Sociological Account Research Articles

The Age of Anger and Social Media: Elias, Technology, Civilizing/Decivilizing Processes and Ressentiment

Politics and society today are characterized by anger and rancour. This paper reflects on this issue by linking: first, Norbert Elias’s sociological account of the complex dynamics of processes of civilization and decivilization, his thoughts on the interrelationship between technological and social organization and human habitus; second, the work done on the concept of ressentiment, introduced by Nietzsche and developed by Scheler and others. Linking these two conceptual frameworks enables a deeper reflection on the role of contemporary communications technology and the ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere’ in the expanding significance of ressentiment in social and political life today. My argument will be that it is important to see the shifts taking place today as part of the interweaving of technological and social changes, with the spread of ressentiment in social media being the latest episode in the ongoing interweaving of processes of civilization and decivilization.

Free-market institutions and income inequality: Did the link persist around the world even in times of falling within-country inequality, 2000–2021?

High or rising economic inequality can exacerbate political inequalities and is plausibly linked with some social harms, such as health problems and declines in happiness and trust. Within-country income inequality increased sharply across most of the world since the 1980s. One prominent critical sociological account of this occurrence points toward institutions of free-market capitalism, or “neoliberalism,” as a key cause that unleashed inequality during the globalization age. This article empirically operationalizes free-market institutions with the use of Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom and examines the issue with fixed-effects regressions in a novel dataset of 130 countries between the years 2000 and 2021. It finds a substantial positive correlation between the two variables in the developing, though not the developed, world. This finding is robust to a variety of alternative specifications. Moreover, across specifications, modest size of government and freedom of international trade stand out as the two clear components of economic freedom driving the aggregate relationship. Finally, mediation analysis suggests there also exists an indirect ameliorative relationship between economic freedom and inequality through the conduit of economic development.

The puzzle of loneliness: A sociostructural and transnational analysis of International Chinese Students' networks in Germany

AbstractThe experience of loneliness is common among international students who study in a foreign country, away from their home. Loneliness refers to the difference between the actual and desired social relationships highlighting not only the quantity but also the quality of relationships. We argue for a perspective on loneliness that emphasizes its social context rather than relying mainly on individualistic or psychological interpretations prevalent thus far. In this article, we explore network predictors of loneliness among Chinese international students in Germany. Through our analysis of a unique data set, we show that when compared to the local students, international students tend to feel lonelier. Surprisingly, when we discover that when international students have the same network size, those with more emotionally supportive ties tend to experience more loneliness compared to those with fewer emotionally supportive ties. Not surprisingly, having a romantic partner is associated with lower levels of loneliness, especially when they also live in the country of education. Additionally, we find that international Chinese students who struggle to form cross‐national friendships report higher levels of loneliness. By delving into these findings, our research offers a sociological account of loneliness among international Chinese and local students in Germany.

Reva Yunus, ‘Labour class’ children’s schooling in urban India: A sociological account

Reva Yunus, <i>‘Labour class’ children’s schooling in urban India: A sociological account</i>

Selective coupling in hybrid organization: Institutional logic contradiction in the context of ERP post-implementation

Drawing a qualitative case study over two years during, this paper provides a detailed sociological account of the local practices and institutional logic and found out that local teams used selective coupling, which led to hybrid practices such as delegation and bricolage. These findings can help top-level manager enhance their awareness of the issues raised by the ERP implementation across organizations. Understanding the constellation of institutional logic within the organization can direct their attention toward new perspectives, thus creating opportunities to influence institutional change. This study analyzes the institutional contradiction during post-implementation from the perspective of flexible coupling and provides further evidence from a completely different context, namely the cross-border implantation in the industrial sector, and within the organization.

“But his sense of justice turned him into a brigand and a murderer.” On Gunther Teubner’s “Self-subversive Justice: Contingency or Transcendence Formula of Law?”

Abstract Teubner’s article on self-subversive justice is an inspiring example of the way in which he tries to move forward Luhmann’s sociological endeavour of understanding law in terms of how it understands itself. Moving Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory forward is something that Teubner significantly does in many of his writings. Here he contrasts various social and legal philosophical accounts with a potential sociological account of justice that utilises the contrasting versions of both Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory and Derrida’s deconstruction theory. To appreciate how justice operates self-subversively is to appreciate how law cannot avoid striving to overcome itself, and how justice both in its many universal and alterity forms enables this. Teubner gets close to marrying not only Luhmann and Derrida, but also sociological theory and literary or poetic theory; also marrying judicial creativity with that of other creative arts. Law constantly looks to justice within its own practices, but at the same time beyond those practices and thereby challengingly confronting itself and its search for justice in doing so.

International Political Sociology through the Colonial Mirror: A Contrapuntal Reading of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract This paper invokes Edward Said’s notion of counterpoint to present a transnational sociological account of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. This contrapuntal reading raises questions of sovereignty, violence, and identity, which—filtered through a political sociological lens—offer novel perspectives on the power of empire and colonialism in relation to these key IR categories. Specifically, I argue that the Spanish colonial frontier in Morocco served as a laboratory for distinctive expressions of transnational state-building, violence, and identity-formation, which were reproduced in the metropolitan heartlands of the Iberian Peninsula during the interwar years. The complex interaction between core and periphery in this period had momentous implications for both Spanish and Moroccan history, many of which continue to play out in contemporary politics across the Gibraltar Strait.

Towards a sociology of the future: An exploration in cognitive social theory

The aim of this article is a sociology of the future. Since the standard sociological practice of extrapolating from everyday semantics of the future and the time-consciousness of modernity is inadequate, an integrated cognitive sociological perspective allied to critical theory is introduced. It makes visible an essential dimension of social life that is either largely taken for granted, misunderstood or ignored by identifying different levels of cognitive structures organising minds, institutions and culture and following their role in societal dynamics. This perspective mediates the sociocultural and naturalistic approaches and introduces the concept of space-time. Centrally, a modal analysis of the key present-past-future sequence is presented, with the focus on the distinct status of the future. It is modally conceptualised, not simply in terms of possibility as is usual, but rather in terms of its modality as a necessary formal generic cultural model that makes the future in the first place conceivable and enables an orientation towards it to be established and maintained. The resulting cognitive sociological account offers a novel theoretical understanding of the future which could facilitate thorough sociological and critical theoretical analyses in the societal space-time field.

Disclosure as family practice: Changing family dynamics in Hong Kong after a gay son comes out

AbstractThis paper examines the family dynamics between parents and gay sons after the latter's disclosure of their sexual orientation. Situated in the “doing family” and life course literature, the paper offers a sociological account of coming out and family dynamics in Hong Kong that presents the narratives of both gay sons and their parents, examining the changing moral and emotional economies of family life across two generations. Thirty‐five in‐depth individual interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of gay sons (n = 15) and their mothers (n = 14) and/or fathers (n = 6). The findings revealed that heteronormative family life, as part of the moral economy of family life, is challenged after disclosure, with parents forced to admit or accept the queer component of their family. Yet, both parents and gay sons work hard to accomplish a “correct” version of sexual normativity that views homosexuality as inborn (sexual essentialism) and conforms to the “good homosexual” image. Sons' disclosure also shifts the burden of the closet, as part of the emotional economy of family life, to their parents, especially mothers, on whom that burden often takes an emotional toll. The paper concludes that disclosure is a contested site of negotiation of the meaning of male identity, parenthood, and homosexuality, as well as a key family practice that changes the moral and emotional economies of families, eventually leading to the formation of new family forms. By viewing disclosure as family practice in a culture where intergenerational closeness and family co‐residence are prominent, this paper rethinks coming out, arguing that in the Chinese context it should be understood not only as identity politics, as it often is in Western contexts, but also as relational politics, thus revitalizing the coming‐out debate across cultural contexts and offering new insights on the relationship between homosexuality and contemporary family life.

The Supreme Court’s decision in McCulloch v Forth Valley Health Board: Does it condone healthcare injustice?

The UK Supreme Court’s recent judgement in McCulloch v Forth Valley Health Board clarifies the standard for the identification of ‘reasonable’ alternative medical treatments. The required standard is that of...

Working live. A sociological account of the entangled relations of liveness through festival work.

The ‘liveness’ of live music performance is often understood as a sensibility or effect – a ‘magic’ or ‘energy’ – produced through a dynamic attachment between performer and audience. However, this popular meaning is elusive and offers a narrow account of the actors, dynamics and relationships involved in its production. Academic debates about ‘liveness’ have tended to reproduce and rely upon existing discursive frameworks of meaning pertaining to its dynamics and constitution that overlook other actors that are also crucial in producing liveness: the cultural and technical worker. This article develops a more sociological account of liveness that acknowledges a wider constituency of actors, objects and temporalities. By drawing on qualitative interviews with festival workers in Britain and the Netherlands, our sociological analysis of festival work demonstrates that liveness is an entangled set of relations that involves performers, audiences, technologies/objects and cultural and technical workers. We also show how the meaning of liveness should be temporally extended to include linear, cyclical and fluid modes. We argue that liveness is better understood as a type of human and technical achievement produced through a more complex set of experiences and participation of actors and objects. Through this examination of liveness, we also contribute to a better sociological understanding of the appeal of cultural work.

Ted Lasso’s Goldfish Principle

This article maps the impacts of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic on the daily life and wellbeing of university ice hockey athletes in Atlantic Canada. The study branched out from broader research on participants in all university sports in the region that fall under the national governing body, U SPORTS. The regional conference Atlantic University Sport (AUS) houses eleven member institutions, eight of which are varsity ice hockey teams, for total of approximately 300 athletes in both men’s and women’s competition. In the context of a small body of literature on the university athlete experience in Canada and the new challenges that the pandemic posed for modern life, this exploratory study sought to chronicle how the athletes encountered and endured the pandemic, including the cancellation of competition in the Fall of 2020 and beyond. This is a case study using a multidisciplinary lens. It was informed by a sociological account of disruption and relied on a patchwork of literature from education, psychology, sport management, and health studies. Data collection occurred through an online qualitative questionnaire and a content analysis of local mainstream media articles. It was then analyzed partly through a qualitative debrief interview with an athlete from the population. The study results will offer scholars, university sport administrators, and student services professionals an understanding of how university hockey athletes in the region made sense of the long-term uncertainty and frequent changes to their everyday lives, perhaps with a view to improving the quality of support and development programming that institutions offer in the future.

Mapping Lithuanian transition towards sustainable energy: sociological account on a waste-to-energy case

Mapping Lithuanian transition towards sustainable energy: sociological account on a waste-to-energy case

This Is a True Story about a True Story

FQ columnist Laurie Ouellette discusses The Real World Homecoming, a reboot of the seminal MTV reality show that incorporates reflexivity’s slipperier ways and shows how intertwined the content industries and ordinary people have become. Homecoming gathers the original Real World cast members, now middle-aged, not to produce a sociological account of lived biography or to examine mediated personhood, but to produce value from a dormant brand.

The History of Student Movements in India: A Sociological Account

This research work is an attempt to present a brief historical and sociological account of student movements in colonial and post-colonial India. This article deals with the aspect of Indian history and Indian sociology that has long been ignored, that is, student movements in India. Another reason to record this history is that students and student movements in India have either become the reason or have marked their presence on several occasions of social and political change in India. In this article, we have covered the major student movements of pre- and post-colonial India while discussing various events that either influenced or were catalysed by various student movements in different time periods. This research article also emphasizes and accounts the changes student movements have gone through over a period of time.

Cryptocurrencies and the promise of individual economic sovereignty in an age of digitalization: A critical appraisal

Cryptocurrencies have fuelled an ideological bifurcation between utopian imaginaries of borderless individual economic sovereignty and egalitarianism among libertarian sympathizers since Hayek and more recent dystopian admonitions against financial disruption and inequality by state actors. Providing a state-of-the-art sociological account of this debate, this article conducts the first empirical study on the links between cryptocurrency adoption, individual economic sovereignty and wealth inequality using a novel 2020 cross-societal database of the population-level adoption of the six largest cryptocurrencies. Analyses show that cryptocurrency adoption neither ameliorates nor worsens wealth inequality, but that the geographical expansion of cryptocurrencies is dependent on the very political economic conditions and state permissions that their libertarian enthusiasts spurn. This article concludes by invigorating a programmatic call and agenda for the empirical, sociological study of cryptocurrencies and the methodological designs required to sustain it.

“I’m Not a Conspiracy Theorist, But…”: Knowledge and Conservative Politics in Unsettled Times

AbstractHow does conspiracist thinking become appealing to its adherents, and with what political consequences? Drawing on fifty in-depth interviews with gun sellers from April 2020 to August 2020, this paper examines conspiracist thinking among US conservatives. We present a sociological account that follows historian Richard Hofstadter’s early account in theorizing conspiracist thinking as a “style” of politics on the Right. Turning to the sociology of culture and political sociology, we examine conspiracist thinking as a tool of political sense-making that becomes particularly appealing during “unsettled” insecurity. We focus on conservative adherents to conspiracist thinking, examining how conspiracist thinking is mobilized to assert feelings of control and certainty in ways that reinforce allegiance to conservative values and repudiation of partisan opponents. Specifically, we theorize conspiracist thinking as an everyday practice of meaning-making (an epistemological practice) which responds to conditions of unsettled insecurity that reflects existing conservative “modes of thought” (e.g., anti-elitist skepticism) and also reinforces conservative sentiments through two mechanisms: epistemological individualism and epistemological othering. Extending existing accounts of conspiracism, our analysis illuminates how conspiracist thinking—as an active, and self-reinforcing, struggle for epistemological control amid contexts of information scarcity and uncertainty—has come to shape American politics from the bottom up.

Trajectories towards Political Engagement on Facebook around Brexit: Beyond Affordances for Understanding Racist and Right-Wing Populist Mobilisations Online

Social media are frequently implicated in the racist and right-wing populist mobilisations that found voice in support for Brexit. However, research tends to focus on platform affordances and fails to provide a sociological account of individuals’ actual experiences with these media, and how they interact with broader social and political experiences to impact attitudes. Based on interviews with newly passionately engaged pro-Brexit Facebook users, this article examines the trajectories by which individuals came to be so engaged. The findings demonstrate that the technological opportunities provided by social media were only significant in the context of offline experiences and socio-political factors. These include racist discourses that predate social media, a loss of trust in traditional media and government, and the opportunity provided by Brexit to articulate and activate pre-held attitudes.

Digital heritage politics from the perspective of relational sociology: the case of Nüshu culture in China

ABSTRACT In proposing a new conceptual framework that systematises and comprehends the complex dynamics of cultural heritage politics in China, the study takes its inspiration from Chinese scholars who have explored the relevance of Guanxi beyond its immediate business context. While current discourse theory acknowledges that heritage-making entails complex relationships that structure this making, there is as yet no systematic theoretical account of how these relationships co-exist, mediate and transform heritage-making. In developing a relational sociological framework based on the work of John Dewey, the analysis of digital heritage-making includes a case study of Nüshu, the dominant language and culture in villages on the southwestern frontier of China’s Hunan Province. Using netnography, the study analyses a range of online accounts and websites that form part of the heritage-making process. Drawing on rich digital material that includes online competitions, virtual conversations or comments and digital certificates, the findings highlight the need for a more dynamic relational perspective that acknowledges the mutuality of heritage producers and the process of heritage-making. The findings contribute to a sociological account of heritage-making in China and to a more generalist theory of relational sociology.

On Condemning Whom We Do Not Know: Confession of Sins, Plea Bargains and Apophatic Anthropology

ABSTRACT This essay claims that the American plea bargain, figured as an inheritor of Christian confession practices, constructs racialized criminal subjects. It further argues that an apophatic anthropology confounds this legal practice and enables new forms of confession to be imagined. The first section utilizes Michel Foucault’s genealogies of confession in order to show that shifts in European religious and legal confession practices contributed to the emergence of the modern self-possessed subject. The second section utilizes Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve’s sociological account of the courthouse to highlight the role of the plea bargain in constructing racialized criminal subjects. The third section challenges the underlying anthropological assumptions of the plea bargaining. Drawing on Judith Butler, Catherine Keller, and Critical Race Theorists, it insists that an apophatic anthropology prevents the construction of racialized criminal subjects through plea bargains. The final section mobilizes this apophatic anthropology to envision new confession practices in abolitionist settings.