Social theory

About: Social theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11421 publications have been published within this topic receiving 624898 citations.

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.

Taking the Social Origins of Human Nature Seriously: Toward a More Imperialist Social Psychology

Abstract: To recognize that human beings are adapted for social living is fundamental to the science of human psychology. I argue that the development of broad social psychological theory would benefit from taking this basic premise more seriously. We need to pay more attention to the implications for personality and social psychology of recognizing that all of the building blocks of human psychology--cognition, emotion, motivation--have been shaped by the demands of social interdependence. In this article I illustrate the generative potential of this basic premise for development of more expansive social theory.

The Creativity of Action and the Intersubjectivity of Reason: Mead's Pragmatism and Social Theory

Abstract: Pragmatism and sociology are children of the same epoch. That was the assertion made by Emile Durkheim, the French founder and classical theorist of sociology, in a series of lectures on the relationship between the two intellectual movements that he delivered shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, during which his life came to its end.2 By that comment he meant more than the trivial fact that the representative philosophy of the United States of America originated in the same period in which sociology made the transition from being an idea of academic outsiders and of social reformers to being an institutionalized academic discipline. Rather, he saw in both enterprises the same spirit at work, a spirit that was striving to formulate in a new fashion philosophical problems with a long tradition and to find a solution for them through a changed relationship to the methods of empirical science. It is true that for Durkheim pragmatism, which in his eyes was represented chiefly by William James, was an irrationalist attack on rationality that had to be warded off by sociology for the sake of reason and of rationalist French culture. While holding that position, however, he did not regard sociology itself as a simple continuation of previous traditions of thought, but as "reconstructed rationalism". In Durkheim's opinion, sociology and pragmatism had both made a break with the older philosophy; his own program of sociology, though, was intended also to circumvent the dangers that pragmatism engendered. Sociology was thus not just an empirical discipline, but in Durkheim's view also a specific philosophical project. It remains in the interest of both sociology and philosophy to recall

Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Science, Social Science, Politics and the Environment: Some Unhelpful Dichotomies Biological Theory and the Environment * Social Theory and the Environment * Conclusion: Towards an Eclectic but Unified Approach * Notes 2. People, Nature and Social Theory People and Nature in Early Sociological Theory: Evolutionism as a False Lead * Tonnies: From Land and Community to Society * Modernity, Community and Human Nature: The Chicago School of Sociology * From Biologism to Functionalism * People and Environment: The Arguments of Later Marxism * Conclusion: Society, Nature and Social Theory * Notes 3. 'Nature as Man's Inorganic Body': Marx's Conceptual Framework Nature, Alienation and People: The Early Marxian Perspective * Marxism and the Environment: Continuing Developments and Debates * Marx and Engels on People and Nature: An Assessment and Comparison with Existing Environmental Analysis * Developing Marx's Approach * Notes 4. Arguments within Biology: From Neo-Darwinism to the Study of Organisms and Their Environments A Methodological Issue * The Neo-Darwinian Revolution * Socioecology: Organisms in Ecological Context * Organism and Environment: The Emergent 'New Biology' * Notes 5. 'Nature as Alive': Social Relations and Deep Mental Structures The Evolution of Mind * Biology and the Problematic Notion of 'Culture' * The Mind: Eroding the Culture-Nature Distinction * An Understanding of the Biologically Evolved Mind * Social Relations and Nature as 'Alive' * Alienation and Fetishisation: Returning to the Yanomami Case Study * 'Women as Nature': Consciousness, Natural Differences and Environmentalism * Notes 6. Spreading 'Man's Inorganic Body': Some Implications Space, Time and Modernity: Aspects of Giddens' Account * Society and Nature: Developing and Using Giddens' Analysis * Nature and the Time-Space Distanciation of Social Life * Time-Space Distanciation Combining with Alienation: The Instance of Food and Health * Time-Space Distanciation, Consumption and the Reification of 'Nature' * Notes 7. Nature Reified: A Contemporary Case Study Notes 8. Society and Nature: From Theory to Practice Realism: Some Areas of Debate * From Theory to Practice * Notes Epilogue Index