Social Theorizing Research Articles

Situating Organizational Action: The Relational Sociology of Organizations

This paper advances a relational sociology of organization that seeks to address concerns over how organizational action is understood and situated. The approach outlined here is one which takes ontology seriously and requires transparency and consistency of position. It aims at causal explanation over description and/or prediction and seeks to avoid pure voluntarism or structural determinism in such explanation. We advocate relational analysis that recognizes and engages with connections within and across organization and with wider contexts. We develop this argument by briefly reviewing three promising approaches: relational pragmatism, the social theorizing of Bourdieu and critical realism, highlighting their ontological foundations, some similarities and differences and surfacing some methodological issues. Our purpose is to encourage analysis that explores the connections within and between perspectives and theoretical positions. We conclude that the development of the field of organization theory will benefit from self conscious and reflexive engagement and debate both within and across our various research positions and traditions only if such debates are conducted on the basis of holistic evaluations and interpretations that recognize (and value) difference.

Patterns in the Telling: Single Women's Intimate Relationships with Men

This article explores some ways in which women not living with an intimate partner talk about their relationships with men. Data are considered in relation to social theorising on the changing nature of intimate relationships. The analysis makes use of traditions in narrative analysis and critical discursive psychology to identify some patterns in the telling, including common cultural resources that are drawn on by speakers. Patterned ways of portraying relationships identified in the data discussed here include a self-blame approach in describing extreme behaviour from the man concerned, and a repudiation of any intention of commitment through talk of the positive features of relationships with unavailable men. A further way of talking introduces a ‘new realism’ in which relationships are depicted as right for a time but dispensable when their time is up. The analysis suggests that concepts of individualisation and impermanence in relationships provide new cultural resources that women can draw on in providing a self-narrative. The data demonstrate the detailed rhetorical work involved in producing a positive account of the self as a single woman.

Human nature as behaviour and action in economics and international relations theory

This article traces the current state of dominant theories or international relations (IR), particularly structural realism, liberal theories of preference, and rational choice theory to six foundation assumptions regarding human nature located in the canonical liberal texts from which neoclassical economics also proceeds. These assumptions are deductively and empirically critiques and their limitations for social theorizing are explicated. An alternative view of ‘the human condition’ more fruitful for constructivist theorizing in IR is generated with recourse to the Aristotelian analysis of Hannah Arendt.

Realist social theorising and the emergence of state educational systems

Realist social theorising and the emergence of state educational systems

Realist Social Theorising and the Emergence of State Educational Systems

This article addresses the issue of theory development in critical realist research. It shows how findings that cannot be accounted for by an established critical realist theory pertaining to a domain, so-called anomalies, may be used to elaborate the domain theory and increase its explanatory power. The main resource for such theoretical repairs is the multi-level character of critical realist theories, i.e. specific theories and theories of domains are based in general meta-theoretical models and assumptions. The specific case examined here is the historical development of education in Norway, which deviates from the expectations generated by Archer's domain theory of the emergence of state educational systems. A reformulation of Archer's theory so that it includes two-cycle developmental trajectories as well as one-cycle trajectories, will accommodate the Norwegian findings and increase the theory's explanatory power. This elaboration of the theory can be seen as an example of an epistemological dialectic, partly constituted by cultural syncretism, but more completely understood as the absenting of an absence in the established theory.

Quality at some point became quantity

The 'qualitative' pole of (Q-squared) combined methods has been defined in mainly residual ways as 'non-numerical' or 'noneconomics'. There is need, instead, for a critical social theorization of qualitative methods. Evidence from a development program for chronically poor, tribal, northern Orissa is used to examine the communicative action of 'participatory assessment' (PA). PA assumes that 'group' and 'visual' synergies can challenge the power relations that restrict communication and poor people's emancipation. The authors' ethnographies show that participants sequestered information from PA village seminars. Although well trained, the PA organizers increasingly ignored cultural context and substituted universalized techniques that produced only quantities of noncontextualized attitudes. The core PA routines therefore gave misleading results; they mistakenly replaced substantive accounts of communication in relation to lifeworlds with abstract seminar techniques. To obtain more reliable results, methods of 'embedded' economic anthropology were used instead to assess poverty.

Vortical postmodern ethnography: introducing a complexity approach to systemic social theorizing

AbstractThis paper reflects on theory evolution from the perspective of considering the role that complexity science might have in social theorizing and research. We assume that just as human society is complex, dynamic, interdependent, and with future states emerging with reference to complex histories, so too are human explanations and theories. With reference to a complexity approach to postmodern ethnography, that of vortical postmodern ethnography, we make manifest the dynamic and interdependent nature of theory building, with human actor/observers and discourse evolution. We suggest that a complexity perspective on social research and theorizing may be most valuable for its role in bringing about alternative descriptions, rather than promoting certain interventions. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Agency, actors and change in a child-focused future: ‘Path dependency’ problematised

This article calls into question the assumptions of leading welfare state theorists who rely on path dependency approaches and ‘permanent austerity’ theses to inform their analyses. In contrast, drawing on public policy approaches that acknowledge paradigm shifts, and feminist state and social movement theorisation, we examine the state/civil society interrelations that have helped to bring about changes in state forms in Canada and Britain. We argue that state/civil society interaction explains the novel patterns that are taking shape in Canada and Britain with the materialisation of a ‘social investment perspective’ and child welfare reform strategy. We examine not only new institutions and new policies, but also new meanings and new roles for different groups.

An Ontology for the Ethnographic Analysis of Social Processes: Extending the Extended-Case Method

The central concern of this article is the relationship between ethnography and social theory. With the help of 'consequent processu alism', a social ontology that centers on the co-constitution of people, cultural forms, social relations, and the built environment, this essay makes an argument for what should be at the core of social theorizing: the principles underpinning the dynamics of processes in the nexus between actions and reactions, igniting social formation in webbed flows of effects across time and space. The article shows how conse quent processualism is able to implode time-honored, reifying concep tual dichotomies, such as micro-macro, event-structure, agency-social structure, to open new vistas on the social. Building on consequent processualism, the essay argues on the one hand for the significance of theory for the practice of ethnography in identifying and delimiting fruitful field sites. Conversely, it advocates ethnography as the method of choice for developing social theory.

Personal Mobility: A Corporeal Dimension of Transnationalisation. The Case of Long-Distance Travel from Sweden

Mobility is a key concept within recent social theorising on globalisation, transnationalisation of social relations, and new divisions of society. Mobility growth is also central to issues of global warming and the need for sustainable development. The aim of this paper is to elucidate empirically some properties of recent developments in international mobility. A theoretically informed understanding of changing patterns of long-distance travel is briefly outlined. This understanding is confronted with empirical findings concerning the actual development of international travel from Sweden during the 1990s. The findings confirm expected trends of further increasing intensity, extensity, and velocity in long-distance mobility. A tendency towards globalisation is observed, though an intraregional transnationalisation is the dominant process at work. It is concluded that an increasing short-term flexibilisation in people's use of time and space is a more important driving force behind the transnationalisation of mobility, than is the geographical extension of more enduring social relations. Influencing factors behind the social division of mobility are addressed by identifying the hypermobile segment of the population. Implications for the wider issues of globalisation and environmental sustainability are discussed.

Mobilizing Geography: Locating Space In Social Movement Theory

ion that exists outside of human agency, but as a manifestation and response to the Mobilizing Geography 231 practices of human agents. Certainly, as Chuck Tilly has argued, the state is an ensemble of “coercion wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories” (as quoted in Steinmetz 1999: 8).” But it is also a cultural and social practice that reflects the contentious politics of social movement actors as well as bureaucrats, citizens, soldiers, and legislators, among any number of others. Take Guidry’s piece in this special issue as an example: not only does he show how social movements are the product of uneven representations of space, he also probes how different movements construct the state (differently) and how the state, in turn, (differently) constructs those movements. As well, Carter, Wolford, Bandy, and Bickham Mendez all stress how human agents in specific spatial and temporal contexts―through processes of identity formation and meaning making―use symbolic practices to construct, challenge and shape the state in small and large ways. Thus, all these articles make the point that the state itself is a space of struggle through which and against which social movements articulate their aims. In the four articles of this special issue, as well as in the substantive introduction to this volume by Deborah Martin and Byron Miller, the argument for taking space seriously is carefully made and compellingly justified. More important, however, than the establishment of the centrality of space to social movement theory, the articles in this volume reveal that opportunities for counter-hegemonic politics abound, and how they can be effectively capitalized upon in order to move toward a more just society: global, local or otherwise. It is my sincere hope that the articles in this special issue truly do change the terrain upon which social movement theorizing and empirical investigation proceeds, for they promise an exciting new era of social movement analysis and the possibility of significantly changing the worlds in which we live.

Putting self psychology to good use: When social and clinical psychologists unite.

The subareas of psychology often fail to share with one another their research and theorizing. This article attempts to redress this lack of communication as it pertains to social psychological theorizing and research on self-motives. The article starts with a review of the social psychological literature surrounding people’s needs for positivity and verification, followed by a discussion of how to integrate these seemingly incompatible literatures. The article then highlights how these self-motives likely play a role in the psychotherapy enterprise and suggests ways in which therapists might use this information. By bridging the gap between the social and clinical literatures in this way, the authors anticipate that both fields will progress more productively toward their respective goals.

Coping With Social Capital? The Cultural Economy of Tourism in The North

This article engages critically with recent social theorising about local development, with illustrative examples from Icelandic peripheral settings. People in resource–based localities have attempted to cope with the transformations of late modernity in various ways. Such coping strategies consist of reflexive social practices which simultaneously produce and make use of social capital. A view of social capital as embedded in practice is advanced: instead of considering it as being a quantitatively measurable property of individuals, communities or even nations, we suggest a qualitative, interactionist approach. Seen in this way, the analytical concepts of coping and social capital are helpful for understanding current trends from resource–based towards cultural economies. Tourism is one such trajectory which has become particularly significant in Iceland. Examples of coping and social capital are provided in the article, obtained from the authors’ studies of tourist operators in two Icelandic localities.

The 'Mini-Renaissance' in Marxist Educational Sociology: A critique

This paper argues that the recent 'mini-renaissance' in Marxist educational sociology as propounded in particular by Rikowski (1996, 1997) is fatally flawed, not only denying the sui generis (autonomous) properties of the educational system but also precluding practical social theorising per se . The reason for this centres on the adoption of a universal internal relations social ontology, which results in the reduction of concrete social reality to the narrow abstraction of the omnipresent 'Capital Relation'. At the same time, such theorising remains conspicuously silent on the issue of the feasible alternatives to capitalism implied by the (albeit flawed) explanatory critiques of such recent Marxist theorising within the sociology of education.

The Disavowal of the Social in the American Reception of Durkheim

In the last decade or more, the central texts of structural theorizing – Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber – have become part of a seemingly outdated problematic of class, history and society, and this has led to the erosion of some of the most central concepts of sociological theory. Terms such as the ‘social’ and the ‘structural’ no longer seem able to identify materially existing collectivities, their mode of existence or their specific system of social relations. The central objective of this article is to examine some of the claims put forward by postmodern theorists (Baudrillard, 1983; Deleuze, 1979; Rose, 1996) concerning the rise of new spatializations and the era of the ‘post-social’ by a return to the inaugural texts of Émile Durkheim (1938, 1951, 1964, 1968). My purpose is to see whether or not Durkheim broke with the language of totality that is often ascribed to him by postmodern theorists and to assess to what extent the claims of poststructuralist theorizing are based both on a misreading of the textsof structural theory (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, etc.) and on a historical tendency to disavow the social. It is argued that the conception of the social put forward by 19th-century social theorizing has not been well understood nor readily accepted either as an independent domain of treatment or as a subject matter differentiated from other subject matters. The reception texts of the Chicago school of sociology in the 1920s (Park and Burgess, 1921) and of the Harvard theoryschool of the 1930s (Parsons, 1968; Sorokin, 1928) are examined in order to discern whether these schools accepted the social as an object of theoretical attention or whether they in fact excluded it from the disciplinary matrix as they formed their own theoretical frameworks. Some textual evidence is drawn upon to support the thesis that the social became an object of theoretic disavowal during the time when Durkheim's fundamental sociological writings were being received in America.

Working in teams: negative effects on organisational performance in policing

This study tested predictions derived from social psychological theorising on the deindividuation phenomenon concerning the effects of working alone or collectively on the quality of outcomes of police patrolling activity. Police officers (n = 1,118) reported the resistance experienced when they last carried out each of 12 patrol activities. Officer age, gender, rank and experience did not predict resistance experienced. Increased resistance was associated with the more active afternoon and night shifts, the presence of larger numbers of civilians, and the two (cf. one) officer patrol mode. Although the resistance experienced by officers working collectively in part reflected the influence of work shift on patrol mode, there were substantial proportions of variance in resistance for most patrol activities that could not be explained by the shift variable. The influence of collective patrolling on resistance was consistent with theorising about the origins of deindividuated behaviour, and highlighted the importance of broad conceptualisations of organisational effectiveness when evaluating individual and collective functioning.

The Disavowal of the Social in the American Reception of Durkheim

In the last decade or more, the central texts of structural theorizing – Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber – have become part of a seemingly outdated problematic of class, history and society, and this has led to the erosion of some of the most central concepts of sociological theory. Terms such as the ‘social’ and the ‘structural’ no longer seem able to identify materially existing collectivities, their mode of existence or their specific system of social relations. The central objective of this article is to examine some of the claims put forward by postmodern theorists (Baudrillard, 1983; Deleuze, 1979; Rose, 1996) concerning the rise of new spatializations and the era of the ‘post-social’ by a return to the inaugural texts of Émile Durkheim (1938, 1951, 1964, 1968). My purpose is to see whether or not Durkheim broke with the language of totality that is often ascribed to him by postmodern theorists and to assess to what extent the claims of poststructuralist theorizing are based both on a misreading of the textsof structural theory (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, etc.) and on a historical tendency to disavow the social. It is argued that the conception of the social put forward by 19th-century social theorizing has not been well understood nor readily accepted either as an independent domain of treatment or as a subject matter differentiated from other subject matters. The reception texts of the Chicago school of sociology in the 1920s (Park and Burgess, 1921) and of the Harvard theoryschool of the 1930s (Parsons, 1968; Sorokin, 1928) are examined in order to discern whether these schools accepted the social as an object of theoretical attention or whether they in fact excluded it from the disciplinary matrix as they formed their own theoretical frameworks. Some textual evidence is drawn upon to support the thesis that the social became an object of theoretic disavowal during the time when Durkheim's fundamental sociological writings were being received in America.

Disability and the Open City

For at least three decades, the issue of physical accessibility has been a focus of analysis amongst some spatial scientists, including geographers, urban planners and architects. Whilst such 'conventional' access studies have assumed an important role as policy evaluation/ critique, their theoretical significance has been extremely limited. The understanding of accessibility, and the highly contested set of policy fields that regulates this, would be deepened if a wider range of socio-political theory was used to examine these issues. This paper contributes to the social theorisation of access by critically exploring how the 'reflexive modernisation' thesis of Ulrich Beck might be applied to the geographical understanding of disablement. The paper demonstrates how Beck's theoretical framework can be used to enrich understanding of the genesis and mediation of inaccessibility.

Social perceptions of cancer and their impacts: implications for nursing practice arising from the literature.

Social perceptions of cancer and their impacts: implications for nursing practice arising from the literature At the millennium cancer still holds a special mystique and is imbued with socio-cultural meanings, which extend far beyond the rational, scientific and biological facts of the disease. Excessive fear and dread may cause family and friends to display avoidance or overprotective behaviours to the ill person, who may subsequently perceive dissatisfaction with social support. Drawing on a literature review this paper explores the impact of cancer on social relationships. Interpersonal strain in relationship is often explained in the stigmatization of the illness and this concept is explored through contemporary social theorizing. These findings have direct implications for nursing practice where the goal of care is to enhance the support relationship.

East Asia: Prospects for the New Decade

An analysis of contemporary dynamics of change within East Asia, cast in terms of the resources of the classical European tradition of social theorizing, suggests that three intermeshing logics of change are shaping the fundamental structural underpinnings of current events: the long-established drive for industrial-capitalist modernity, the now familiar concern for regional interchanges and the very recent unexpected episode of the Asian financial crisis. Developments within the region will involve, crucially: (a) Japan, where one can expect few novel initiatives; (b) China, where one might expect processes of reform to continue; (c) the NIEs, where there is likely to be deepening interest in the region; and (d) the ASEAN states, where there would probably be a greater concern for developments within the wider East Asian region. Overall, the regional states are likely to continue to develop in line with specific historically established logics of change. Introduction It can be argued that there are diverse ways in which the social world might be constituted, and if we grant this point then there are two immediate consequences. First, the global system which we inhabit is given to us in terms of the conceptual machineries which we deploy (we have no direct, unequivocal access to reality), and this being the case, we can assert that a necessary condition of scholarship is reflexive embedding in the processes which theorizing would grasp. Put another way, we have to make clear where we stand and for whom we argue (and in the author's case, the approach adopted derives from the classical European tradition of social theory). Secondly, it is appropriate to acknowledge that the global system is home to diverse forms of life. It is in the light of these broad intellectual commitments that this article will consider how theorists working within or with reference to the classical European tradition of social theorizing should read and react to recent changes within the global sy stem, and how they relate to likely patterns of change in East Asia over the next decade. The classical European tradition of social theorizing can be characterized in terms of its historical occasion, substantive preoccupations, and formal character. The historical occasion can be found in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century concerns of intellectuals to grasp self-consciously the patterns of change enfolding and running through the societies in which they inhabited; in brief, to theorize the process, in historical sociological terms, of the shift to the modern world. [1] In substantive terms, the central preoccupation is with the analysis of complex change, that is, the ways in which various agent groups have read and reacted to enfolding structural circumstances in the uneven and episodic historical process of the ongoing construction of the modern world of industrial-capitalism (in all its diverse forms). The formal character of the classical European tradition is interpretive, [2] critical [3] and dialogic. [4] And, finally, it can be compared with more familiar contemporary ways i n which the nature and role of the social sciences is understood; thus, the preference for a spread of restricted technical professional disciplinary spheres oriented to the knowledge of the market-place is rejected in favour of routinely inter-disciplinary work oriented to the encouragement of discourse within the public sphere. [5] The tradition is quite diverse. [6] There are a variety of national traditions in Europe and each has had its own preoccupations and typical relations with the central axes of social power in the state, market, and polity. It would also be true to say that the years following the end of World War II saw a period when the influence of the United States was strong. However, the strength of that particular influence waned with the emergence of political and intellectual confusions within the United States in the decade of the 1960s. …