Sociological Practice Research Articles

Balancing Control and Complexity in Field Studies of Neonicotinoids and Honey Bee Health.

Amidst ongoing declines in honey bee health, the contributory role of the newer systemic insecticides continues to be intensely debated. Scores of toxicological field experiments, which bee scientists and regulators in the United States have looked to for definitive causal evidence, indicate a lack of support. This paper analyzes the methodological norms that shape the design and interpretation of field toxicological studies. I argue that contemporary field studies of honey bees and pesticides are underpinned by a “control-oriented” approach, which precludes a serious investigation of the indirect and multifactorial ways in which pesticides could drive declines in honey bee health. I trace the historical rise to prominence of this approach in honey bee toxicology to the development of entomology as a science of insecticide development in the United States. Drawing on “complexity-oriented” knowledge practices in ecology, epidemiology, beekeeping and sociology, I suggest an alternative socio-ecological systems approach, which would entail in situ studies that are less concerned with isolating individual factors and more attentive to the interactive and place-based mix of factors affecting honey bee health.

Talking sociology

Zygmunt Bauman has always approached sociology as an imagination, as an ongoing conversation with experience rather than a discipline within tight boundaries. This has enabled his work to move outside of the academy, and over the past decade or so he has become a leading public sociologist. But what does this status mean for the practice and possibilities of sociology? In this conversation Bauman reflects on the role, status and opportunities of sociology, who it is for, and what this means for the sociologist.

Paul DU GAY & Glenn MORGAN (2013) New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Du Gay and Morgan’s edited collection offers a thorough volume focusing on The New Spirit of Capitalism (NSC), a book published in France in 1999 and translated into English in 2005. There is no doubt that New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics is a timely landmark work among the growing body of organization studies inspired by approaches developed in the field of French pragmatist sociology (Jagd, 2011; Patriotta, Gond & Schultz, 2011; Cloutier & Langley, 2013; see also the M@n@gement special issue with Dansou & Langley, 2012; Taupin, 2012). This is particularly due to the fact that, as noted by the editors, Boltanski and Chiapello’s seminal work is a weighty tome that presents several complex contributions to domains as diverse as sociology, political economy, social history, social critique etc. Whilst elucidating one theoretical approach stemming from that articulated in Boltanski and Thevenot’s On Justification (published in France in 1991, eight years before NSC but translated into English in 2006), Du Gay and Morgan also take the opportunity to clarify the approach of the French pragmatist sociology (also termed sociology of critical practices or sociology of critique), which is often misunderstood. With New Spirits of Capitalism?

Much more than money

We analyze conceptual patterns shared by Michael Ende’s novel about time, Momo, and examples of time conceptualization from psychology, sociology, economics, conventional language, and real social practices. We study three major mappings in the materialization of time: time as money in relation with time banking, time units as objects produced by an internal clock, and time as a substance that flows. We show that binary projections between experiential domains are not enough to model the complexity of meaning construction in these widely successful examples. To account for the intricacies of time materialization in context, we use generic integration templates, models for conceptual templates based on Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory. The interplay of such detailed patterns with pragmatic and cultural factors, including diachronic aspects, is crucial to identify the cognitive models at work, and the factors that guide their instantiations as a variety of surface products. The blending model for the spatialized time can be refined and extended to the materialization of time.

Bourdieu and urban politics: Conceptualizing a Bourdieusian relational framework for urban politics research

This study purposes to build a generic theoretical framework of urban politics, drawing on Bourdieu’s relational sociology and theory of practice. Through a Bourdieusian relational mode of analysis, the study has conceptualized subfields of urban politics and the possible dimensions of politics among stakeholders in different subfields. In addition, the two conceptual spaces of positions and position-takings in the field of urban politics were hypothetically constructed with a methodological suggestion of Galois lattice analysis. The concepts of capital and habitus have also been related to develop the theoretical framework.

Taking the Bundle Apart: Some Reflections on the Significance of Edward Thompson’s Work for the Practice of Sociology

Taking the Bundle Apart: Some Reflections on the Significance of Edward Thompson’s Work for the Practice of Sociology

Unmasking and disclosure as sociological practices

Unmasking is a recurrent feature of modern sociology and cultural criticism. While false consciousness is imputed by intellectuals to religious groups and to certain social classes, unmasking is, or claims to be, a corrective performed by intellectuals themselves. Unmasking supposes that enlightened enquirers are able to help the less rational to understand their real interests; a type of exposure, it offers a cognitive tool of emancipation. This article (a) examines unmasking; and (b) contrasts it with an approach to understanding that we call disclosure. Our claim is that disclosure is more attuned to the full keyboard of social action, and less demeaning of its players, than unmasking is. Disclosure attempts to grasp what actions are like for those who enact them. Nothing has been more often or consistently unmasked and with more venom than religion. It is the main example explored in this article.

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.

Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz edited by Helen Maxson and Daniel Morris (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz edited by Helen Maxson and Daniel Morris Louise Hornby (bio) READING TEXTS, READING LIVES: ESSAYS IN THE TRADITION OF HUMANISTIC CULTURAL CRITICISM IN HONOR OF DANIEL R. SCHWARZ, edited by Helen Maxson and Daniel Morris. Newark, New Jersey: University of Delaware Press, 2012. xviii + 236 pp. $75.00. The list of contributors at the end of Reading Texts, Reading Lives includes the following epigram: “Daniel R. Schwarz is the sine qua non” (235). This, of course, is the claim made by any festschrift, a deferential and devotional genre that cannot exist without its central object. I would venture that the editors of this volume are not just attaching the existence of the tribute to the life and career of Schwarz but are also hinging their own work and that of the other contributors on his legacy and teaching. The volume, comprised of twelve essays, a published conversation, and an annotated bibliography, is an effort to bear witness to the scholarship and mentorship of a professor who has indelibly marked the lives of his students and colleagues, and, as such, it succeeds. The achievement, however, is hermetic: it is guaranteed by the form of the festschrift itself, which is, in turn, symptomatic of the humanistic tradition Schwarz has defended and cultivated throughout his career. The collection hews closely to its terms, and its essays are careful to speak in the vernacular of the cultural criticism they inherit from Schwarz. They cover a broad variety of works and authors, including modernists such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen; contemporaries like Colm Tóibín, Toni Morrison, and Wendell Berry; Holocaust writers; and a discussion of Lee Friedlander’s photography. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be the four essays on Joyce. Margot Norris’s comparison of “Eveline” and Larsen’s Quicksand offers a carefully nuanced consideration of modernist narratives of migration.1 Her essay stands out in the collection for stitching together Hugh Kenner’s earlier readings of Joyce and modernism with contemporary criticism, thus offering a historically grounded model for theoretical generosity and inclusion. Ed O’Shea’s reading of Joyce’s Dubliners alongside Tóibín’s stories identifies a shift in the representation of the city from tropes of paralysis to expansion. Steve Sicari draws from Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce to rethink the role of repetition in modern fiction against J. Hillis Miller’s Fiction and Repetition (which Schwarz has also taken to task).2 Beth Newman’s essay on Hebraism in Ulysses follows Schwarz’s lead, working to understand Bloom’s position as a Jew and Joyce’s own relationship to humanism. The texts considered in the collection are cast into new and interesting comparative contexts (for example, Ruth Hoberman’s essay [End Page 543] brings the little-known work of Gilbert Cannan to bear on that of D. H. Lawrence and the painter Mark Gertler3). The theoretical and methodological territory, however, is necessarily and unabashedly repetitive, affirming, as the subtitle of the volume attests, Schwarz’s particular stripe of “humanistic cultural criticism” by following the same critical arc. The editors have thus chosen to honor Schwarz’s work by way of echo rather than argument. Even the penultimate chapter in the collection, which consists of a published conversation between Schwarz and Daniel Morris, one of the editors of the volume, presents itself as a further occasion for repetition. The conversation between mentor and mentee turns on the central tenets of Schwarz’s previously published work, in particular, his 2006 manifesto, In Defense of Reading.4 In light of recent discussions about new critical practices of reading that offer challenges to both humanism and theory (I think here of Steven Best and Sharon Marcus’s account of “surface reading” and Heather Love’s work on sociological practices of reading5), a very different kind of conversation might have been had. Rather than offering a “summary of the evolution of Schwarz’s thought” (xvii), the conversation could have considered Schwarz’s speculations within...

What Durkheimian thought shares with pragmatism: How the two can work together for the greater relevance of sociological practice

Durkheimian thought and pragmatism are often considered inconsistent with each other. Nevertheless, beyond their most obvious differences, they share some fundamental postulates – like immanentism, pluralism, and relative indeterminacy. Realizing these common points seems particularly crucial in the current situation of the social sciences. Firstly, it allows us to overcome the structural-functionalist and structuralist versions of Durkheim’s work that prevent the understanding that at its core is his theory of practice. Secondly, it forces us to distance ourselves from the aspects of pragmatism that are most hostile to sociological thought (that is, that are the most oriented towards individualism). Finally, and above all, it provides social scientists with the means to escape their difficulties in assessing their own practices, and it aids in defining their political role in society. Indeed, taking into account what pragmatism shares with the Durkheimian tradition leads to a better understanding that what the social sciences are founded on, both historically and in terms of scientific practice, is a political undertaking of emancipation. Such an undertaking aims to implement an approach involving the ideas of truth and historical progress in human thinking that is neither objectivist nor relativist. In order to describe this undertaking and its limits, this article explores the famous text published by Durkheim and Mauss in 1903 under the title ‘On Some Primitive Forms of Classification’.

Experiencing Practical Knowledge

The classical philosophy of American pragmatism has experienced a striking renaissance within the social sciences during the last decade especially in France and Germany. My essay takes this development as a starting point to propose a historical and epistemological combination of pragmatism and sociological practice theory from an anthropological viewpoint. In the long run this combination is not only supposed to overcome their pretended incommensurateness in social theory, but to consolidate their methodological convergences, which, while actually reclaimed in international social and cultural anthropology, still wait to be applied in a more systematic relation. Hence, the essay examines their respective approaches concerning knowledge, action and the importance of experience starting with William James and Émile Durkheim (1). In a second step, the concepts of experience and practice in the works of John Dewey and Pierre Bourdieu will be compared one to another (2). The essay finishes by outlining a possible combination based on emergence theory that still has to be developped (3).

Learning to Be Affected: Social Suffering and Total Pain at Life's Borders

The practice of live sociology in situations of pain and suffering is the focus of this article. An outline of the challenges of understanding pain is followed by a discussion of Bourdieu's ‘social suffering’ (1999) and the palliative care philosophy of ‘total pain’. Using examples from qualitative research on disadvantaged dying migrants in the UK, attention is given to the methods that are improvised by dying people and care practitioners in attempts to bridge intersubjective divides, where the causes and routes of pain can be ontologically and temporally indeterminate and/or withdrawn. The paper contends that these latter phenomena are the incitement for the inventive bridging and performative work of care and live sociological methods, both of which are concerned with opposing suffering. Drawing from the philosophy of total pain, I highlight the importance of (1) an engagement with a range of materials out of which attempts at intersubjective bridging can be produced, and which exceed the social, the material, and the temporally linear; and (2) an empirical sensibility that is hospitable to the inaccessible and non-relational.

Once upon a Problem

This article investigates the specificity of sociological materials and methods in relation to other disciplines and practices (art, literature, science and journalism) and questions the opportunities for sociological attentiveness, experimentation and failure in the context of contemporary UK professional, institutional and academic/intellectual constraints. It asks whether materials and methods are ‘sociological’ to the extent that they tell about the problems of society, or whether it is the unique relation of sociology to its materials and methods that defines sociological practice. Exploring these questions in relation to a project that was researched and written during an extended period of unpaid leave (ie outside the profession and the institution), the article also examines some of the consequences of a changed relation between sociology and experience. What would be the implications if the aim of sociology was not only to theorize and explain experience but also, sometimes, to be an ‘informed provocation’ of experience? The second part of the article considers what the concept of ‘make-believe’ might offer sociology – not in terms of what sociology is, but rather in terms of what it does with its materials and methods. Finally, the article returns to the most common material that sociologists work with – words – and asks how it is possible to stay receptive to the vitality of words as forces in the research process.

No Way to Make a Living.Net: Exploring the Possibilities of the Web for Visual and Sensory Sociologies of Work

This article reflects on the possibilities and pitfalls of a website, No Way to Make a Living at: http://nowaytomakealiving.net , as a sociological space for exploring what work (paid or unpaid) is like in today's world. The site includes research projects, short thoughts on everyday working lives, and different kinds of textual (fictional, autobiographical and analytical), aural, and visual representations of work. It emerged as a collaborative project from our frustrations with some dominant representations of work in contemporary photography, and the limitations in the forms of knowledge we can convey in academic publishing. We argue that the contemporary complexity of work exceeds the dominant forms of sociological representation available to us, and illustrate how a website provides multi-media opportunities to gain new insights into work. However, we also problematise the status of visual and sensory methodologies as a panacea for the shortcomings in more conventional sociological practices. We discuss the analytical and imaginative potential of absence as well as presence. And in the final section, we frame the site as a contribution towards a more ‘open sociology’, and one which engages with a readership we can only partially know.

Critical approaches in physical therapy research: Investigating the symbolic value of walking

Research using a critical social science perspective is uncommon in physiotherapy (PT) despite its potential advantages for investigating questions other approaches cannot address. Critical approaches can be used to expose ideas and concepts that are dominant, given, or taken-for-granted in practice in order to reflect on how “things could be otherwise.” The purpose of this paper is to use an example of research examining the symbolic value of walking to outline the key features of critical research and its application to PT. The study drew from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of practice to illuminate how socially ingrained notions of normality and disability are reflected in rehabilitation practices and affect parents and children with cerebral palsy. Dominant social assumptions about the value of walking are shown to shape individual choices and contribute to parental feelings of angst and doubt, and negative self-identities for children. The example reveals how critical approaches to research can be used to reveal the socio-political dimension of rehabilitation practice and address important research questions that have been largely neglected.

A National Survey of American Higher Education Capstone Practices in Sociology and Psychology

Previous research on capstones in sociology and psychology has suggested that there is a typical capstone experience required by three quarters of all four-year colleges and universities in the United States. This article reports results from a national survey that confirm that sociology and psychology capstone courses conform generally to a common format. The findings further indicate that factors related to student limits and time limits predominate with respect to those variables that produce less successful course outcomes. A review of the social science capstone literature and the pedagogical best practices literature suggests that student limitations and time limitations can be attenuated by curricular, structural, and resource-allocation changes.

Beyond Methodological Individualism: Social Scientific Studies of Rational Practice

AbstractStandard versions of the sociology of rational practice assume justificationist theories of rationality: all rational beliefs are justified and rational individuals do not believe any non-justified statements. This theory appears to some to offer the possiblity of finding “deeper” insights into social behavior: some actions presented by actors as “rational” can, in fact, be explained as non-justified and, therefore, as mere consequences of prestige and/or power conflicts. When, however, it turns out that no theories can be justified, then all theories are irrational. This leads to relativism. The possibility, that we may profitably construct alternative theories of rationality is, in contrast, raised nearly uniquely by fallibilist theories of rationality. In order to take advantage of this, an alternative to the dominant methodological individualist theory of rational action is needed and possible. According to this alternative, rational action consists of problem-solving within institutional contexts without justification. Such a non-relativist sociology of rational practice can be enlightening and useful. Differing institutional contexts offer differing standards of rationality.

The Biosocial Event: Responding to Innovation in the Life Sciences

Innovation in the life sciences calls for reflection on how sociologies separate and relate life processes and social processes. To this end we introduce the concept of the ‘biosocial event’. Some life processes and social processes have more mutual relevance than others. Some of these relationships are more negotiable than others. We show that levels of relevance and negotiability are not static but can change within existing relationships. Such changes, or biosocial events, lie at the heart of much unplanned biosocial novelty and much deliberate innovation. We illustrate and explore the concept through two examples – meningitis infection and epidemic, and the use of sonic ‘teen deterrents’ in urban settings. We then consider its value in developing sociological practice oriented to critically constructive engagement with innovation in the life sciences.

'n NUWE PERSPEKTIEF OP DIE SAAMLEEF VAN SOLDATE

"There are three types of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics."In this article five views are expressed.1. Typical, quantitative sociological practices are not ideal to foster an understanding of man's cohabitation.2. A new study of cohabitation or another technique of becoming acquainted with groups is needed.3. The military is specially suited to the earlier (mal-?) practices due to its orderly structure _ military sociology was fraught with the earlier stereotype practices.4. The new approach to study is one of actually experiencing and understanding, rather than description and declaration.5. The military (especially the SA Defence Force) is well-suited to the new approach.

Conceptualising the ‘Visual Essay’ as a Way of Generating and Imparting Sociological Insight: Issues, Formats and Realisations

This article discusses and exemplifies a more visual and expressive way of constructing and presenting sociological insight. It seeks to articulate the specific demands, traits and potentials of the ‘visual essay’ as a societal and sociological practice and format. In particular it provides some observations, propositions and arguments that may further help to clarify what the visual sociological essay, as an unorthodox scholarly product, might entail and what place it should acquire in broader scholarly discourse. This theoretical discussion is accompanied by excerpts of concrete visual essays of both scholarly and non-scholarly origin. These examples help to show some of the basic strengths of this format which attempts to play out the synergy of the distinct forms of expression that are combined: images, words, layout and design, adding up to a scientifically informed statement.