Contemporary Social Theory Research Articles

Beyond Reflexivity: Centering Recognition and Relational Dialogue in Social Inquiry

In this manuscript, we develop the concept of recognition as a methodological concept, with a particular focus on its inter-subjective dimensions. Departing from the way recognition is used in much contemporary social theory and socio-political discourse, we suggest that recognition is a foundational methodological concept, related to but transcending methodological discussions of reflexivity, and with implications for meaning and validity. We ground our discussion in empirical examples that help illustrate the principles of recognition (and of misrecognition), and how researchers can attend to these principles in their own work.

Barbarism and modernity in S.N. Eisenstadt’s theory: Towards a cultural sociology of radicalism

The emergence of ‘radical’ social and political actors, ideologies and identities seems to be a hallmark of the crisis of liberal democracy that is spreading throughout global society. Despite its growing uneasiness about these facts, social science has not produced much theoretical innovation about them. This article aims to contribute to this task, by bringing to bear a conceptual framework elaborated by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt through his reflections on modern barbarism. I argue that the author’s understanding of barbarism has a significant interpretive potential for the sociological analysis of contemporary radical identities, and suggest some ways to reconsider ‘populism’, thereby redefining the very concept of radicalism. The article starts by introducing the pivotal notions which constitute the conceptual framework of our author. The following section outlines the main argument of Eisenstadt’s theory of barbarism, unpacking the way in which those concepts interweave to conjure a cultural theory of exclusionary, violent identities and institutional regimes. The final section highlights the significance of such approach for a cultural sociology of radicalism, by exploring the relations between the author’s views and some selected trends in contemporary social theory.

Substitution: On the Animating Spirit of Economic Rationality

The term ‘substitution’, given minimal attention in thinking, became important in modern logic, but its treatment is highly technical. After a short review of its conceptual-historical background, the article discusses two important contemporary social and cultural theorists of substitution, Roberto Calasso and Michel Serres. It then turns to William Stanley Jevons, who first took up Boole’s logic, formulated the principle ‘substitution of similars’, the presumed heart of reasoning itself, constructed the first computer, and was a founder of neoclassical economics. The coincidence of these innovations in Jevons, through ‘substitution’, captures the way the modern world was set on its current trajectory, progressing towards a ‘substitution society’. The article concludes that as the key values of human life cannot be substituted, substitution as a general principle applied to human existence is absurd; economic theory, however, as shown in the ideas of Jevons, is founded on the exclusion of such genuine and meaningful concerns.

Motivasi Sedekah Dalam Al-Qur’an: Studi Penafsiran Ayat-Ayat Sedekah Dalam Tafsir Al-Qur’anul Majid An-Nuur

This study examines the motivation for charitable giving (sadaqah) in asbi ash-Shiddieqy's Al-Qur’anul Majid through the lens of Bourdieu's theory. The significance of this research lies in integrating social theory with Qur'anic interpretation to explore how capital, habitus, and practice influence charitable actions. The methodology involves a qualitative analysis of ash-Shiddieqy's tafsir using Bourdieu's theory, while identifying gaps in previous studies related to the roles of symbolic and cultural capital and gender equality in charitable giving. The novelty of this research is its application of Bourdieu’s theory to investigate how metaphors in the tafsir and gender equality impact motivation and practice in charitable giving. The findings indicate that the metaphors in Al-Qur’anul Majid simplify the concept of sadaqah, making it easier to understand and implement, thereby increasing motivation. Gender equality in charitable giving, as outlined in ash-Shiddieqy's tafsir, promotes active participation from all genders and reinforces egalitarian values in charitable practices. Furthermore, mutual reminders within the community, according to the tafsir, play a crucial role in maintaining the quality and consistency of charitable actions, strengthening social capital, and shaping a habitus that supports sustainable giving. This study contributes significant insights by linking Qur'anic exegesis with contemporary social theory, offering new perspectives on how social and symbolic factors influence charitable practices within religious and social contexts.

Five Key Concepts for Human Inquiry Into Plant Lifeworlds

What can humans learn from plants in this time of widely perceived ecological disruption? And how can concepts drawn from ethnobotanical and ethnobiological inquiry help to guide understanding of interspecies relations in this historical moment? This essay departs from these basic questions by centering five key concepts derived from contemporary social theory for examining human understanding of plant lifeworlds: translation, equivocation, refusal, animacy, and agency. In doing so, it makes the case for how these concepts can invite ethnobiologists and ethnobotanists to question what we think we know about human–plant relations and the broader worlds that we collectively constitute.

A Critical Realist Model for Organizational Sociology

Current discussions surrounding organizational sociology theories indicate a state of stagnation. This paper aims to invigorate theoretical innovation by drawing on contemporary social theories, particularly employing a critical realist perspective. Focused on addressing the theoretical convergence between organizational and collective action sociologies, as identified by Friedberg, the paper reinterprets his concept of organized collective action through the critical realist collective subjectivities theory, as proposed by Vandenberghe. The objective is to generate an original Critical Realist Model for Organizational Sociology. This initiative stems from critical realism’s critique of flat ontologies and epistemologies that tend to conflate different objects of reality. The proposed model takes the form of a trialectic generative sequence, highlighting driven objects configured in a specific ontological situation as the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the emergence of organizations. This sequence includes (a) time-space co-presence and the embodiment process; (b) symbolic community sharing and the identification process; and (c) power dynamics and the processes of representation, delegation, and subordination. This model positions collective organized action as a fundamental intermediary concept for understanding organizations and collective action within a realistic social theory. It indirectly contributes to addressing the broader debate on agency and structure.

Irritating the secular: on Peter Berger and Charles Taylor’s theological projects

ABSTRACT The literature that discusses the secularization paradigm is extensive. However, we still know little about revisionist accounts of secularization theory utilized as a proxy for theological projects. Through close reading, I zoom in on two prominent scholars of religious studies and beyond, Peter L. Berger and Charles Taylor, who represent stellar examples of the religiously grounded critique of the secularization paradigm. Berger and Taylor attempted to reconcile contemporary social theory and theology by injecting constitutive theological notions into their alternative constructions of the secular and religious to re-claim the relevance of Christianity in the present. My central proposition is that the gist of their empirical and normative rebuttal of secularization hinges not on sociological or genealogical explanations but on theologically anchored claims. The conceptual comparison of Berger and Taylor’s revisionist works, well-established in the canon of religious studies, reveals parallel strategies and three mutually intertwined theological assertions set to fracture the secularization paradigm: two-tiered ontology, the notion of personhood, and reconceptualization of religion.

In Defence of the Indefensible: Exploring Justification Narratives of Corporate Elites Accused of Corruption

AbstractDrawing on the pragmatic turn in contemporary social theory, we explore how corporate elites accused of corruption in the context of weak institutions engage in their justification works. Empirically, we focus on three high-profile corruption scandals that shook Ghana between 2010 and 2020 and inspired widespread public condemnation. Publicly accessible archival documents, such as court reporting, newspaper stories, press conferences, and the digital footprints of corporate elites implicated in the scandals provide data for our inquiry. Focussing on the juxtaposition of ‘sayings’ and ‘doings’, the findings show justification as performative, and rooted in contextual pragmatism that acknowledges the plurality of logics situated between self-interest and folk-logic. Within this framework, the domestic and civic orders of worth emerge as most prominent, with the justification processes manifesting through victimising, scapegoating, and crusading. Building on these insights, we develop a framework that highlights how the use of justifications serves as a critique of the inadequacies within climates of weak institutional frameworks consequently fostering an atmosphere conducive to framing unethical conducts as morally acceptable.

Healthcare social network research and the ECHO model™: Exploring a community of practice to support cultural brokers and transfer cultural knowledge

BackgroundProject ECHO® networks at Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service (CHQHHS) are communities of practice designed to mitigate services and systems fragmentation by building collaborative partnerships addressing priority child and youth health needs. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience the negative impacts of fragmentation in addition to historical challenges of absent or culturally inappropriate health services. Access to culturally safe and responsive services can be improved by engaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Workers and similar roles in an online community of practice, supporting the integration of cultural and clinical knowledge and self-determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander consumers in decisions affecting their health.Analysing professional support networks and knowledge sharing patterns helps identify enablers and barriers to partnerships. Using social network research, the multilevel network inclusive of ECHO network members and their colleagues was studied to identify interdisciplinary and cross-sector advice exchange patterns, explore the position of cultural brokers and identify common relational tendencies.MethodsSocial network theories and methods informed the collection of network data and analysis of advice-seeking relationships among ECHO network members and their nominees. Registered members from two ECHO networks were invited to complete the Qualtrics survey. Networks analysed comprised 398 professionals from mainstream health, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Controlled Health Organisation, education, disability and child safety service settings.ResultsBrokers were well represented, both those who hold knowledge brokerage positions as well as cultural brokers who incorporate clinical and cultural knowledge enabling holistic care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients (38 individuals, 17% of network). Professionals who occupy brokerage positions outside the ECHO network tend to be more connected with co-members within the network.ConclusionsThis study is the first application of contemporary social network theories and methods to investigate an ECHO network. The findings highlight the connectivity afforded by brokers, enabling the coordination and collaboration necessary for effective care integration. Inclusion of cultural brokers in an ECHO network provides sustained peer group support while also cultivating relationships that facilitate the integration of cultural and clinical knowledge.

Trauma: open concept.

This paper presents and discusses two sets of theories concerning trauma. The first involves a contemporary social theory of "cultural trauma" and the second refers to psychoanalytic theories on psychic trauma. We argue that these two groups of theories have some relevant elements in common, despite social theorists' critique of psychoanalytic understanding on the matter. In our view, the most important meeting points between these groups of theories concern (a) the possibility to think that trauma is not welded to events but has a formation process, one of attribution of meaning, (b) that this process has a temporality of its own, and (c) that the environment (the objects, actors, and agents that compose it) has a fundamental and determinant role in trauma formation. Further, we suggest that trauma is still an open concept in psychoanalysis.

Meta-economics, scale and contemporary social theory: Re-reading E. F. Schumacher’sSmall is Beautiful

In this article, we argue that E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful offers important insights for contemporary social theory. In particular, we focus on the merits of his use of ‘meta-economics’ and of ‘scale’ as a means for advancing ecological social critique. While we are sympathetic to Schumacher’s approach, we are mindful of the limitations to his theoretical imagination and commence our article acknowledging his partisan metaphysics and his insensitivity to global political dynamics. To resolve this, we demonstrate that the central critical insights Schumacher provides can be substantially extricated from these problems. Our task here, therefore, is a critical reconstruction of Schumacher’s approach to social-ecological critique, which we claim offers the potential to shape contemporary social theory, both within and beyond critical political ecology.

Phenomenologies of ‘social acceleration’: some consequences and opportunities for education studies in an unknown future

ABSTRACTSocial acceleration, the rapidly increasing speeding up of the pace of life, has been described and theorised by contemporary social theorists including Paul Virilio, Ben Agger, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, and Hartmut Rosa. While these theorists use illustrations from education, and others such as Foucault and Adam have considered the relationship between education and time, there has been little theorisation of dromology (a term Virilio coined to describe the ‘science’ of speed) in education studies itself. Given its growing importance as a ‘grand theory’ in social science, this paper calls for educationalists to recognise the value of theories of social acceleration to gain a better understanding of contemporary educational practices and how the COVID-19 pandemic is illustrative of this.

Urban Renewals: Learning from a Country’s Recent Experience for Enhancing Socially-Sustainable Global Planning Policy

Against the background of urban redevelopment programs through the lens of varied, country-related planning cultures, this article sets the stage for learning from one country’s recent experience. In this article, we focus on two Israeli urban regeneration programs operating since 2000: the ‘Integrated National Planning Scheme’ (TAMA 38) and ‘Evacuate and Build’ (Pinuy Binuy) programs. This article aims to examine the governmental agenda behind these programs in comparison to previous urban regeneration programs and, especially, to critically review the implementation and implication of these programs considering social sustainability issues. Methodologically, the policies and practices of this recent wave of urban renewals in Israel are revisited through a critical reading of a series of studies from the last five years, bringing together multidimensional societal aspects. In terms of ethics and qualitative dimensions, the examined societal aspects are rooted in social sustainability theory and contemporary urban policy design. Our findings regarding this country-related recent experience in urban renewals have identified several gaps concerning certain aspects of social sustainability theory and practice. These gaps call for a better understanding by Israel’s urban policy makers of the comprehensive essence of contemporary social sustainability theory, which should also be mirrored in the respective professional discourse. The gaps are also useful in informing our accumulating transnational knowledge and experience in urban renewal schemes, based on a chain of country-related experiences and planning cultures.

Conceptualizing State Re-Engagement With Public Higher Education

Three trends have characterized state policymaking for higher education in the 21st century: divestment, accountability, and race neutrality. These policy agendas are often justified as an attempt to optimize system efficiency and performance by making institutional actors (agents) responsive to the demands of state officials (principals). In this manuscript, we present quantitative evidence that these three policy initiatives have not achieved their stated purpose. We use contemporary social theory to explain why this is the case. Finally, we call for deeper re-engagement of states and their higher education systems in place of transactional and technocratic models.

The Contest between Information and Uncertainty

This article argues that the Cold War – era battle between information and uncertainty is a critical origin point for contemporary social theory – informed, data-intensive projects of the US national security state. Beginning in the 1950s, international relations experts and government officials turned to digital computing to help make decisions under the unavoidable pressures of geopolitical uncertainty. By the 1970s, their data banks of political knowledge and novel statistical tools purported to forecast political unrest long before an unaided human could. These efforts sparked a new epistemology of political knowledge, one that is now common in data science, in which designers and users prioritize correlation over causality and the instrumental management of problems over scholarly understanding or explanation. Far from a historical curiosity, this history is a warning. The sensibilities of Cold War technopolitical projects are continually rematerialized in contemporary computational security projects. Left unchallenged, their durability will continue to increase in tandem with the national security state's continued investment in computational social scientific projects for geopolitical management.

Lessons from Reckwitz and Rosa: Towards a Constructive Dialogue between Critical Analytics and Critical Theory

ABSTRACT It is hard to overstate the growing impact of the works of Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa on contemporary social theory. Given the quality and originality of their intellectual contributions, it is no accident that they can be regarded as two towering figures of contemporary German social theory. The far-reaching significance of their respective approaches is reflected not only in their numerous publications but also in the fast-evolving secondary literature engaging with their writings. All of this should be reason enough to take note of their collaborative work, which, most recently, has culminated in the publication of their co-authored book Spätmoderne in der Krise: Was leistet die Gesellschaftstheorie? (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021). The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the latest exchange between Reckwitz and Rosa contains valuable insights into recent and ongoing trends in society in general and social theory in particular. The first part comprises an outline of the central matters at stake in, and the core lessons learnt from, the constructive dialogue between Reckwitz’s critical analytics and Rosa’s critical theory, before moving, in the second part, to an assessment of the most significant limitations of their respective views and propositions.

Critical Diversity Literacy: A framework for multicultural citizenship education

We propose the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) framework for citizenship education in contemporary heterogeneous societies. It encourages an anti-essentialist, power-conscious awareness of difference beyond notions of citizenship that have been constitutive of the nation and tend to normalise masculinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and whiteness. Using intersectionality and decoloniality heuristics, we approach multicultural citizenship from the multiple axes of our identities as we inhabit the world more complexly than mere belonging to the nation-state. The framework synthesises insights from contemporary social theory into a usable scaffolding for diversity capacitation. The ten principles focus on intersectionality, social identities and positioning, historical awareness, diversity vocabulary, the coded nature of hegemonic power and personal engagement. Taken together, they promote an approach to multicultural citizenship that focuses on social justice and pushes us to recognise the lived experience of citizenship ‘from below’. The framework has proved useful in designing curricula and interventions in different contexts and sectors and can be utilised to develop age-appropriate materials in schools.

Whats's critical about Critical Theory again? Critical Theory, ethnocentrism, sexism and racism

The purpose of the article is to examine some of the weaknesses of critical theory with regard to race and gender, as well as to critique the limitations of critical theory stemming from its ethnocentrism. In it the author argues for a return to the deeper engagement with the breadth of contemporary social, political, and emancipatory theories and movements as seen in the first generation of the Frankfurt School. As a case in point, he shows that Angela Davis' omission from the history of critical theory indicates the degree to which even critical theory is haunted by racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism. These shortcomings of critical theory make it necessary to revisit critical theory once again, carrying forward the provocation made by Nancy Fraser in her essay entitled “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?”. As a result of the argument, the author suggests that a new critical theory, which brings Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis into contact with other recent theories, would lead to more fruitful forms of critical theory that would help overcome the one-dimensional concerns of traditional critical theory.

Ignatian Leadership as a Mechanism for Human Liberation: “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”

Leadership that draws upon Ignatian wisdom has the potential to heal the divides which plague our local, national and global communities. This chapter weaves together elements of Ignatian Spirituality, critical leadership studies, feminist theory, and critical race concepts to propose a conception of Ignatian leadership that is liberatory for both leader and those being led. Drawing upon Ignatian sources as well as contemporary social science theorists, it illustrates the relevance of the Ignatian worldview for today’s context, as leaders engage critical consideration of race, gender and class in shaping a more just, humane, and sustainable world. It invites the reader to reflect on the role of social identity as a shaping influence for leading with love for the liberation and flourishing of all.

The Society of Singularities: Reply to Four Critics

Abstract In this article, Andreas Reckwitz replies to the four critical commentaries of Patrick Baert, Andreas Pettenkofer, Austin Harrington and Sally Haslanger on his book The Society of Singularities. In this context, he discusses the general position of this book within the landscape of contemporary social theory and the question of what a ‘social logic of the unique’ means. He enters the question in how far his analysis of the new middle class differs from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the new petty bourgeoisie, emphasizing the combination of an orientation towards inner experience and social prestige in his account of the new middle class. He discusses the question of whether neoliberalism is responsible for the proneness to disappointment which the late-modern culture of self-actualization implies. Finally, he works out the differences between the type of critical analytics which his book implies and normative critical theory.