Social Ontology Research Articles

The frontier factor in the formation of the hero's image in Russian society

The article examines the concept of a hero in relation to the concept of a frontier, which the authors understand as a "contact field", a boundary that connects rather than separates the spatio-temporal field of conjugation of two or more realities. Particular attention is paid to the development of the frontier as a point of assembly and the personality of the hero and the new social normality. The need for a comparative analysis of the concepts of subject, actor, and hero that already exist in sociology is indicated. An attempt is made to differentiate these concepts, the main features of the hero as a total subject are given, the importance of distinguishing between an everyday hero and a "frontier" hero is indicated. The influence of the frontier as a factor in the formation of the hero's image is substantiated based on the materials of an empirical study conducted by the authors of the article in eight Federal Districts of the Russian Federation in 2023 (n = 1350). For this purpose, data are analyzed on a number of open and semi-closed questions depending on the place of residence of the respondents, that is, the territorial factor. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the length of Russia and the diversity of its regions, the frontier status of some of them, provide the corresponding specificity and demand for a hero. Respondents from those subjects of the Russian Federation that currently act as a frontier themselves articulate their idea of a hero and heroism much more clearly. The military hero remains the textbook hero for Russians. A significant part of the independently named heroes are outstanding personalities, primarily of the Soviet era, mainly military leaders, politicians, child heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Everyday workers and laborers - doctors, health workers, volunteers, rescuers, teachers, scientists, etc., which was typical for the Soviet era, are not currently singled out as heroes by respondents. Which leads to the conclusion that the actor of Soviet modernism, which was associated with heroism, was closely associated with the concept of a hero (in particular, labor), is not relevant in the minds of Russians today. Such transformations are associated by the authors with the influence of the situational factor, as well as with the change of the corresponding social ontologies.

Adorno on objects: towards an inclusive social theory

ABSTRACT In this paper, we draw insights from Theodor W. Adorno’s views on objects to demonstrate the relevance of the subject-object-oriented model of social theory. By engaging closely with his notion of the ‘preponderance of the object’, we develop an account of social ontology that blends substantial, relational, and processual ontologies. We highlight the usefulness of Adorno’s social ontology in addressing contemporary social concerns related to subject-object relations, such as the reification of consciousness and objectification. Furthermore, we emphasize its significance in light of distorted subject-object relations. Considering these aspects, we argue that subject-object oriented social theory is more inclusive and relevant than the intersubjective model that emerged after the linguistic turn in Critical Theory.

Экософский взгляд на общество риска и возможности медицины в снижении рисковых последствий

The relevance of the topic is due to the formulation of issues related to the state of modern social reality, the presence of risk in it as one of the essential characteristics. Abandoning the past mechanism of development – tradition as a stable foundation, modern society has acquired the specificity of the absence of a non-stop movement – a transition that does not correlate with the movement from one stage to another, more stable, but represents the continuity of the process. This is a fundamentally new ontology of reality, in which the constancy of its movement, instability create a situation where, as U. Beck says, in the rapidity of change, there is a “collapse of scientific, technical and legal rationality” [3, p. 167], traditionally used as a method of organizing public order. The article updates the Platonic category of metaxy (“Timaeus”) as a characteristic of the dynamics of being, its constant ‘intermediacy’ between the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ while eliminating the stable ‘present’. Modern social reality is a meta-reality, a transition in its infi nity of realization, the consequence of which is the risk and fear of falling into the abyss of baselessness. Risk is a specific characteristic of a social movement in the continuity of transition, when the stability of the present is lost, and the horizon of the future is not visible in traditional logic, which causes existential fear that constantly accompanies a person. ‘Risk Society’ (U. Beck) demanded a new rational ‘arrangement’ (A. Giddens) and a relevant methodology for its construction. The article is devoted to the problem of searching for this methodology. As such, the rationality of the emerging new trend in philosophy – ecosophy – is proposed, which actualizes a holistic view of the world, building on the category of ‘life’ in the unity of its manifestations in nature and culture. The problem is solved by contradiction: on the one hand, the risk is associated with the growth of science, which has historically had a humanistic connotation, on the other hand, its embodiments, being realized today in high technologies, turned out to be turning against man. Contradiction initiates risk. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the rationality of the ecosophical content as a methodology for the study of modern risky social ontology caused by scientific technologies, to argue their impact on human health and to show the possibilities of medicine in solving this problem.

“Members of One Another”: Towards a Kierkegaardian Ecclesiology

Søren Kierkegaard’s theology, notorious for its emphasis on the single individual and her relationship to God, has sometimes given the impression that one should downplay the importance of the corporate body of the Church. Because of his salient emphasis on the individual and her faith, one could be forgiven for thinking Kierkegaard has nothing to teach us about ecclesiology. We disagree. Drawing on the social ontology of Philip Pettit, we argue that because Kierkegaard’s rejection of collectivism has more to do with his affirmation of the individual and their actions before God, holism provides for the possibility of a Kierkegaardian ecclesiology. Such an ecclesiology, we argue, could stress the importance of the single individual before God while giving an account of how the individual’s actions are brought into the body of the Church. Where many ecclesiologies fail to provide a robust account of individual action within the corporate body, a Kierkegaardian ecclesiology can do just that.

Social kind vs. conferralist approaches to social ontology: ‘race’ as a case study

ABSTRACT Philosophers often understand social categories as conferred or as social kinds. The relationship between conferralism and a social kind approach to social ontology remains unclear. Conferralism is often interpreted as a way of understanding the nature of social kinds, rather than as an alternative to a social kind approach. In this paper, I argue that these two approaches are in fact radically different, and I identify the challenges unique to each approach. The social kind approach requires social kinds to be identifiable on the basis of kind-specific social properties or relations while the conferralist approach does not, instead taking institutional classification practices and communal attitudes to be reality-conferring. While these are not mutually exclusive approaches to social ontology – some social categories are conferred and constitute social kinds – they are genuinely different. I use the debate about the existence of social races as a case study to show why it is useful to distinguish between social kind and conferralist approaches.

Beyond Individualism and Holism: Integrated Information Theory as Formal Framework for the Gradation of Social Structure

AbstractIn lieu of the sum-zero scenarios of either wholly individualist or holist depictions of social entities, some social ontologists and philosophers of social science have recently called for gradualist approaches able to account for variances in ontological reducibility between specific instances of social phenomena. The precise formal tools needed for this type of approach are, however, currently lacking. In this paper, I propose a new approach to social ontology that utilizes Integrated Information Theory (IIT) in order to provide a suitable formal language for gradualist descriptions and analyses of social entities. In line with the operational physicalism of IIT, social entities are stipulated as causally irreducible to their parts to the degree that differences are made by and to them over and above the differences made by and to their parts.

Collective Intentionality and the Study of Religion. Social Ontology and Empirical Research, by Andrea Rota

Collective Intentionality and the Study of Religion. Social Ontology and Empirical Research, by Andrea Rota

Migration theory as social theory: From transnational migration to mobile social ontologies

Migration theory <i>as</i> social theory: From transnational migration to mobile social ontologies

A post-Hegelian theory of human rights: beyond recognition and the state

This article develops a post-Hegelian social and political theory of human rights. To do this, it moves past two legacies that can be traced back to Hegel’s philosophy: his theory of recognition and his views about the embeddedness of rights within states. IR often misinterprets Hegel’s recognition theory as applying within a public world of state action. However, Hegel argues that recognition occurs before rather than within a social world. Instead, I show how and why Hegel’s analysis of Sophocles’ play Antigone is a more fruitful starting point for theorising contemporary international practices. I mobilise a Hegelian social ontology of ‘ethical life’ and a post-Hegelian critique of statism and Eurocentrism to argue that human rights should be understood as an independent field of action in which agency is embedded, rather than as a practice that is tied to sovereignty and states. Several conclusions about the ontology and epistemology of human rights stem from this analysis. Human rights practice brings forms of action and obligation into being. It enables collective (not only individual) action. It requires the exercise of humility rather than hubris. Finally, it invites a discussion of how agents can bridge external and internal perspectives to evaluate the actions that seem to be required by their practices. This critical exploration and re-interpretation of Hegel’s early work corrects IR’s tendency to use his later and more statist writings to locate and concretise the grounds for ethics.

Intersectionality of gender and age (‘gender*age’): a critical realist approach to explaining older women’s increased homelessness

ABSTRACT Older single women in Australia are increasingly experiencing homelessness. Age and gender seem inherently related to single older women’s housing crises, but no attempt has been made to account for the causes of their homelessness through an intersectional lens. This article develops a complex and contingent causal explanation of the structures and mechanisms implicated in growing homelessness for this group. We demonstrate an original use of critical realist-informed intersectional analysis which is characterized by stratified social ontology and emergence. We theoretically reframe existing literature to demonstrate how the intersectional causal powers of gender and age (‘gender*age’) discrimination and conventional life course experiences intersect to generate financial precarity for older women. Our causal model explains how economic insecurity, structural and individual contexts, and crisis events interact, challenging older women’s housing security and precipitating first-time homelessness later in life.

The Judgment of the Nations: Structural Sin, Social Ontology, and Social Eschatology

The Judgment of the Nations: Structural Sin, Social Ontology, and Social Eschatology

“Objective Possibility” in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness

Abstract This study explores the pivotal concept of “objective possibility” within Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to “objective possibility” and related terms in essays like “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness,” emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term’s roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber’s methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber’s use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel’s dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action.

К вопросу о линиях интерпретации феномена гражданской войны в античной философии: stasis и bellum civile

The concept of civil war remains relatively underdeveloped given a steadily increasing interest of political philosophers in the study of civil conflicts in general. The multi-layered genealogy of this notion includes elements of significantly different approaches to its definition. The two divergent lines of interpretation of the phenomenon of civil wars can be traced back to the ancient philosophy: the Greek stasis and the Roman bellum civile. In recent years, the concept of stasis is making a comeback to the academic circles due to its use in the works of Nicole Loraux, Giorgio Agamben and a number of other authors. At the same time, the dominant approach to analyzing civil wars is based primarily on their perception in line with the Roman concept, which presupposes a monistic social ontology model and has significant limitations when applied to modern conditions. In the article, the author analyzes the main features of the perception of the phenomenon of civil wars in the ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Based on the texts of Plato and Aristotle, who elaborated the theory of stasis in the most systematic way, the author demonstrates that admitting the possibility to overcome just the extreme external manifestations of stasis (but not to eradicate it altogether) inevitably impacts the evaluation of the importance of pluralism in the life of a political community, the interpretation of the actions of the defeated party and memory politics. Hence, the author analyzes how the perception of a civil conflict as a phenomenon inherent in the life of the polis and, in one form or another, an “inevitable evil”, can again be relevant in the context of the philosophical and political discussions of the 21st century.

Beyond Local Domains: Connective Ontology in (Post-)Cognitive Sociology

Ontology in cognitive science has long been dominated by cognitivism, developing computer science metaphors to position cognition as intrinsic mind-brain information-processing. Contemporary cognitivism hypothesises localised domain-specificity, disaggregating cognition into discrete subtypes, each of which exists in a dedicated brain region. Latterly, peripheral cognitive science scholarships have contested these ideas, cultivating post-cognitivist dispositions with radical ontologies, relocating cognition in active socio-material ecologies. Nonetheless, much cognitive sociology retains cognitivist ontology, treating sociological phenomena as extrinsic constraints that influence the mind-brain’s foundational cognition. I argue that cognitive sociology could fruitfully engage with post-cognitivist science. As an example, I use connective ontology, from the sociology of personal life, to conceptualise cognition as dynamically emergent and vitally animated ecological connective energies. Doing so, I show that post-cognitivism offers routes towards genuine social ontologies of cognition as a sociological matter, moving beyond cognitivism.

Agency in business networks: combining IMP research with a relational sociological perspective to challenge views on sustainability and ethics

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to clarify the ontological assumptions regarding the concept of agency and sociality within business networks in the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group (IMP) research by refining these assumptions with a relational sociological (RS) perspective. This paper reinforces the robustness of the actors-resources-activities (ARA) model with an in-depth investigation of the actor dimension, where local interactions between interdependent individuals play a central role in building common futures within business networks through organisational reflexivity.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper investigates the social ontology of research. It challenges the implicit assumptions of IMP research regarding agency and sociality within business networks with a problematisation strategy (Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011). Combining IMP views on agency with the RS perspective, it sets this combined framework as an alternative for the analysis of sustainability and ethics within business networks.FindingsCombining IMP research and an RS perspective allows us to extend the knowledge of sociality within business networks, highlighting the centrality of meaning sharing in the process of network change. By focusing on symbolic interaction processes, an RS perspective contributes to a deeper theoretical understanding of the relationship between local communication and business network patterns. Combined with an IMP perspective on agency, it provides researchers with an alternative conceptual framework for examining sustainability by considering ethics and leadership dialectically.Research limitations/implicationsRS is still an emerging stream within sociology, characterised by diverse views. Not all relational sociologists, as scientists, feel obliged to engage with sustainability research. Thus, the paper is a two-sided invitation to IMP researchers and relational sociologists to delve into the adaptation processes in business networks in highly uncertain environments.Practical implicationsRS focusing on the centrality of communication in local interactions, business network researchers can show that organisational leaders are not the ones with a charismatic vision isolated from any natural and social environment; rather, they are the people with “the capacity to assist the group to continue acting ethically, creatively and courageously in the unknown” (Stacey,2013).Social implicationsAdopting an RS perspective on agency in business networks can help managers and researchers determine how business networks can be managed in a more sustainable way. Combined with a dialectical and processual understanding of ethics, the IMP-RS perspective emphasises day-to-day local communication practices within and between organisations that challenges microeconomic views on nature, strategy, ethics and leadership. This paper thus places the social at the centre of sustainability approaches.Originality/valueFrom an RS perspective, business networks are analysed as patterns of interactions between many organisations and individuals. The value of this conceptual paper is in showing that change within business networks is negotiated through local interactions and symbolic communication between individuals. Thus, it suggests the need to combine the individual and the organisational levels to analyse agency within business networks and to examine the adaptation of business networks to sustainability.

How do childhood and children's rights mean what they mean? Innovating the debate around the social semantics of childhood and children's rights through an interdisciplinary approach

AbstractThis article discusses children's rights as social semantics, approaching them as a form of self‐description of a paradoxical relationship that has emerged from the late twentieth century within several social systems, a relationship between generational order and children's position as holders of human rights. Charles Taylor's theory on the evolution of the semantics of human value is combined with a wide interdisciplinary array of contributions from Childhood Studies, Social Work, Pedagogy, Studies on Constitutionalism to propose an innovative social ontology of children's rights. Although the UNCRC has been the object of critical scrutiny since the early 1990s, the authors are not aware of any previous attempt to approach children's rights as social semantics in an attempt to illuminate the dynamic and paradoxical coupling within discourses on childhood between a fundamental social process, the reproduction of generational order and a fundamental social institution, human rights as codified in western modernity. The authors argue that while describing a paradoxical coexistence between intergenerational order and human rights, the semantics of children's rights maintains its unity as a cultural form because another semantic distinction, between human rights and personal rights continue to generate social meaning. It is hoped that the scholarly debate will benefit from the contribution of this article to enrich the debate around the social ontology of childhood and children's rights.

Social norms and the dynamics of practices

ABSTRACT I endorse five central themes of Charlotte Witt's Social Goodness: the pervasiveness and irreducibility of social roles and norms; normative externalism; the artisanal model; a richer social ontology; and the possible critical transformation of social norms from within. I reframe these themes within the biological account of the evolution and development of human ways of life in Joseph Rouse's Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction. Witt's social analysis attends to human bodies as loci of artisanal skills and social salience as gendered, sexed, and raced, but not to bodies as vulnerable, dependent organisms in social environments. A broader, biological conception of normativity shifts from Witt's focus on social roles and norms to the dynamics of social practices as shaping people's developmental environments. This more complex account of social dynamics enriches Witt's conservative account of how practices are transmitted and sustained. It thereby surpasses limitations in her account of how hierarchical social norms can be both obligating and open to critical challenge from within. It does so in three ways: by emphasizing normative conflicts within practices, by shifting from individual know-how to discursive practices as loci of artisanal authority, and by an account of power relations as intertwined with biosocial normativity.

A new paradigm in social ontology

A new paradigm in social ontology

Why Metaphysics Matters: The Case of Property Law

Are property rights absolute? This paper attempts to reframe this question by drawing on insights from the field of social ontology. My main claim is that, even if we accept the most extreme view of the absoluteness of property rights, there are some non-normative conceptual limitations to these rights. The conceptual limitations are based on two claims about the nature of property rights and their subject matter, namely objects in the world: (1) property law regulates relations between persons through the use of objects, and not relations between persons and objects; (2) even when owned, objects retain some of their ‘independent’, unowned, existence. Taken together, these claims confine property law to the institutional meaning that is given to objects, which is distinct from their social and natural meanings. Since property law defines objects in a certain way, it makes space for other social considerations but without the need to qualify property rights.

What if Göbekli Tepe was an Open School? A Thought-Provoking Approach to the Genesis of Cultural Revolution

ABSTRACT This pioneering study investigates the transformative shift in the nature of education during the Neolithic revolution, utilising Göbekli Tepe’s role as an archaic open school that attested to this change. This exploration is underpinned by the premise that “if education is a process of acculturation, its origins must be sought in the cultural revolution of humans.” Beyond the conceptual boundaries of the dominant western ontology, the open schooling role of Göbekli Tepe considers indigenous social ontology. In this study, the educational role of Göbekli Tepe has been examined in the symbolism of local culture, its special pilgrimage and storytelling traditions. This study hypothesises that Göbekli Tepe is an archaic open school that was a testament to the cultural revolution of humans.