates such as the one on homo economicus versus homo sociologicus.

Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere

Abstract: Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere provides the first major social scientific study of these festivals in the wake of their explosion in popularity over the past decade. It explores the cultural significance of contemporary arts festivals from their location within the cultural public sphere, examining them as sites for contestation and democratic debate, and also identifying them as examples of a particular aesthetic cosmopolitanism. The book approaches contemporary festivals as relatively autonomous social texts that need interpretation and contextualisation. This perspective, combined with a diversified set of theoretical approaches and research methods, and guided by a common thematic rationale, places the volume squarely within some of the most debated topics in current social sciences. Furthermore, the multifaceted nature of festivals allows for unusual but useful connections to be made across several fields of social inquiry. This timely edited collection brings together contributions from key figures across the social sciences, and proves to be valuable reading for undergraduate students, postgraduates, and professionals working within the areas of contemporary social theory, cultural theory, and visual culture.

Social Approaches to Mental Distress

Abstract: Introduction.- Values and Working Relationships.- Understanding the Experience of Mental Distress.- Social Circumstances and Life Events: How Damaging Social Experiences May Contribute to Mental Distress.- Power, Agency and Social Capital.- Personality Adaptations, Resilience and Vulnerability.- Families, Relationships and Social Systems.- Social Models of Mental Distress.- Early Intervention and Crisis Resolution.- Recovery and SocialParticipation.- Risk Taking and Safeguarding.- Assessment, Action Planning and Self-directed Support.- Concluding Comments: Putting Social Theory and Research Into Practice.

Making Sense of 'International Practices'

Abstract: Introduction Now that the “practice turn” in social theory has reached International Relations (IR), a new great debate seems to be in the offing. Observers of previous “turns” might be skeptical of the promissory notes, not only because of experience, but also because this new focus on “practices” seems even less well defined. The spectrum ranges from adherents of “implicit knowledge” and habits a la Polanyi to Giddean grand theory focusing on the dialectics of agency and structure. It encompasses “social” epistemology stressing the communal aspects of knowledge production, Bourdieu’s emphasis on “ habitus ” and doxa , and Oakeshott’s “habits” and “knowing how” rather than “knowing why.” Thus, the call to foreground practices might make for heated debates but illumination by low wattage, given the heterogeneity of the different vocabularies. Such problems are usually “solved” by a “working definition” imposing some order. Yet, frequently “working definitions” hide deep conceptual disagreements and emerge from intense negotiations among the participants in a research project. While such a preliminary agreement might be the price for getting along, nothing in this procedure guarantees that this “consensus” is “fruitful,” as it depends on who participates and on who is setting the terms of the debate. Two of the more recent “collective” research programs – one on “ideas,” the other on “judicialization” – illustrate these problems: By nobly forgoing any engagement with the common uses of the crucial terms and their theoretical reflections, and by settling conceptual issues largely by fiat, we were treated to an amicable but rather shallow conversation among friends.

Sociology of the European Union

Abstract: Introduction A.Favell & V.Guiraudon.- PART I: SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS.- Social Class and Identity J.D.Medrano.- Social Mobility and Spatial Mobility A.Favell & E.Recchi.- Elites, Middle Classes and Cities A.Andreotti & P.Le Gales.- Markets and Firms N.Fligstein.- PART II: POLITICS AND POLICIES.- Mobilizations V.Guiraudon.- EU Politics N.Kauppi.- EU Policies F.Merand.- Social Theory and European Integration H.Trenz.- Postface G.Ross.

Foucault and Sociology

Abstract: Michel Foucault was a gifted but elusive thinker with a wide and continuing impact across many academic fields. This article positions his work as a historical sociology of knowledge and evaluates its contribution. After reviewing Foucault’s central preoccupations as they emerge in his major works, the argument briefly considers their influence on accounting scholarship as an informative exemplar of a wider Foucault effect. Four key areas for the sociological reception of Foucault are then considered: the nature of discourse and archaeology, his historical method, the problem of agency and action, and his conception of power. Articulating Foucault’s relationship to sociology is inherently problematic, not least because he takes the emergence of the sciences of man as something to be explained rather than augmented. Yet his work remains a rich resource for inquiries of the sociological type, is broadly aligned with a practice turn in social theory, and intersects with several themes in both mainstream and critical sociology.