Sociological Notion Research Articles

Action and Reflection (ii)

This is the second article in a series of two on the topic of “action” and “reflection”. The first article appeared last year in the fall issue of this journal (Vol. 79 (2), 140–171). This second article is divided into two sections. The first section deals with reflection, mainly in the form of reflexivity, a central notion in contemporary sociology and an attitude characteristic of the modern secular mind. The second section discusses second-order agency (soag), subdivided intospiritsandpowers. Most instances of (humanly engendered) spirits fall under an “as if” category: all these cases are about certain communalities expressing themselves in such a strong way that itseemsas if a supra-personal agent is at work.Zeitgeisterare a point in case. The only incidence of asoag-kind may be that ofmobs. Powers fit our model better than spirits and for that reason most of the second part of this essay is dedicated to that topic. The foremost distinction that will be made is that between incomplete and full powers. The thesis presented in the final section is that powers can only come to completion by taking a “religious turn”. The notion of “assent” as a basic ingredient of human action is what connects the first to the second part of the essay.

The translators’ positioning in an institutional setting

Translators in Singapore face the dilemma of serving the needs of a heterogeneous population in this multi-racial and multilingual city-state and have often become the “scapegoat” in the event of a controversy arising from the translation. A case in point is the heated debate triggered by a newspaper article in the Straits Times, translated from a Chinese article in Lianhe Zaobao. Drawing on two sociological notions, that is, erasure and indexing of social identity, this paper sets out to investigate whether the translator who worked in an institutional setting positioned himself in favour of an institutionally-aligned culture and ideology in order to strengthen the institutional voice. It will first review the key concepts, namely, institutional power, ideology and positioning, and their relevance to the Singapore context, and then scrutinize the source text and its two translated versions in an effort to detect any traces of cultural and ideological shifts that lead to the controversy. The paper reveals that the translator working in an institutional setting in Singapore does align himself with the authority and the erasure of translators paradoxically jeopardizes the author’s social identity and ideological positioning.

Entre "reais" e "virtuais": noções sobre risco e verdade em um clube brasileiro para crossdressers

Proponho analisar a partir das noções de "real" e "virtual" como se constrói a hierarquia dentre associadas em um clube brasileiro para crossdressers, que se organiza a partir da internet, e o quanto elas impactam as negociações e relações sociais para dentro e para fora do clube na produção de "crossdressers de verdade". Também busco entender em que medida se constroem lugares diferenciados para as associadas, pautadas nas noções sociológicas de gênero, sexualidade, estigma e senioridade.

Desvio e estigma: caminhos para uma análise discursiva

The present paper offers a theoretical literature review of Goffman’s concept of stigma, which has been extensively relied upon in discursive and educational studies in Brazil, by highlighting its relation to H. Becker’s Sociology of Deviance and its roots in the Chicago School. The paper aims at approaching such sociological notions from a discursive and interactional standpoint. It is specifi cally argued that certain analytical categories drawn from work in both interactional sociolinguistics and narrative analysis can be productively employed to provide a better understanding of the notions of deviance and stigma.Keywords: deviance, stigma, face, narrative.

Everyday life of women with a history of domestic violence and abortion

This is a qualitative study based on the Comprehensive Sociology. Aimed to understand the daily life of women with a history of domestic violence who had an abortion. We conducted in-depth interviews with ten women who were admitted to the hospital for abortion and reported experiencing domestic violence. Mostly characterized by being black, low education, between 18 and 40 years. The process of organizing and analyzing the data was based on the notions of Comprehensive Sociology and theoretical sensitivity. The daily life of women who had an abortion is marked by the experience of domestic violence as a child and teenager, expressed by abandonment and rejection, and also by domestic violence. The early sexual activity is related to the unplanned pregnancy and lack of support from family and partner. It is necessary a professional look for recognition of domestic violence as a health condition of women.

Religious and Spiritual Mobility in Britain: The Panacea Society and Other Movements in the Twentieth Century

Historiographical accounts of religious change in Britain increasingly reflect the sociological notion that decline in one area of religious activity does not necessarily imply the decline of religious or spiritual activity in society overall. This kind of understanding calls for a historical account of the complexity of spirituality and religious affiliation. Based on a study of the archives of a religious group called the Panacea Society, which promoted a spiritual healing method from 1924 to 2012, the article describes the main styles of engagement with a non-traditional religious form in Britain. The article analyses the Church of England's understanding of the migration of adherents between Christian Science, Theosophy, Spiritualism and itself in the interwar period. Showing the religious and spiritual mobility of individuals, the article indicates the capacity for non-traditional religion to engage people who were not especially religious and to take on the fullest religious significance for some participants.

Chinese Australians’ Chineseness and their mathematics achievement: the role of habitus

Large-scale international comparative studies and cross-ethnic studies have revealed that Chinese students, living either in China or overseas, consistently outperform their counterparts in mathematics. Empirical research has discussed psychological, educational, and cultural reasons behind Chinese students’ better mathematics performance. However, there is scant sociological investigation of this phenomenon. The current mixed methods study aims to make a contribution in this regard. The study conceptualises Chineseness through Bourdieu’s sociological notion of habitus and considers this habitus of Chineseness generating, but not determining, mechanism that underpins commitment to mathematics learning. The study firstly analyses the responses of 230 Chinese Australian participants to a set of questionnaire items. Results indicate that the habitus of Chineseness significantly mediates the relationship between participants’ commitment to mathematics learning and their mathematics achievement. The study then reports on the interviews with five participants to add nuances and dynamics to the mediating role of habitus of Chineseness. The study complements the existing literature by providing sociological insight into the better mathematics achievement of Chinese students.

Why students leave engineering and built environment programmes when they are academically eligible to continue

The retention of students to graduation is a concern for most higher education institutions. This article seeks to understand why engineering and built environment students fail to continue their degree programmes despite being academically eligible to do so. The sample comprised 275 students registered between 2006 and 2011 in a faculty of engineering and the built environment, who were academically eligible to continue, but failed to register for their studies the following academic year. The sociological notions of structure and agency were used to make sense of the data. The findings suggest that some students had control over their decision to leave and some students’ decisions were dominated by various structural factors. The outcome of the study is helpful in terms of suggesting what actions can be taken in order reduce the number of students leaving in good academic standing.

“Prompt, at any time of the day…”: the Emerging Translatorial Habitus in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

As one of the key notions in French sociology,habitushas also lately conquered the field of translation studies, at least from the perspective of a sociologically-oriented view of translation. In this paper I will critically highlight the main factors responsible for the term’s potential for translation purposes. Within the discussion of its adoption in translation studies, I will test the enduring claim of the translator’s submissiveness allegedly related to the translatorialhabitus. On the basis of a case study on the private (commercial) translation sector in the late Habsburg Monarchy, I will focus on three aspects to substantiate my assumption that towards the end of the nineteenth century, the commercial translators’ activity was already characterized by explicit emancipating processes, mostly driven by the struggle for recognition in the field: the initially weak structure of the field; thehabitusas a product of the relation between its collective and individual history; the conditions triggering the dynamism of the translator’shabitus. I will attempt to develop a differentiated view on thehabitusconcept, challenging traditional discussions of its informative value.

Appearances and dis/dys-appearances

This article draws on phenomenological and sociological notions of the ‘lived’ body in order to develop a dynamic perspective on embodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. My main argument is that even our most basic sensorimotor experiences are more complex, fluid, and more deeply imbued with socio-cultural meanings than many metaphor scholars assume. While our conscious awareness is ordinarily directed towards the world, making our physical actions and perceptions appear to be natural and straightforward, at times of dysfunction, such as illness and disability, the body suddenly seizes our attention and is perceived as alien. In these moments bodily experience often becomes not just the source, but also the target of metaphorical mappings. I demonstrate the usefulness of the notion of dynamic embodiment by applying it to the example of verbal and visual cancer metaphors.

Learning Chinese as a heritage language in Australia and beyond: the role of capital

The benefits of learning and retaining heritage languages are well documented in the literature. Chinese heritage language learners’ commitment to their heritage language learning has gained significant research ground in social psychological and post-structural schools, with empirical evidence predominantly emerging from the North American contexts. There is scant sociological examination of similar problems conducted outside North America. The current study aims to make a contribution in this regard. The use of Bourdieu's sociological notion of capital in the Australian context complements the social psychological and post-structural work predominantly produced in the North American contexts. The initial quantitative sub-study analyses the impacts of various resources on the Chinese heritage language proficiency of 230 snowball-sampled Chinese Australian respondents to an online survey. The subsequent qualitative sub-study explores the profits of learning Chinese heritage language through interviews with a subset of the survey sample. Findings indicate that cultural, social, and symbolic capital significantly positively contributes to Chinese Australians’ Chinese heritage language proficiency, which, in return, produces profits in different forms of capital. The study suggests a reciprocal relationship between ‘capital’ and Chinese heritage language proficiency.

Rorty and Dewey on Warrant

1. Rorty between Putnam and BrandomIn an interview for the film American Philosopher, by Phillip McReynolds,1 one can hear Hilary Putnam saying: says that the notion of warrant, justification, is a sociological notion. None of the classical pragmatists was a cultural relativist about warrant. The statement is plain and straightforward, as one should expect from a philosopher trying to convey a crucial point to a non-specialized audience. We skilled philosophers know that each and every word of it needs further qualification, though it captures in an admirably concise form the core of the Putnam-Rorty debate. A second merit of Putnam's statement is that its two sentences, taken as premises of an enthymeme, confront us with the twofold character of that debate. On one hand, it is a debate about the nature of justification, and in what relation it stands to cultural or sociological determinations. On the other hand, it is a debate about what it means to give a response to that problem, for Putnam's argument points to the unstated conclusion: No one who believes that is a sociological notion is m the same boat with classical pragmatists. According to Putnam, a true interpretation of should avoid the kind of cultural relativism that Roity allegedly promoted.Another influential representative of contemporary pragmatism, Robert Brandom, considers that Roily was, in other respects, still too close to the classical conception of warrant, that is, of our nonnative assessments of beliefs and assertions. According to Brandom, pragmatism in the broad sense claims that beliefs or judgments must be understood in tenus of practical commitments.' Brandom's view is that such commitments refer to other assertions inferentially related to the judgment or belief, whereas for the classical pragmatists and Rorty they are instrumental and refer to non-mferential consequences. Roity's characteristic talk of vocabularies as more or less useful would not provide a satisfactoiy account, by Brandom's lights, of what is involved in a belief being justified or warranted/In what follows I will not attempt to disentangle the rather vexing questions posed by the Putnam-Rorty-Brandom debate about what pragmatism is or should be. More modestly, I wish to take Putnam's and Brandom's criticisms as a starting point for a summary re-examination of Roity's position in relation to classical pragmatism, and to Dewey in particular. My remarks will be aimed to show that Rorty was not as far from the ideas of the classical pragmatists as Putnam suggests, nor as close to Brandom's interpretation of those ideas as he suggests. In a sense, then, this is a vindication of Roily as a respectable pragmatist (whatever this may mean), despite the real differences that will also emerge between lus position and that of the old school.2. Warranted Assertibility and InstrumentalismContemporary pragmatists agree that Jolui Dewey transformed the approach to epistemological problems in a decisive way. In a nutshell, Dewey suggested that we should drop the abstract notion of knowledge as an unfathomable subject/object relationship, and ask instead what lies at the bottom of our knowledge claims, or what entitles us to think that we are light in believing what we believe. If one makes this sluft, then the problem of which beliefs count as trae knowledge amounts to, as far as we are concerned - that is, as far as knowledge is considered a human activity - the problem of what aie we in believing. Pragmatist epistemologists therefore adopt the Deweyan concept of warranted assertibility as the proper object of concern for epistemology. As we have seen, it is the nature of that warrant which is controversial, so let us turn first to the concept as originally stated.The tenu warranted assertibility was introduced by Dewey in lus 1938 Logic. It appears for the first time in the following paragraph:That inquiry is related to doubt will, I suppose, be admitted. …

Self‐Knowledge, Gender Roles, and the Making of the Secret Gospels: A Chapter in the Sociology of Nonknowledge

AbstractIn addition to the four canonical gospels of theBible'sNewTestament, some so‐called apocryphal gospels have also been discovered to exist. Although the process by which the four gospels byMatthew,Mark,Luke, andJohn were determined to be the core gospels was completed by the late second centuryAD, it is generally held that the exclusion of other gospels was an incremental process that was finalized more than a century later. This article explores the inclusion and exclusion of texts in theNewTestament canon by reference to the sociological notion of ignorance, or “nonknowledge.” It is argued that the strategic use of nonknowledge can be shown to have achieved an “unknowing” of things that had previously been known among the early Christian community. Underpinning this argument is the suggestion that at least part of the success ofChristianity during the first 100 to 200 yearsADwas due to many Christian women not only occupying a special position in their communities but also being seen as having been favored with knowledge aboutGod. Such women were subsequently marginalized and knowledge about their role suppressed. The article concludes by noting that the formal exercise of control over what ought (not) to be known is part of the normal process of establishing stability and order in a bounded institution. This in turn promises to deliver insights for the sociological analysis of historical cases in many other areas.

Brian Friel’s Translations: A Bourdieusian Reading

Brian Friel is one of the most eminent figures in contemporary Irish drama. In his plays, he addresses the issues of language, culture, education, power, politics and myth. He is also mostly regarded as a postcolonial writer, since he is concerned with colonial and postcolonial contexts in which language and cultural clash are dominant factors. Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, as one of the theorists in cultural studies mentions the dynamics of power relations in social life through such ideas as capital, habitus, field, symbolic violence, etc. Therefore Bourdieu's theories regarding class, culture and language are applicable. The focus of this article is to analyze Friel's plays in the light of Bourdieu's sociological notions. According to Bourdieu, there are different types of capital (cultural, economic, social and symbolic) which distinguish every individual's position in society and in relation to other individuals. . For instance in Translations , the play which is going to be analyzed, the Irish characters who speak their native language (Gaelic) try to learn English in order to get linguistic capital and form a prestige or social status for themselves.

More Publics, More Problems: The Productive Interface between the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique and Deweyan Pragmatism

1. IntroductionThe pragmatic 'sociology of critique' has been developed over the past two and a half decades by a group of French scholars collaborating within the Groupe de sociologie politique et morale at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. The approach seeks interpret situated communication with a critical lens, understand public disputes and political culture and practice, and propose a structure for a range of common and more nuanced understandings of the variegated socio-political landscapes in which public disputes occur. A critical pragmatic analysis of cases of disputed justice focuses not only on the dynamics of the arguments that actors use justify their engagement in the public sphere, but also on the institutional, technical, legal, and material arrangements that are mobilized support the debates. A common ontological structure and method of inquiry unites this work, oriented around the linked concepts of grammars of public disagreement and models of justice, along with justification, denunciation, and compromise, and the tests which they are put.We refer here the French school of critical pragmatism, but we should note before proceeding in this direction that the term 'critical pragmatism' and its implications have independent origins in North America apart from those in France. In North America, the term can be traced at least as far back as 1935 Alain Locke, who developed a critical pragmatic theory of valuation as a means of undergirding the evolution of cultural pluralism (Kadlec 2007). This thread of American pragmatism notwithstanding, the struggle between pragmatism per se and critical social theory dates the very origins of American pragmatism; notably, with the critique leveled, from France, by one of the fathers of the discipline of sociology, Emile Durkheim, in 1895. In no uncertain terms, Durkheim saw the notion of a pragmatic sociology as a logical contradiction; he saw pragmatism as foregoing inquiry into eternal human truths by flattening these the same plane as sporadic individual actions (Karsenti 2004; Karsenti 2012). By insisting in various ways that, when it comes justifying and judging truth claims, there exists no means to get outside our beliefs and our language so as find some test other than coherence (Rorty 1979, 178), classical pragmatists seemed, from the perspective of classical sociologists, abandon the quest for a means base social inquiry on something more enduring than contemporary human communities.From Durkheim the present, critical social theorists along with conservatives such as Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr (MacGilvray 2010) have repeatedly confronted this lack of foundation or external reference point for the purpose of transcending, ordering, or judging individual experience as a failure of American pragmatism contest abuses of power in the real world. Pragmatists working in the American tradition respond these critiques in numerous ways. Hans Joas, for example, argued in 1993 that the stand-off constituted, primarily, an enduring misunderstanding. Richard Rorty's extensive opus draws upon Dewey build a defense and project of American democracy as an eternal project of seeking justice by the greatest number for the greatest number. A number of recent texts1 revive and further this tradition of synthesis. Among these, Torjus Midtgarden (2012, 507) has recently argued that Dewey derives immanent standards for social criticism from a sociological and historical reading of the cultural sources of normative authority. In the French language, recent work such as La Croyance et L'Enquete: aux sources du pragmatisme (Belief and Inquiry: the sources of pragmatism), a collection of essays by French philosophers and social theorists on the relevance of first generation American pragmatists - Dewey and Mead in particular - their own work, suggests a readiness for further bridge building. …

The Force of Law and Lawyers: Pierre Bourdieu and the Reflexive Sociology of Law

Looking back 25 years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu's seminal article “The Force of Law,” we inquire into the background for the weak reception of his work in law and society studies. We argue that the differences in the conceptions of law, state, and society between US law and society scholarship and French historical sociology have made it hard to transfer the theory across the Atlantic. We further contend that the impact of Bourdieu's work has generally been reduced by how it has been perceived as yet another French theory. It has thus been decoupled from perhaps its greatest strength, namely, the underlying notion of sociology as a reflexive practice. Against this background, this article sets out to reconnect the practice of Bourdieusian sociology with its conceptual framework and, in so doing, demonstrate its potentially central role in the sociology of law.

Remarks on Dan Walden's Retirement (Even Though He Is Tireless and Didn't Retire and Never Will!)

It is a consummate privilege of heartfelt love and esteem to celebrate the distinguished life and work of Dan Walden, who for many brilliant decades has both mentored and contributed to American letters. Long ago, when I was just out of graduate school (whence, let it be noted, I emerged doctorateless), it was my habit to attend the midwinter meetings of the Modern Language Association in New York. This was known, in the formal academic argot of the time, as “cruising.” My intent was simply to hang out, imbibe ideas, and tentatively tread, so to speak, the road not taken. And there, in a cavernous and professorially mobbed hotel, I discovered Dan Walden, a fellow cruiser, and though as an established academic he had come on university business, still we cruised and schmoozed together, Dan and I and his delightful Bea and a crew of highly degreed vagrants. I recall drinking cup after cup of tea (tea, mind you, not booze) at cafeteria tables, talking Literature, which really meant gossiping madly and meanly. All this took place in that antediluvian era when gender applied solely to French and German tables and chairs, books had not yet become texts, and gay was a synonym for jolly.In those wild early years, Dan and all the rest of those cruisers and schmoozers could not have predicted that he would found, ex nihilo, that unique and remarkable enterprise, Studies in American Jewish Literature, a pioneering publication—the very first serious critical journal to consider the Jewish component in American literary culture. Its thesis was neither what we have been compelled to endure under the oversold rubric of multiculturalism, with its rivalrous victims, nor the fashionable groupthink of so-called ethnicity, a term much trampled on by competitive zealots. What Dan aspired to interrogate was the idea of literature, as expressed in a heritage that coalesced its influences at least four thousand years before the arrival of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. Incontrovertibly, this vision is light years distant from sociological notions of “minority fiction.” In genuine literature there are no minorities; and in pursuing the study of American Jewish writers, Dan's standard was literature itself.Dan Walden has given us a lifetime of dazzling scholarly generosity. His colleagues, his students, his devoted friends, and his grateful community all know their good fortune. And what began as a carefree and boisterous cruise has matured into a glorious intellectual voyage.Kol ha-kavod!

Role behavior: A neurosociological perspective

Recent advances in social neuroscience show that many social phenomena can be traced back to neural processes. Major limitations and contributions of social neuroscience for a better understanding of social phenomena are considered. Social neuroscience is currently guided primarily by psychological notions and theories, thus making it inappropriate for solving sociological problems. Brain research for sociology can be increasingly useful within a branch we call neurosociology. Incorporation of data from cognitive and neuroscience may clarify the low-level structure of social phenomena and contribute to our understanding of social mechanisms. The notion of social status/role is taken as a possible subject of neurosociological research. A number of low-level brain structures and processes are shown to be relevant for the sociological notion of status/role. Examples include findings concerning the possible role of mirror neurons and oxytocin in social cognition and behavior. The idea of modularity is considered as a source of particular neurosociological hypothesis. It is also argued that the study of the neural system may contribute to a better understanding of social categorization, stratification and other macrosociological questions.

Picturing Work in an Industrial Landscape: Visualising Labour, Place and Space

This paper explores the notion of the visual landscape of work. Coming from a sociological perspective it attempts to view work, its meanings and the identities that surround it, through the lens of landscape. It takes on recent challenges to work sociology made by economic/labour geographers who argue that sociological understanding of employment are insufficiently spatial - space if used as a concept at all is reduced to the notion of a boundary containing economic processes rather than something that is constructed and in turn constructs work. Using material from ongoing research into the former Guinness Brewery at Park Royal in West London, and in particular a range of archival and contemporary visual sources, this paper illustrates the ways in which spatial ideas underpin complex sociological notions of work practice and culture. It will examine the way space is implicated in the location, construction, labour, and closing of this once famous brewery and how visual material helps to unlock theoretical and methodological understandings of work and industry.

Twenty-first-century drug warriors: the press, privateers and the for-profit waging of the war on drugs

The privatization of war-making — especially in regard to the waging of the war on terror — is well documented, but there are other emerging markets for the burgeoning ‘private security industry’. In fact, the war on drugs represents one of the most potentially lucrative market opportunities for what has been called the ‘narco-carceral complex’, an industry that is uniquely positioned to profit from the drug war, and is financially self-interested in the perpetuation of this war. This is consistent with the ‘disaster capitalism complex’, itself an extension of Eisenhower’s ‘militaryindustrial complex’. Add to this the sociological notion of ‘moral panic’, especially concerning the role of the press and the promotion of fear as a useful tool in the overall militarized response to the ‘crisis’, and there exists a situation that has potentially disastrous consequences for those who are not standing to gain by the perpetuation of the wars on terror and drugs as for-profit endeavors.