Reflexive Sociology Research Articles

Reflexive anthropology: On the method-guided construction of premises in social theory

The notion of reflexive anthropology follows Bourdieu's concept of reflexive sociology. It argues that it is necessary to take a reflexive look at the “unconscious” of sociological research in order to overcome epistemological limitations. At the same time, however, Bourdieu fails to identify scientific research practice as part of a differentiated society that is structurally dependent on the cult of the individual (Durkheim). Therefore reflexive sociology needs to be complemented by a reflexive anthropology that analyzes the human person and its normative special status as an institution of a horizontally differentiated society. This leads to the question that I explore in this article: what follows from the fact that the anthropological premises of sociological research affirm the anthropological conception of modern sociation? The fact that sociology reproduces the anthropological certainties of modern society has been repeatedly criticized. Based on these arguments, I present a critical procedure that allows us to work out whether and to what extent the general conceptual presuppositions of research reproduce modern anthropocentrism. Finally, I outline a social theory that makes it possible to render the modern self-conception an object of study.

Translating ‘Understanding’/ understanding translation: A reflexive approach

This article has its starting point in an apparently marginal undertaking: Bridget Fowler’s translation of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Comprendre’, a methodologically oriented chapter which appeared at the end of the collectively authored book La Misère du monde. Its objective is to show how translation, beyond its apparent marginality, is in fact a key component of sociological practice, and inseparable from sociological interpretation and theorizing. Because of this, translation can provide an original and unexpected point of view that sheds light on little considered sociological matters and relations which usually escape from critical consideration. First, Fowler’s translation is discussed in the context of her critical engagement with Bourdieu’s sociology. Second, sociological approaches to the mostly neglected craft of academic translation are examined. Third, the project of a reflexive sociology is related to that of reflexive translation through what can be characterized as a translational sociology.

Navigating across academic labour markets: a Bourdieusian reflexive narrative of a Chinese international doctoral graduate’s employment experiences

ABSTRACT Much research has investigated international graduate employability in home or host countries. However, limited studies have accounted for such employability across the home and the host. Drawing on Bourdieu’s relational and reflexive sociology, this paper critically examined the first author’s narrative of his employment experiences as a doctoral graduate navigating across Chinese and Australian academic fields after completing ten years of higher education and research training in Australia. While he encountered various challenges due to capital deficiency and habitus-field mismatch, he also reflexively learned to capitalise on his transnational academic dispositions and decode different logics of practice across different academic fields. Thus, he underwent constant changes of identity, agency, and belonging in his cross-field employment journey, which potentially shaped his transnational habitus. This Bourdieusian reflexive narrative contributes to research and practice on graduate employability and reflexivity from a sociological perspective.

Engaged and Reflexive Sociology for Environmental Health1

The article examines my environmental health work for nearly four decades with many environmental activists and organizations, as well as scientists and government officials. I discuss how I have merged research and advocacy, while mentoring many students and colleagues on how to do that. I discuss my efforts to conduct transdisciplinary work that crosses social sciences, environmental health science, environmental justice, social movement studies, and science and technology studies, while centering that work on community‐based participatory research. I examine my ability to do the practical work of serving public health and the broader social good, while also developing theoretical and analytical concepts along the way. I discuss the importance of continually being reflective about these many areas of work, both personal reflexivity and reflexive, evaluative discussions with collaborators.

Doing youth participatory action research (YPAR) with Bourdieu: An invitation to reflexive (participatory) sociology

Recent years have seen an increased epistemological and methodological interest within sociology in participatory research. Seen as one mode by which to upturn the apparent antagonism between ‘town’ and ‘gown’, and as a pragmatic way to render sociology more ‘public’, participatory research seems to offer resolutions to some of the field’s more pressing recent concerns. It also appears to provide redress to continuing institutional pressure to establish ‘impact’ for our research. This article offers a close and theoretically informed examination of the assumptions and practices of youth participatory action research, or YPAR, in order to contribute to deepened disciplinary understandings of the possibilities and limits of participatory approaches. Framed by the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, we draw upon cross-national conversations through which we have intentionally reflected on moments of ambivalence or discomfort in our own participatory research practice(s). We utilise these to engage critically with some recurring problems in YPAR, suggesting these also have relevance to sociological enquiry more broadly. Our collaborative process of mutual reflexivity, developed through walking and talking together, writing individually and then providing feedback and clarifications, has allowed us to deepen our understanding of the power dynamics at play in participatory sociological enquiry.

Self-organized communities of children

Abstract From a child-centered perspective, this article explores the practices of children’s self-organized play-communities in institutional everyday life in Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, based on a phenomenological non-participant-observational study with a duration of 16 months involving two kindergartens (Bernstorff, 2021). Drawing on Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology and praxeology, children’s self-organized play-communities are analyzed as a social space, being a field for relations, fights, negotiations with specific admission requirements emerging as accepted values shared by the specific field. The analysis demonstrates that self-organized play-communities are a social space with its own practices of being together expressed through the social language in play linked to and guided by an institutional choreography. Besides, the analysis demonstrates three kinds of different communities of children in self-organized play, viz. the categories: Relational play-communities, Community-oriented play-communities, and Conflictual play--communities, which categories may, however, also overlap into blended categories. The article argues that children’s self-organized play-communities risk being under pressure in the institutional choreography, which in turn affects children’s opportunities for having uninterrupted periods of time and space to self-organized play in their institutional everyday life.

The cosmopolitan standard of civilization: a reflexive sociology of elite belonging among Indian diplomats

The cosmopolitan standard of civilization: a reflexive sociology of elite belonging among Indian diplomats

Praying interaction rituals: Prayer, ritual, and spiritual capital in a contemporary neo-Guru movement

In this article, I contribute to the development of the sociology of prayer focusing on the practice of bhaktiyoga, or yoga of devotion, within the largely influential, although substantially understudied, Mooji’s neo-Guru movement. Methodologically, I rely on the tools of reflexive sociology, autoethnography, and discourse analysis while theoretically I advance a preliminary theorization of praying interaction rituals through a coupled reading of Mauss’ early insights, Randal Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chain Theory (IRC), and the concept of spiritual capital. The article conceptualizes collective prayer as an interaction ritual chain through which the collective identity of the community is continuously reconstituted around shared rituals, and which is in turn aimed at the acquisition of spiritual capital, the most valued type of capital within Mooji’s community of devotees. Within this framework, prayer becomes essential also in the process of becoming a ‘good devotee’.

‘Thinking About How We Think’: Using Bourdieu’s Epistemic Reflexivity to Reduce Bias in International Business Research

The paper advances epistemic reflexivity as a methodological process for dealing with knowledge biases in International Business research. By drawing upon Bourdieu’s (1989) reflexive sociology, the paper develops an epistemic form of reflexivity that moves beyond the limiting focus on the researcher’s social background and interpersonal relations with the researched, towards the conditions of knowledge production contained in the researcher’s subjective role as well as intellectual bias and positioning. Such an approach enhances trustworthiness and credibility in all research processes (qualitative, quantitative, mixed and multimethod), through a systematic exploration of social scientific claims. This can be achieved by the IB researcher scrutinising their own Self, cultural practices, biases and ‘unthought categories of thought’, which, if not problematised, may limit our understanding of other peoples’ ‘social reality’ and the IB phenomena that we investigate. The paper contributes to IB research methods literature by developing an epistemic theoretical foundation for reflexivity in addition to devising a methodological process for researchers to intellectually engage with, comprising of six reflexive, self-interrogating ‘thinking tasks’.

Conducting research on and with your own students

Abstract Researchers’ proximity to their field of interest can make it difficult to create what Bourdieu called “the strange point of view” needed to look beyond the field’s implicit beliefs when producing new knowledge. Based on a Bourdieusian approach to reflexive sociology, this article discusses proximity and distance when conducting research on and with one’s own students. To problematize proximity and distance in a research project, this article discusses a case in which a teacher/researcher conducted research on and with her own students in a bachelor’s degree program in sign language and interpreting as part of a project focusing on the students’ development of professional characteristics as interpreters for individuals with deafblindness. This article argues that student participation and input created an epistemological rupture and represented the strange point of view that became a counterweight to the researcher’s proximity to the field.

After Neoliberalism: Social Theory and Sociology in the Interregnum.

Charles Thorpe argues sociology lacks a "language of society as a whole." He holds that positivist sociologists de-legitimated holistic theories or broad normatively oriented "social theories," leaving the discipline without discursive means to critically assess and deliberate its overall directions and those of society. Thorpe does not address holistic theory directly or explain how it differs analytically from standard "sociological theory." My intent is to clarify these matters by extending facets of his argument to illuminate the interdependence between holistic theorizing and empirical-historical social science, which is necessary to create the type of "reflexive sociology" that Thorpe argues would make sociology more cosmopolitan and capable of addressing the turbulent sociopolitical conditions in the interregnum after neoliberalism.

Koniunkturalizm epistemiczny, spekulacje i szablony pojęciowe. Kilka wniosków z opowieści o miejskiej „podklasie”

W mojej książce The invention of the ‘underclass’ [2022] przedstawiam, odwołując się do „dziejów pojęć” (niem. Begriffsgeschichte) Reinharta Kosellecka oraz socjologii refleksyjnej Pierre’a Bourdieu, mikrohistorię narodzin, upowszechnienia się i zaniku owego uwidocznionego w tytule, podszytego rasizmem demona potocznej wyobraźni (ang. racialized folk devil) dającego o sobie znać na styku badań naukowych, dziennikarstwa i oficjalnej filantropii podporządkowanej polityce. Rzeczona historia pokazuje sposób uprawiania polityki wiedzy dotyczącej grup mieszkańców metropolii, wywłaszczonych i odartych z godności – w związku z nią proponuję trzy pojęcia, które mogą pomóc badaczom w analizowaniu używania i nadużywania innych konstruktów nauk społecznych, przyczyniając się tym samym do zwiększenia dbałości o higienę myśli: „efekt leminga” odnoszący się do znanego fenomenu zachowań stadnych (przykładem szalony pęd ku „diasporze”); „konceptualną bańkę spekulacyjną” (jak w przypadku „kapitalizmu rasowego”) oraz „problematykę szablonową” (ang. turnkey problematics) (jak w przypadku „odpornego miasta” i „miasta kreatywnego”). Ponadto omawiam czynniki sprzyjające rozwojowi koniukturalizmu epistemicznego (ang. epistemic bandwagons), spekulacji oraz szablonów pojęciowych (turnkeys) i wskazuję kryteria tworzenia efektywnych pojęć i koncepcji, biorąc pod uwagę ich aspekt semantyczny (klarowność i neutralność), logiczny (spójność i specyfikę kategorialną) oraz heurystyczny (adekwatność empiryczną i płodność teoretyczną).

Epistemic bandwagons, speculation, and turnkeys: Some lessons from the tale of the urban ‘underclass’

Drawing on the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, my book The Invention of the ‘Underclass’ draws a microhistory of the birth, diffusion, and demise of this racialized folk devil at the intersection of the academic field, the journalistic field, and the politics-policy-philanthropic field. This history illuminates the politics of knowledge about dispossessed and dishonored categories in the metropolis and suggests three notions that can help researchers parse the use and abuse of other social science constructs and thus practice better conceptual hygiene: lemming effects (illustrated by the wild rush to deploy ‘diaspora’), conceptual speculative bubble (as with ‘racial capitalism’), and turnkey problematics (such as the ‘resilient city’ and the ‘creative city’). I discuss the factors that foster the development of epistemic bandwagons, speculation, and turnkeys, and specify the criteria that make for a robust concept in terms of semantics (clarity and neutrality), logics (coherence and type-specificity), and heuristics (empirical adequacy and theoretical productivity).

YENİ NESİL SANAYİ BÖLGELERİ: OSB’LERDE YENİLİKÇİ DÖNÜŞÜMÜN SOSYOLOJİSİ

Türkiye’de organize sanayi bölgelerinin (OSB) yenilikçi dönüşümüne ilişkin çaba ve olanakları sosyolojik bir bakış açısıyla ele almayı amaçlayan makalede, imalat sanayi ekosisteminin temel bileşenlerinden bir tanesi olan organize sanayi bölgelerinin gelişiminde etkili olan unsurlar deşifre edilerek bütüncül bir analiz yapılmıştır. Organize sanayi bölgelerini bilgi temelli toplumsal bir dönüşümün üretim ayağının temel yapılandırıcısı ve hızlandırıcısı olarak konumlandırma stratejisini anlamak, açıklamak ve kurgulamak makalenin temel hedefini oluşturmaktadır. Analizin temel çerçevesi Bourdieu tarafından geliştirilen düşünümsel sosyoloji yaklaşımını kullanarak alan, habitus ve sermaye kavramları üzerinden yürütülmüştür. Manisa Organize Sanayi Bölgesi’nin yenilikçi dönüşümünü hızlandırmak adına kurulan Yenilik Merkezi çarpıcı bir vaka olarak ele alınmış ve bu bağlamda analiz edilmiştir. Çalışma neticesinde, kuramsal çerçeveden yola çıkarak organize sanayi bölgelerinin dönüşümüne ilişkin temel eksenler belirlenmiştir. Bu bağlamda, konu hakkında ileride yapılacak daha detaylı çalışmalar için teorik bir altyapı oluşturulmaya çalışılmıştır.

Towards a Digital Reflexive Sociology: Using Wikipedia's Biographical Repository as a Reflexive Tool

We propose the development of 'digital reflexive sociology', understood as the use of digital methods and Big Data to reflect on the social and historical circumstances of sociologists and sociological thinking. To show this approach's potential, we employ Wikipedia as a ‘reflexive tool’, i.e., an external artefact of self-observation that can help sociologists to notice conventions, biases, and blind spots within their discipline. We analyse the collective patterns of the 500 most notable sociologists on Wikipedia, performing structural, network, and text analyses of their biographies. Our exploration reveals patterns in their historical frequency, gender composition, geographical concentration, birth-death mobility, centrality degree, biographical clustering, and proximity between countries, also stressing institutions, events, places, and relevant dates from a biographical point of view. Linking these patterns in a diachronic way, we distinguish five generations of sociologists recorded on Wikipedia and emphasise the high historical concentration of the discipline in geographical areas, gender, and schools of thought. Drawing on these results, we discuss the potential of using digital repositories and methods to enhance reflexivity within sociology.

Thriving in the neoliberal academia without becoming its agent? Sociologising resilience with an early career academic and a mid-career researcher

In educational research, there has been much stricture of neoliberalism as a scourge. In the higher education sector, the neoliberal turn has been observed as eroding academic freedom and deprofessionalising academics. Early career academics are often described as victims of neoliberalism. In this paper, we take a positive perspective through a deep dive into resilience that enables self-transformation and, potentially, system change. Our paper is situated in the Chinese higher education context where the “up-or-out” system has been put in place, mirroring the neoliberal university at a global range. We — a mid-career researcher and an early career academic — analyse our collective narratives generated through WeChat text and voice message. Drawing insight from Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, our narratives lead to four themes: capital accumulation and self-transformation, shaping the publication habitus, emancipation from symbolic violence, and resilience to symbolic domination. We conclude the paper with a call for sociology of resilience and recommendations for deneoliberalising higher education.

Pierre Bourdieu as I Remember Him

This portrait of Bourdieu's laboratory in the early days describes the impact of the bourdieusian «tribe» on the author's social destiny, especially to his attempt to develop a reflexive political sociology that explores the intertwinement of culture, power, and knowledge. Repeatedly, he depicts himself as an outsider suspended between several (geographical, disciplinary, and intellectual) worlds. Without directly addressing the issue of self-objectivation, the author puts it into practice as sociogenesis of several elements: relationships, collaborations, interests, oppositions/attractions, position-taking, scientific success.

Sketch for a Sociology of Sociological Self-Analyses

This essay analyzes one of the major expressions of the sociological critique of sociological reasoning, the objectivation of the subject of objectivation, who should analyze the sociohistorical conditions of possibility of the very act of objectivation. Though Bourdieu's invitation to a reflexive sociology of sociology has not been widely accepted and put into practice, the authors argue that its actual application actually brings about consistent payoff: this special issue represents but one installment. Reclaiming a place for socio-analysis, this paper highlights how this activity can produce a cognitive difference in the making of sociological research, insofar as its genesis and development are defined by the sharing of a specific thought style, existing within and because of an intersubjective framework.

Merleau-Ponty's Many-Layered Presence in Bourdieu's Thought

Why has Pierre Bourdieu's thought come to matter so much in our time? This paper intends to prove that the answer lies in the (partly concealed) presence of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical tenets in many aspects of Bourdieu's manifold oeuvre. They steer it decisively and, though formerly undetected, give access to their deeper meaning. Besides, most obscurities in Bourdieu's output become dispelled only if we scrutinize its roots in Merleau-Ponty's thought. Accordingly, the thorny Bourdieuan notions of habitus, field, diacritical standpoint, structure of position-takings, cultural capital, scholastic fallacy, or reflexive sociology are to be elucidated with the aid of intellectual tools supplied by Merleau-Ponty, like operant intentionality, embodied significance, the invisible, the pensee de survol or hyperdialectics. We conclude that, at odds with most social theories, Bourdieu's account preserves the existential inscrutability of human demeanour thanks to its Merleau-Pontian ingredients.

Ambivalent complicities and knowledge production: Researching migrant women farmers' reproductive health experiences in the middle belt of Ghana.

Using a critical reflexive process (An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 1992; Theory, Culture & Society, 13, 1996, 17), this article identifies and examines issues of power, complicity and knowledge production as they emerged in the first author's master's research on migrant women farmers' economic and reproductive health experiences in the middle belt of Ghana. We examine the ambivalent positionality of the international graduate student researcher as "other of the other" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30, 2005, 2017, p. 2025), and how diverse fields of power, including the researcher's educational institution and cultural norms regarding gender relations, mediated interactions among various actors in the research process. Specifically, we examine how the student researcher was complicit in reinforcing patriarchal standards, perpetuating western saviourism and committing symbolic violence. Situating these reflexive findings in relation to insights from feminist postcolonial theories, we highlight how power relations, gender and social class informed these ambivalent complicities. Rather than erase/silence these tensions in the research process, we argue that such ambivalences may be an inevitable dimension of transnational knowledge creation, and thus, it is imperative that researchers consider how their ambivalent positionalities and complicities may be navigated and leveraged most productively and with the least harm to research participants.