A central issue in sociology concerns motivation. Generally, sociologists have followed Mills’s lead in emphasizing motive-talk, or post hoc explanations, over the “springs” of action themselves. Drawing from the interdisciplinary science of motivation, this article argues that we can tease motives apart from motive-talk by incorporating the affective disposition to seek into a theory of motivation. Seeking involves three dissociable phases—wanting, liking, and learning—each of which is intrinsically pleasurable. This suggests three things. First, mundane activities related to anticipation or learning are affective in nature. Second, not only does each phase of seeking involve different motives, but also, any given phase contains sequences of activities, likely indicating mixed motives. And third, people commit to routines and roles not because of their habits or automatic cognition but because of the affective urgency and expectation they feel in their bodies. Implications for the sociological literature on pleasure and for a sociology of motivation are discussed.

The article pursues three main objectives. First, I review and clarify the core philosophical foundations of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Patricia H. Collins’s intersectional theory. Second, I examine the proximity of these two epistemological frameworks by comparing them with concrete references and practical examples. Finally, I investigate the synergistic possibilities of integrating the two political theories, highlighting conceptual and methodological gaps that further integration could address. This comparative analysis provides the groundwork for effectively developing an intersectional theory of practice.

A broad “postpositivism” characterizes the epistemological basis of contemporary sociology. Nevertheless, sociology remains a multiparadigmatic discipline, home to approaches that differ greatly from each other in method. In this article, I examine questions of epistemology in sociological research by revisiting Adorno and Horkheimer’s critiques of positivism in German sociology. I argue that Adorno and Horkheimer’s articulation of an alternative critical theory provides four central features that remain novel in sociology today: (1) the refusal of a priori methodological or data protocol, (2) a strongly interpretive approach to theorization, (3) a necessarily totalizing approach to theorization, and (4) an active and overt political Marxism. I conclude by comparing implications of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical sociology with Burawoy’s extended case method, with which it shares many features yet remains distinct.

Interaction ritual theory is one of the most important contributions of micro-sociological theory, tying together the production of local order and actors’ ongoing projects. Although Goffman replaced the “social” order of classical anthropology with an endogenous “interaction” order, such theory conceives ritual as reflecting and enacting an existing structure. Drawing on recent interactionist work and developments in ritual theory, we complement this understanding of ritual with an account of potentiality. Interaction rituals undoubtedly sacralize the self that is presented in interaction and defend the interaction order within which such selves are enmeshed, yet they simultaneously open up potential avenues for transformation of selves and relationships. Ritual action is strewn with moments in which the world appears not as it is but as it could be: a subjunctive “what if” of social life. We show how focusing on the interplay between order and potentiality in interaction ritual provides a more precise way to understand interaction and new ways to approach forms of interactional inequality.

Critical race theories of ideology, surprisingly, replicate key tensions in early Marxist thought. Following a selective review of several Marxist theorists, this article examines critical race conceptions of racial ideology within the influential work of Charles W. Mills and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, probing three related problem areas: an “expressive” theory of society, the correspondence of ideologies to racial groups, and an overreliance on standpoint implications. In response, the author develops a heterodox, nonreductive Marxist theory in which racial ideologies, although historically durable, are seen as contingent, relatively autonomous constructs that take shape unevenly within capitalist societies, do not correspond to fixed social groups, and may or may not facilitate the reproduction of capitalism. Developing a less deterministic theory of the relation between social structure, group identity, and racist belief opens up more generative approaches to the problem of racial ideology.

The erosion of truth-telling is central to discussions of democratic decline. However, these discussions often gloss over how democratic truth-telling is constituted as a practice. I develop the concept of democratic alethurgies to tackle this problem by drawing on civil sphere theory and Foucauldian studies of truth-telling. Focusing on practices of critique, I situate democratic truth-telling within a discourse that contrasts curious, courageous, and open-minded democratic actors with incurious, cowardly, and closed-minded undemocratic ones. This discourse is inflected in different prescriptions for how the truth-teller should discover the truth, wield it, and relate to their public audience. I develop this approach through a comparison of the truth-telling of journalists and activists. The concept of democratic alethurgies provides a framework for analyzing democratic truth-telling and generates an empirically rooted vocabulary that reframes discussions of democratic decline.

Migration is a topic of heated debate, yet it is relatively absent from sociological theory discussions. This article analyzes the extent to which structural de-thematization or specific framing of migration shapes sociological perspectives by focusing on approaches that have been canonized as “classics.” Through a rereading of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W. E. B. Du Bois, I address absences and show how these authors have nevertheless constructed certain figures of migration: as a passive figure of forced mobility, a threatening figure of otherness, and an active figure of social transformation. How these authors depict migration is both symptomatic of their approach but also of a contemporary sociological and sociopolitical discourse that can be critically reflected in relation to these works. By showing how migration is treated in these different intellectual projects, the article contributes to a genealogy of sociological thought and its impact on contemporary perspectives regarding migration, diversity, and inequality.

In recent decades, the long-standing debate about the scientific status of the social sciences and their explanatory nature has been rearticulated through perspectivist, interpretivist, and mechanistic approaches. Whereas mechanistic approaches advocate for realism in sociological models, perspectivist and interpretivist perspectives challenge this by emphasizing the multiple interpretations and meaningful nature of social reality, as opposed to the natural sciences. Currently, the metatheoretical discussion centers on competing views regarding the relationship between theories and the objects they address. In contrast to this focus on theories, I propose a rearticulation of Hacking’s interventionist argument. I argue that all sciences share a common epistemic activity—the construction of chains of reference—which points to shared notions of success. This paves the way for realism through a practice-based argument that does not originate from ontological disputes, suggesting that our best theories are those literally embedded in scientific practice.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) make the question of machine agency a pressing matter. Contrary to the idea that agency is the inherent quality of a system, we argue that agency should be seen as a social status, or more precisely, a socially granted license to issue actions that is acquired and monitored in social practices. From this perspective, we develop criteria for the theoretical demarcation of agents and nonagents to distinguish entities based on their attributed abilities and their relative power in social networks. We derive a matrix of different types of agents and show how this matrix can inform empirical studies on AI.

I outline four temporalities that appear in highly regarded explanatory historical social science. Given William Sewell’s centrality to the literature, I do so through a critique of his proposition that there are “three temporalities”—experimental time, teleology, and eventfulness—and that only the last of them is valid. I concede that his rejection of “experimental” time is justified. But I argue that the category of “teleology,” which Sewell rejects, encompasses two forms of transitional change—“tendencies” and “thresholds”—that are coherent and defensible. I further argue that his preferred category of “eventfulness” really refers to two distinct temporalities—“coincidences” and “contrivances”—rather than just one. I illustrate tendencies, thresholds, coincidences, and contrivances in the works of John Veugelers, Ivan Ermakoff, Marshall Sahlins, and, of course, Sewell.