Plausibility Structures Research Articles

Religion as Opposition: A Gramscian Analysis

Building on Antonio Gramsci's approach to the dynamics of hegemony and counterhegemony, this article develops guidelines for the historical analysis of conditions under which religion promotes either social quiescence or opposition. Gramsci stressed the importance of (1) leadership resources and (2) organizational autonomy for oppositional movements. Social-psychological studies of the processes of religious conversion and commitment bring to light the importance of social support for the plausibility of belief- a third, implicit element in Gramsci's thought. These three factors are examined in a comparison of oppositional movements of coal miners and textile workers in the American South after World War I, when religion proved to be a crucial factor in either blunting or heightening workers' insurgency. Leadership resources, organizational autonomy, and plausibility structures are linked to Gramsci's analyses of the roles of force and hegemony in the formation of social classes.

Localism, Religiosity, Orthodoxy, and Liberalism: The Case of Jews in the United States

Two hypotheses suggested by Localism theory are tested on a Jewish sample: (1) Localism is positively related to religiosity and (2) it inhibits political liberalism. Some support is found for each hypothesis. General Localism is distinguished from subcommunal, here Jewish, Localism. The latter, especially as measured by Jewish Primary Group Involvement, is the more influential variable. An earlier Roof and Hoge (1980) study of Localism among Protestants, both liberal and conservative, and Roman Catholics is reviewed and showun to support the value of distinguishing among various forms of Localism. Roof (1972, 1976, 1978) has developed Localism theory to help explain church-based religion in contemporary society. The theory holds that the maintenance of a religious commitment in a highly differentiated modem society, such as America, with a variety of competing secular and traditional value systems requires a localistic perspective shared by persons who interact frequently, thus providing support to each other. Such support provides what Berger (1967) calls a plausibility structure. Localism is also regarded as an important factor (Roof 1974, 1978) in the etiology of prejudice against minorities, inclining one to hold intolerant, authoritarian attitudes generally, and especially against those who are perceived as threatening or competitive (1974, p. 661). The theory has received empirical support in Roof's own studies of the sources of religious commitment among Southern Baptists (1972) and Episcopalians (1976, 1978) in North Carolina. Some support for the theory *Revision of a paper delivered to the Association for the Sociology of Religion, 1987. Direct correspondence to J. Alan Winter, Department of Sociology, Connecticut College, New London, CT 06320. ? 1988 The University of North Carolina Press

On the Presumed Fragility of Unconventional Beliefs

Upon encountering an unconventional belief system, people are often heard to exclaim: How could anyone in his right mind believe such nonsense? This sentiment is not restricted to the layperson. A more subtle version of it is featured in some of the social scientific literature on religious cults an movements. As such, it gives rise to explanations of cult or movement viability that are premised on an assumption that unconventional religious beliefs are highly vulnerable to everyday experience and therefore inherently fragile. This assumption prompts some scholars to propose the existence of elaborate structures that are presumably required to maintain the tenuous beliefs and to protect their respective adherents from cognitive dissonance. This paper challenges the view that unconventional belief systems are necessarily fragile and owe their persistence primarily to the power of plausibility structures. It is also argued that such assumptions can function as barriers to understanding of contemporary religious movements and other unconventional beliefs.

State and Religion: Religious Conflict among Jews in Israel

Th e organization of religion in modern, industrialized, Western countries, where state and religion are structurally separate, has led to an increase in tolerance for religious pluralism and to the mitiga tion of conflict not only between different religions, but also between different denominations within the same religious group ing. The reason for this, according to Peter Berger, is that religion's plausibility structure is becoming less relevant to the entire societal plausibility structure, although retaining significance for individu als in society.1 An example of this is the three main denominations of Judaism in the United States. There, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism (in ascending order of adherence to traditional Jewish doctrine) are very much tolerant of one another, despite the basic differences in their belief structures. While Marshall Sklare notes that this is partially due to the cohesive, ethnic aspects of Judaism, especially in confrontation with non-Jews in the United States, this can only be so in a society not governed by religious adherence.2 Societies in which religion plays a relatively important part in determining societal behavior, as the case of Iran demonstrates, carry with it the seeds for severe conflict and turmoil. Religious conflict, based as it is on an ideological plane, makes compromise much more difficult to achieve, for the very act of compromise (or the self-perception that one is compromising) can undermine the religious doctrine. The problem of tension between religious groups is exacerbated when religion and state are intertwined, and it is in this context that the case at hand—the religious situation in Israel— is discussed.

Religious Deprogramming and Subjective Reality

Unlike the psycho-physical interpretation of the Pavlovian approach (Hunter, 1953; Hinkle and Wolffs, 1956) or psychoanalytic notions (Lifton, 1961; Meerloo, 1956) on thought reform, we contend in this paper that contemporary of American young cultists may be best analyzed in terms of ego-identity change as suggested by Schein (1961). The ego-identity change occurs in interaction with significant others who provide a unique plausibility structure through three specific stages: a shock treatment of defreezing, protective or coercive persuasion to eliminate 'floating influence of the cultist mind-control, and readjustment of the changed subjective reality to the larger society. A set of data was collected through intensive interviews with 17 deprogrammed youths and a few deprogrammers and rehabilitators, and through participant observations in the deprogramming-rehabilitation sessions. The data then were used as illustrative and interpretive materials in support of our contention. Problem This paper examines religious deprogramming as a social construction of subjective reality. Berger and Luckmann (1966) contend that subjective reality can be transformed and that in a nearly total transformation (alternation), the individual switches the worlds of subjective realities.1 Religious in this paper is understood as a process bringing a person the total rejection of those attitudes, beliefs and practices of a group or of which the individual was previously a loyal member. The then may be seen as an alternation process through which one is led to dismantle and disintegrate the nomic structure of his/her subjective reality and, then, switches to another world-a new or the previously held reality. My discussion in this exploratory study will be focused on what is apparent and what is concealed in the process of deprogramming. While the manifest objective of explained by parents is to rescue their children who have been 'brainwashed' in the cult and became incapable of making rational decisions, the latent function of might be viewed as deconversion and reconversion -in other words, a process of social construction of subjective reality. This can be best examined through analysis of (1) the basic elements which constitute the plausibility structure of

A Home for the Disabled: Marginality and Reality

The participant-observer study of a Cheshire Home which is described in this article was intended to bring some fieldwork evidence to bear on currently popular speculations in the field of the sociology of knowledge. These speculations are best known through the writing of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, which draws heavily on the work of Alfred Schutz. The reality of everyday life, it is said, is massively taken for granted and presents itself as not in need of further analysis: it rests on 'typifications' which make patterns of social intercourse easy and unselfconscious and so constitute the social structure. But sub-universes of meaning (such as Schutz examined in his study of Don Quixotel) are not only possible but today highly probable: counter-realities are the home of counter-identities.2 Schutz had written off 'attentional modification' which converts what is taken for granted into something deeply problematical;3 Berger and Luckmann talk about 'a more complex distribution of knowledge' that occurs when bastards, lepers, idiots and cripples congregate in durable groups and establish counter-worlds with their own institutionalized clusters of counter-identities. New 'plausibility structures' are established for counter definitions of reality.4 The taken-forgrantedness of everyday reality is apparently less massive and far more fragile than one had supposed; and in Berger's later writings it is highly precarious. Modern man lives in 'discrepant worlds of meaning' and is 'peculiarly unfinished' and conversion-prone.5 Berger's sociology of knowledge draws heavily on notions of socialization (and resocialization) which are derived from Goffman's studies of institutional life and from a too simple interpretation of G. H. Mead.6 (Mead, of course, knew that the self is a social system in which I interacts with me. It does not collapse nearly as readily as Berger imagines when familiar social props are withdrawn.) I therefore examined a Cheshire Home as a marginal world which perhaps gave a base for a counter reality and a cluster of counter identities by focusing on processes of resocialization. I looked for evidence of resocialization on the one hand as stages in a 'moral career', on the other as a process of shedding old typifications and conceptual categories and acquiring new ones. In view of the great weight given by Berger and Luckmann to

Traditional Religion in Contemporary Society: A Theory of Local-Cosmopolitan Plausibility

Sociological theories of religion typically presuppose a religiously-based nqimative order, and for this reason their appropriateness in a modern, secular society is questionable A localcosmopolitan theory is proposed which attempts to identify an important plausibility structure for traditional, church-type religion today. Analysis of data from a sample of Worth Carolina Episcopalians shows that this theory not only explains multidimensional religiosity patterns, but also provides a parsimonious interpretation for the effects of education and community size. Implications for the changing social basis of church religion in modern society and the process of secularization are discussed.

Berger's Plausibility Structures: A Response to Professor Cairns

Few sociologists can afford to ignore Peter Berger, and theologians only do so at their cost. Berger's contributions to both the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion are important and widely influential. However, I think he would be the first to admit that his specifically theological contributions are more tentative and exploratory. Professor Cairns ably shows that in fact Berger's theological ideas have shifted considerably over the last decade. From a highly Barthian position, distinguishing rigidly between ‘religion’ and Christianity, he has now almost become a natural theologian, appealing to ‘signals of transcendence’ within the experience of everyone, whether Christian or not.

Historical Sociology and Jewish Historiography: A Review Essay

hroughout the Middle Ages the place of the Jew in western society was defined in terms of both the theological assumptions of Christianity and the corporate structure of medieval society. Within this framework, European Jewry maintained a semi-autonomous existence, ordering its life according to the values and institutional structures of rabbinic Judaism. In Berger's terms, this framework provided the Jew with both the legitimation and plausibility structure necessary to sustain a traditional, closed society. With rare exceptions, usually involving only the upper socio-economic levels of their society, Jews lived a segregated social and cultural existence, separated from Christian society by neighborhood, appearance, dress, language, religion, and historical and ethnic consciousness.

Semantic heuristics and syntactic analysis

This paper investigates the hypothesis that the component of sentence processing time directly attributable to syntactic processing depends critically on certain semantic properties of the sentence. Using two different procedures, it is found in a series of experiments that there is little evidence to support this view. Specifically, it is shown that syntactic processing time tends to be constant for sentences of varying semantic plausibility but constant syntactic structure, and further, that reversibility fails to affect sentence processing in a systematic way. These facts are interpreted as indicating that the recovery of the underlying structure of a sentence is controlled by purely syntactic properties of the input.