This article proposes a cognitive structural account of the emergence of social worlds that organize the expectations of producers and audiences. The proposed model considers the emergence process in three stages: (1) the arrival of distinctive clusters of objects and their producer, (2) conceptualization of the labeled clusters in high-energy social structures that we call a “scene,” and (3) whether a scene’s coordinating concept becomes generally taken for granted. We first develop an ontology for analyzing these processes. We then analyze the role of social structure in these stages and define the emergence process in terms of hazards, that is, the event rates of each stage. The proposed account can explain the emergence of worlds in a variety of social contexts, including organizational forms in markets, genres in creative industries, disciplines in science, and forms of social protest.

Recently, sociology saw a surge of interest in practical theorizing. Many contributions to this discourse adopt an empiricist approach to theory building characterized by data centrism, a separation between discovery and justification, and an unclear or restricted role of existing theory. The article develops “hermeneutic theorizing” as a distinct approach that reconceptualizes engagement with prior theory as a central driver of novel theorizing. This hermeneutic mode has implicitly shaped the self-understanding of many classical sociological theorists and finds its roots in Hegel’s concept of determinate negation and the broader hermeneutic tradition. By explicating this way of thinking with and against tradition and showing its relevance for contemporary sociological theory building, the article aims to broaden the conception of theorizing and find a systematic place for the critical engagement with established theory in theory development.

The phenomena going under the label of “work-life balance” (WLB) are crucial for understanding not only major pressures weighing on people’s well-being and choices but also the very organization and negotiation of everyday life. Despite being heavily researched, however, WLB is surprisingly undertheorized within sociology. This article attempts to redress the situation by proposing a robust and multilayered sociological model capable of explaining its genesis, experience, and variations. I first deconstruct the commonsense notion of WLB, recasting it as a family-employment-leisure nexus, and specify its elements. Next, I flag the limits of current conceptualizations of WLB and turn to Bourdieu’s field theory for solutions. I go beyond Bourdieu, however, by modeling more precisely how multiple fields interact to shape the demands, dispositions, and desires of everyday experience. I develop a series of concepts and distinctions to that end and finish with a sketch of research possibilities.

Freedom has long been central to philosophical inquiry and political discourse, yet sociological analyses remain limited. This article introduces a novel sociological framework structured around two dimensions—superordinate unity (dominant configurations of social, ecological, economic, and political interdependencies) and freedom claims (explicit normative demands for autonomy). I propose a typology of four ideal-typical freedom regimes: ancient, medieval, modern, and planetary. Critically assessing historical forms of freedom within city-states, feudal systems, and nation-states, particularly within the Global North’s historical trajectory, I identify limitations in modern conceptions amid global ecological and socioeconomic crises. I introduce “planetary freedom” as an empirically observable emergent ideal-type, characterized by reflexive awareness of global interdependencies, collective stewardship, and institutionalized cooperation, thus reconceptualizing autonomy as shaped by contemporary global challenges.

This article presents a pragmatist framework for the sociology of emotions by introducing the concepts of aesthetic and anaesthetic emotions. Aesthetic emotions arise from disruptions of habits, generating emotional qualities that unify experience and reshape sensibility, and thus influence future emotional experiences. Anaesthetic emotions remain routinized, failing to expand sensibility or guide future experiences. I argue that aesthetic emotions are key to understanding the affective grounds of civic and political engagement. By focusing on aesthetics as an affective process, I highlight how sensibility contributes to recognizing public issues and the potential for collective action. I also explore how anaesthetic dynamics—often rooted in uncultivated experiences, structural apathy, or institutionalized habits—limit the transformative potential of emotions. By tracing how sensibility is cultivated or neglected, this framework shows its powerful (an)aesthetic effects on everyday life and the public sphere.

Sociologists of race tend to prioritize either how race structures people’s lives or the change and variation of racial categories across time and space. This bifurcation constrains sociological race theorizing. Structural materialist sociologists tend to minimize the significance of variations in racial systems across the world, and symbolic boundary race sociologists turn away from theorizing the substance or basis of racial categories. These tendencies either overdetermine racial categories or naturalize racial difference. As a solution, in this article, I synthesize theses of the colonial constitution of racial categories with dualistic theories of race as structure. I specify race as a historically contingent subset of broader structures of descent-based difference whose categories were generated through early-modern Western European colonial expansion. Systems of racial classification vary regionally based on the history of the region and its population’s trade and labor relationships to specific Western European empires from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century.

Approaches to the study of markets in economic sociology have been converging with an approach to markets found in the field of evolutionary economics. In this view, markets are treated as sets of rules that facilitate the exchange of goods and information. These rule sets can be modeled and formalized as evolving computational algorithms situated in an ecology of human beings. I demonstrate this convergence and show that closer dialogue between these fields could contribute to the development of a framework for classifying diverse market forms, studying their change over time, and accounting for the causal mechanisms by which they produce varied outcomes. This would provide tools with which to grasp empirical phenomena of interest to economic sociologists, political economists, and policy scholars that elude existing sociological approaches. But it would also represent a first step toward a grander project: a “natural history of markets.”

This article, adapted from the 19th Lewis A. Coser lecture delivered in 2024 at the American Sociological Association Meetings, presents three intertwined and sometimes overlapping arguments. First, I examine the limitations of the category “Global South” for studying Latin America. Second, I develop this critique by proposing a perspective distinct from both Northern theory and Global South approaches—what I call a “strabismic” standpoint. Third, I demonstrate this perspective in situ through the case of Argentine sociology, tracing the circulation of knowledge from an intermediate field of sociological production, where the center–periphery duality is but one among multiple relevant dimensions. Taken together, I aim to provincialize current constructions of Global South theory and highlight how in their effort to develop new critiques of the existing canon, scholars—given the dominance of English as a lingua franca—may inadvertently reproduce the very ethnocentrism they seek to challenge.

This article outlines a theoretical approach for studying the “grammatical” structure of processes of future-making. Building off theoretical insights about the indexicality and relationality of meaning, I show that the prevalent semantic view of future-making as a movement from imagination to action is unable to theorize the dialogical relationship between the projection of futures and the construction of corresponding trajectories. I propose an alternative that draws on the concepts of enacted sensemaking and situated action to conceptualize projection as a process of organizing indexical practices into relationally defined trajectories into the future. I then reappropriate Leifer’s analysis of how the relations between local actions constitute shared projective horizons in chess to show how this iterational fabric of interconnections defines a relational grammar that coordinates future-orientations. Finally, I use Hutchins’s analysis of distributed cognition to draw these insights together into an account of how the continuous dialogical interaction between projectivity and iteration enacts social grammars, through which images and practical trajectories of future-making are co-constructed.

This article describes a strategic mechanism, fuzzy boundaries, that groups use to accumulate advantage. In contrast to the dominant view that rigid, well-defined boundaries maximize group rewards, I argue that ambiguity in membership criteria can, under certain conditions, more effectively secure and promote group benefits. Fuzzy boundaries are defined by two features: an intentionally ambiguous criterion for inclusion and the selective, inconsistent application of that criterion to adjust the insider-outsider line as needed. I illustrate the operation of fuzzy boundaries through a historical analysis of occupational boundary drawing in the nineteenth-century United States. Ultimately, the study offers a generalizable framework for understanding how strategic ambiguity in group boundaries can serve actors seeking to preserve privilege across domains, such as education, hiring, and professional accreditation. Unlike well-defined qualifications, the malleability of fuzzy boundaries often insulates them from legal challenge, making them an effective mechanism for maintaining social and institutional advantage.