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Blinded by the facts: Unintended consequences of racial knowledge production in the Dillingham commission (1907–1911) Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Sunmin Kim
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‘Trauma work’ as hindrance to political praxis during democratisation movements Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2024-02-03 Zeina Al Azmeh, Patrick Baert
This paper examines the impact of a shift in focus from political praxis to trauma work in the context of a failed democratisation movement. It investigates the various phenomena which emerge when intellectuals, under the traumatic impact of violence and atrocities, place trauma narration at the core of their interventions. Drawing on document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews
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Self-negation Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Mustafa Emirbayer
This paper presents a new approach to theorizing and empirically investigating a phenomenon variously described by sociologists as internalized oppression or symbolic violence. Located at the intersection of internal worlds and external reality, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal and social, this object of inquiry—here termed self-negation—is crucial to many forms of societal domination. The paper
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Dating in captivity: creativity, digital affordance, and the organization of interaction in online dating during quarantine Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Kaiting Zhou
Unprecedented times compel new ways to explore relationships. Using interviews with dating app users quarantined in American cities at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I show the impacts of digital mediation on the highly scripted interactional patterns in dating. Drawing from the literature on creative action, temporality, digital affordance, and the materiality of cultural objects, I examine
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What counts as investment? Productive and unproductive expenditures Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-11-18 Fred Block
There have been significant changes in what economists include in the category of investment over the last six decades. The US government agency that compiles national income date, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, has tried to keep up with these changes, but it has not succeeded. The resulting tension between economic theory and official data can be overcome by adopting a different theoretical lens
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The gates to the profession are open: the alternative institutionalization of data science Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Netta Avnoon
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Defiant conformists: gender and resistance against genocide Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Kiran Stallone, Robert Braun
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Creating and maintaining an alternative public sphere: The struggles of social justice feminism, 1899–1925 Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-11-04 John Thomas McGuire
One of the most successful and influential contributions to examining the intersection between society and its effect on public action is Jurgen Habermas's landmark The structural transformation of the public space (1962). But as subsequent scholars pointed out, the Habermasian definition of “public sphere” needed to be expanded beyond its original historical context. This article contributes to that
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The domestic violence victim as COVID crisis figure Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Paige L. Sweet, Maya C. Glenn, Jacob Caponi
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Reimagining modern politics in the European mountains: confronting the traditional commons with the neo-rural conception of the common good Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Ismael Vaccaro, Oriol Beltran, Camila Del Mármol
Since at least the 1970s, the countryside of Western Europe has been the site of a myriad of “new” communal initiatives. Rural areas that were abandoned during the last century have witnessed the arrival of new inhabitants. These newcomers often flock to the mountains escaping urban lifestyles characterized by individualism, mass-oriented livelihoods, and isolation. Many of these individuals move to
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The policy-planning capacity of the American corporate community: corporations, policy-oriented nonprofits, and the inner circle in 1935–1936 and 2010–2011 Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 Tom Mills, G. William Domhoff
Using a combination of network analysis and descriptive statistics, this study examines the extent to which six important and longstanding policy-oriented nonprofit organizations — foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups — were connected via their directors with the 250 largest corporations in the United States in 1935–1936 and 2010–2011. The results demonstrate that the six nonprofit
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Democratization, development, and inequality: the limits of redistributive models of democracy Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Hannes Lacher, Dillon Wamsley
This article seeks to provide a comprehensive re-evaluation of the redistributive models of democracy advanced by Carles Boix, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, their reception within the democratization literature, and the subsequent trajectories of their authors. Contrary to the existing literature, which commonly envisions RMDs as a unified framework, this article argues that Boix and Acemoglu
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Nationalizing accounts: everyday nationalism, Japanese scientists, and global policy Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Nahoko Kameo
The article delineates how actors invoke nationalizing accounts—accounts that turn local conditions, actions, and actors into national ones—in everyday talk. Taking the case of Japanese university scientists depicting their commercialization trajectories after the adoption of a set of policies that originated from the U.S., the article delineates how scientists stipulate what they do is Japanese. I
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What makes a difference? Symmetry as a sociological concept Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-08-04 Jean-Sébastien Guy, Steffen Roth
This article discusses symmetry as an analytical tool for sociological analysis. Symmetry is presented as a property of social formations and a way to generate information about them through their mutual comparisons. The concept thus displaces the old dichotomy between individual and society. The latter forces to think in terms of wholes and parts, unduly limiting the possibilities at hand by keeping
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Does ‘social infrastructure’ curb drug addiction? The role of local institutional norms Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-08-04 Joseph Wallerstein
Research suggests that reducing rates of drug addiction requires a range of physical spaces where drug users and counselors can meet, build community, and work together. The efficacy of this ‘social infrastructure,’ however, depends not just on how its shared spaces facilitate access to social networks, but on how institutional rules and norms govern the social interaction that takes place in those
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Distinguishing but not defining: How ambivalence affects contemporary identity disclosures Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Amin Ghaziani, Andy Holmes
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Prerequisites and pathways: How social categorization helps administrators determine moral worth Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Isaac Dalke, Joss Greene
Scholars have revealed how moral evaluation is woven into formal administrative processes. While research examining these dynamics tends to assume that a person’s naturalized identity (such as race and gender) precedes administrative processing, we argue that social categorization by administrators is the tacit precondition upon which further processing takes place. We make this argument by looking
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Why did Trump call prayers politically correct? The coevolution of the PC notion, the authenticity ethic, and the role of the sacred in public life Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-06-03 Ori Schwarz
Trump’s crusade against PC played a key role in his political rhetoric and resonated well among his supporters, yet his notion of PC differed greatly in meaning from earlier uses of the term and was used to denounce a much wider range of socio-political behaviors. Based on a systematic analysis of Trump’s use of this notion, I identified five main normative propositions organizing Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric
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Trump divide among American conservative professors Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-05-27 David L. Swartz
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Planning as social practice: the formation and blockage of competitive futures in tournament chess, homebuying, and political organizing Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Max Besbris, Gary Alan Fine
Drawing on models of the interaction order, we describe how planning is an inherently social activity. We argue that planning as a practice involves five core elements: mirroring, identifying, coordinating, timing, and surmounting. Specifically, planning depends on (1) a realization of likely responses of others, (2) a recognition of communal understandings, grounded in local cultures, (3) a commitment
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From secularization to religious resurgence: an endogenous account Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Zeynep Ozgen
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Nuclear denial in Japan: the network power of an energy industrial complex Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Michael C. Dreiling, Tomoyasu Nakamura, Yvonne A. Braun
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Rethinking the “crisis of expertise”: a relational approach Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Lisa Stampnitzky
Concerns about a “crisis of expertise” have been raised recently in both scholarship and public debate. This article asks why there is such a widespread perception that expertise is in crisis, and why this “crisis” has posed such a difficult puzzle for sociology to explain. It argues that what has been interpreted as a crisis is better understood as a transformation: the dissolution of a regime of
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Resignation without relief: democratic governance and the relinquishing of parental rights Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Gillian Slee, Matthew Desmond
Sociologists have long studied the ways people resist oppression but have devoted far less empirical attention to the ways people resign to it. As a result, researchers have neglected the mechanisms of resignation and how people narrate their lived experiences. Drawing on 81 interviews with parents with past child protective services cases, this article provides an empirical account of resignation
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Social media, meet old politics: preservation and innovation in Colombian presidential elections, 2010–2018 Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Nicolás Torres-Echeverry
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Pricing the priceless child 2.0: children as human capital investment Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Nina Bandelj, Michelle Spiegel
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Ambivalences of smallness: population statistics and narratives of scale among American Jewry Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-12-04 Michal Kravel-Tovi
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A theory of intersubjectivity: experience, interaction and the anchoring of meaning Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-11-17 Iddo Tavory
Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding
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The survival game: Impression management and strategies of survival under extreme conditions in a Soviet Gulag prison camp Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen, Urs Steiner Brandt, Gert Tinggaard Svendsen
How do people survive under extreme conditions? Will selfish, non-cooperating free-rider types – the solo players – have the best chances of surviving? Or would cooperating, hard-working types – the team players – have higher chances? All morale put aside, it is interesting to know whether non-cooperation or cooperation pays off in a game characterized by scarcity and hard competition for survival
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“Black people don’t love nature”: white environmentalist imaginations of cause, calling, and capacity Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Matthew W. Hughey
I examine how white British members of a London-area environmental group conceptualize race in relation to ecological disasters. Based on a five-year (2018–2022) ethnographic study, members employed racialized narratives and symbolic boundaries to construct who was the cause of disasters, who had the moral responsibility or calling to remediate disasters, and who possessed the adequate resources and
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Encounters, separations, and incursions: Theorizing the Black Panther Party’s challenge to the War on Poverty Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Andrew Anastasi
This article analyzes a series of encounters between the Black Panther Party and the U.S. government’s War on Poverty, beginning with the Party’s foundation in a North Oakland anti-poverty office in 1966, and culminating with the resignation of six Party members from elected positions on a West Oakland anti-poverty board in 1973. The essay theorizes these encounters as moments in an antagonistic process
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Value change and the pragmatist theory of morality: A response Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Stefan Bargheer
What is the contribution of pragmatism to the sociology of morality? I answer to the points raised by the essays in this symposium on Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany by outlining what the work of John Dewey adds to recent discussions on the question how values change over time and how individuals develop moral commitments.
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The culture of official statistics. Symbolic domination and “bourgeois” assimilation in quantitative measurements of immigrant integration in Germany Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Martin Petzke
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“Insurgent subjectivity: Hope and its interactant emotions in the Nicaraguan revolution” Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Jean-Pierre Reed
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Critical reflections on pollitt and bouckaert’s construct of the neo-Weberian state (NWS) in their standard work on public management reform Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-09-26 Hubert Treiber
Pollitt and Bouckaert and their neo-Weberian state (NWS) have been chosen as the subject for this essay because the book has become a standard work in the public management movement. It is frequently cited and has been re-published in multiple editions (most recently in 2017). The authors also refer explicitly to Max Weber. This contribution seeks to draw attention to three important aspects, which
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Entanglements of experience: sketch for a sociological phenomenology of nature Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-09-22 Iddo Tavory
The article presents a social phenomenology of naturalism. Starting from Stefan Bargheer’s Moral entanglements (2018), it argues that to understand the transformations of naturalist practices, we have to focus both on the shifting typifications of activity and their organizational moorings, but also on the experiential affordances of practice. Drawing on the work of Schutz and Merleau-Ponty, I focus
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The person of the category: the pricing of risk and the politics of classification in insurance and credit Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-08-27 Greta R. Krippner, Daniel Hirschman
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Transcending the Capitalism and Slavery Debate: Slavery and World Geographies of Accumulation Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Tâmis Parron
The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or colonial
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Deweyan moral sociology: descriptive cultural history or critical Social Ethics? Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Philip S. Gorski
The contemporary sociology of morality is a form of descriptive ethics that shrinks away from any sort of prescriptive ethics. Building on the moral philosophies of John Dewey, and also of Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, and in dialogue with recent work by Stefan Bargheer, this article proposes a more ambitious program of critical social ethics that connects concerns with character and the common
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Moral entanglements with a changing climate Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Rebecca Elliott
This essay explores the theorization of moral valuation outlined in Stefan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany when extended to the climate crisis. It considers, first, how ‘nature’ is valued when it confronts people and societies as a source of threat, rather than of recreation or resources. Second, the essay critically examines the role of moral discourse in the
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The Morality of Birding: Aesthetic Engagement, Emotion, and Cognition Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Erika Summers-Effler
Drawing on a ritual approach to microsociology, I explain how and why aesthetic and moral practices inform each other and evolve as they do. I continue to develop a theory of aesthetic engagement, specifying how it generates the emotional sensibilities that inform moral practices. Examining aesthetic engagement and emotional sensibilities focuses our theoretical attention on our capacity to find our
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The means and ends of nature Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Caleb Scoville
What should sociologists make of nature? Pragmatism provides one possible answer to this question by centering the practical relations between humans and nonhuman nature. Stephan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements offers perhaps the most ambitious effort to develop a pragmatist sociology of nature. The book’s polemical aim is to depose a family of theories that, Bargheer argues, dominate our way of thinking
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Work and play as moral categories Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Shai M. Dromi
Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany, by Stefan Bargheer, claims that work and play orientations have respectively organized German and British wild bird conservation efforts. The book argues that work and play are nonmoral categories, and—more broadly—that moral justifications for action should be understood as mere post-hoc surface phenomena that contribute little to social
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The structure of political conflict. The oligarchs and the bourgeoisie in the Chilean Congress, 1834–1894 Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-07-21 Naim Bro
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Culture in transnational Interaction: how Organizational Partners Coproduce Sesame Street Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-07-22 Tamara Kay
Given the extraordinary politicization of culture in an era of globalization, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries during the last five decades. Sesame Street’s ubiquity around the world presents us with the question I address in this article: how do partner organizations work together, on the ground, to locally adapt a hybrid cultural
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Towards a transregional history of secularism: Intellectual connectivity, social reform, and state-building in South and Southeast Asia, 1918–1960 Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Clemens Six
This article argues for a transregional historical approach to explain the career of political secularism, i.e. the ideas and practices that inform the modern state’s relationship to and administration of religion, in the 20th century. More specifically, it asks in how far we can understand secularism in South and Southeast Asia between the end of the First World War and decolonisation after 1945 as
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From modern urban resident to sociable urban citizen: The making of spatial-political subjectivity through public housing in Singapore, 1972—2021 Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Tiffany J Chuang
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From industrial to digital citizenship: rethinking social rights in cyberspace Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Federico Tomasello
Growing social inequalities represent a major concern associated with the Digital Revolution. The article tackles this issue by exploring how welfare regulations and redistribution policies can be rethought in the age of digital capitalism. It focuses on the history and enduring crisis of social citizenship rights in their connection with technological changes, in order to draw a comparison between
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The genesis of Brexit in the UK: outline of a multi-field model Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-05-17 Will Atkinson
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Risky businesses: economic crisis in Argentina and the generative power of generations Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Sonia Prelat
How are risk orientations shaped in the sphere of work beyond proximate structuring institutions? In the absence of clear organizational imperatives or institutional supports, what provides the broad contours of a workable imaginary? Using interview data from small business owners in Argentina, I show that the form and content of generational memories of crisis influence the uptake of entrepreneurial
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Corporate political power and US foreign policy, 1981–2002: the role of the policy-planning network Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-04-30 Philip Luther-Davies, Kasia Julia Doniec, Joseph P. Lavallee, Lawrence P. King, G. William Domhoff
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Bureaucracy and the politics of time in state-business relations: Waiting to recruit migrant labour in Mauritius Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Lucas Puygrenier
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Trying to make race science the “civil” science: charisma in the race and intelligence debates Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-04-26 Kushan Dasgupta, Aaron Panofsky, Nicole Iturriaga
When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals
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“Burning the bridges”: escalation in the pursuit of authenticity Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-03-02 Stoyan V. Sgourev, Erik Aadland
We develop a process-based framework, articulating the escalation of difference between “private” self and “public” display as an alternative trajectory in the pursuit of authenticity to alignment and compromise. A parsimonious model presents an endogenous dynamic of binary choice that generates momentum toward polarization. The model is illustrated in the context of “black” metal – a branch of heavy
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Violence Regimes: A Useful Concept for Social Politics, Social Analysis, and Social Theory Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-02-07 Jeff Hearn, Sofia Strid, Anne Laure Humbert, Dag Balkmar
This paper critically interrogates the usefulness of the concept of violence regimes for social politics, social analysis, and social theory. In the first case, violence regimes address and inform politics and policy, that is, social politics, both around various forms of violence, such as gender-based violence, violence against women, anti-lesbian, gay and transgender violence, intimate partner violence
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School beyond stratification: Internal goods, alienation, and an expanded sociology of education Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Jeffrey Guhin, Joseph Klett
Sociologists of education often emphasize goods that result from a practice (external goods) rather than goods intrinsic to a practice (internal goods). The authors draw from John Dewey and Alasdair MacIntyre to describe how the same practice can be understood as producing “skills” that center external goods or as producing habits (Dewey) or virtues (MacIntyre), both of which center internal goods
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Distributive effervescence: emotional energy and social cohesion in secularizing societies Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Kevin McCaffree, F. LeRon Shults
Research suggests that societies are becoming more materially secure, less intensely religious and that social interactions are increasingly computer mediated. However, sociological theorists have not yet developed robust mechanistic theories explaining how social cohesion might be generated under these new conditions. This is a notable omission because scholars have demonstrated empirically that materially
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Between sacred gift and profane exchange: identity craft and relational work in asylum claims-making on religious grounds Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2021-11-08 Kim, Jaeeun
Identity crafts for migration and citizenship purposes require the assistance of brokerage actors that help secure documents, advise on self-presentations, and vouch for relevant credentials. While recognizing the contradictory roles these intermediaries play in both facilitating and controlling migration and the porous boundary between for-profit and non-profit actors, scholars have yet to explore
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Towards a sociology of curiosity: theoretical and empirical consideration of the epistemic drive notion Theory and Society (IF 3.226) Pub Date : 2021-11-08 Bineth, Ariel
The article argues for the social production of curiosity. Due its motivating characteristic, curiosity is reconceptualized as an epistemic drive which organizes the social production of knowledge under given socio-historical and local-cultural circumstances. First, historical, philosophical, and sociological literature is reviewed to give a context for the argument. Then a theoretical apparatus is