Sociological Claims Research Articles

The secret and The Circle: Georg Simmel’s social theory and Dave Eggers’ dystopian fiction

This article considers Dave Eggers’ 2013 dystopian novel The Circle, which critically explores digital surveillance, alongside Georg Simmel’s social-theoretical writings on the secret, social distance and proximity, and the intersection of social circles. The article shows how Simmel’s social theory illuminates important aspects of secrecy and surveillance in The Circle, including the secret’s constitutive role in individuality and social relations, and allows one to reframe the estranging effect of certain dystopias in terms of Simmelian strangerhood, which is based on the paradoxical unity of closeness and remoteness in social-spatial relations. Conversely, The Circle in certain respects pushes beyond Simmel’s social theory by using literary devices to critically explore social subjectivity and by highlighting elements of 21st century life that challenge or complicate Simmel’s sociological claims. Especially notable in this respect are The Circle’s insights into the affective intimacies between people and their personal technologies that shape our digital social practices. By bringing Simmel’s social theory and The Circle into productive dialogue, this article lays the groundwork for an approach to analysing dystopia that more fully appreciates the genre’s sociological import – including how at least some dystopias implicitly engage in social theorising – than prevailing, literary-formalist approaches to the study of speculative fiction.

The Extended Computational Case Method: A Framework for Research Design

This paper considers the adoption of computational techniques within research designs modeled after the extended case method. Echoing calls to augment the power of contemporary researchers through the adoption of computational text analysis methods, we offer a framework for thinking about how such techniques can be integrated into quasi-ethnographic workflows to address broad, structural sociological claims. We focus, in particular, on how this adoption of novel forms of evidence impacts corpus design and interpretation (which we tie to matters of casing), theoretical elaboration (which we associate to moving empirical claims across scales and empirical domains), and verification (which we see as a process of reflexive scaffolding of theoretical claims). We provide an example of the use of this framework through a study of the marketization of social scientific knowledge in the United Kingdom.

The Geo-Ecological Turn in Sociology and its Implications for the Sociology of the Arts

Accelerating climate change has set in motion a broad change in beliefs about human life that is affecting the social sciences and humanities (SSH). A deeper understanding of the social causes and consequences of climate change is evolving in sociology, yet some of the discipline’s subfields have not responded to climate change. Is this because climate change is perceived to be irrelevant or are scholars suppressing new beliefs that could disrupt the norms of their field? The sociology of the arts provides an illustrative case. This subfield has historically ignored environmental factors, but there is mounting pressure for correcting this oversight and rethinking the beliefs and norms of the field. This article argues that climate change is relevant to the sociology of the arts and that this subfield can become more aligned with the geo-ecological turn in sociology and the SSH. This turn is part of a wider epochal and existential transformation in public consciousness in response to broad changes in society and nature. Changing beliefs about the arts are therefore not explained by endogenous dynamics in the arts field. The article provides a meta-analysis of the geo-ecological turn in sociology and in interdisciplinary arts and cultural research where pioneering arguments have emerged. The analysis uses theory of disciplinary transformation in the sociology of science to analyze largely implicit sociological claims for a transformation of ‘normal science’ beliefs about (1) aesthetic exceptionalism, illustrated by a new conception of music as a study object, and (2) the role of the arts in economic growth. Some implications for the sociology of the arts are considered.

Social Interest, Linguistic Indifférence

Based on the human interests underlying sociolinguistic description and interpretation, the author traces the epistemological imperatives of the study of syntactic variation through data and method to the theoretical preoccupation with form-function polyvalence. The ultimate locus of all syntactic or sociological claims of a theoretical or methodological nature derives from the communicative intentions of a speaker at the moment in dicourse where more than one referentially or functionally equivalent structure is accessible. We situate this moment in a social scientific critique of linguistic ideologies.

Girls bite back and act in self-defence: Nurse versus patient

Abstract My troubled informant was born twice: first as a naughty little boy, then as a kind 20-something girl. And she is now a flawless-looking nurse. Research addressing ethical issues that involve transgender personnel is scarce. Arising from a large ethnographic study in a clinical setting in Europe, this article reports on a case in which patient and nurse enter a complicated dynamic of aggression. The patient assaulted the nurse. But the nurse, in a reflex reaction, hit back at the patient. The analysis does not absolve her from the guilt. However, it suggests that the case may offer important nuances that deserve especial consideration when discussing this new topical arena. Sociological claims of emotional alienation in health organisations have, in fact, significance in this discussion. Moreover, the legal aftermaths may not be as straightforward as they may seem. The article proposes that the topic merits further problematisation, and indeed a specific approach to workplace violence more generally.

Social Ontology De-dramatized

The article responds to Richard Lauer’s (2019) “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” The article concurs that “social ontology matters” for the conduct of research and theory in social science. It argues, however, that neither of the interpretations of the status of social ontology offered by Lauer is satisfactory (either apriori philosophical realism or pragmatist anti-realism). The article argues for a naturalized, fallibilist, and realist interpretation of the claims of social ontology and presents the field of social ontology as the most abstract edge of social-science theorizing, subject to broad empirical constraints. The approach taken is anti-foundationalist in both epistemology and metaphysics. Ontological theorizing is part of the extended scientific enterprise of understanding the social world. Claims about the nature of the social world are not different in kind from more specific sociological claims about social class or individual rationality, to be justified ultimately by the coherence and explanatory success of the theories they help to create. At the same time, it is justified to treat the claims of social ontology as provisionally true, which supports a realist interpretation of the findings of social ontology.

Radical Orthodoxy on Catholicism, Protestantism and Liberalism/Liberality: On the Use of Historical Narratives and Quantitative Methods in Political Theology

AbstractPolitical theology assumes or depends, implicitly or explicitly, on historical narratives and empirical claims. For theologians making historical, socio‐cultural and economic claims an interdisciplinary use of several different methods is helpful, including a theologically and philosophically informed combination of historical narratives with social and economic quantitative methods. This argument is fleshed out by a critical analysis of historical and sociological claims about Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Protestantism in relation to liberalism and liberality, which are central to the argument of John Milbank’s and Adrian Pabst’s book The Politics of Virtue. They find the roots of an increasingly untenable abstract atomistic liberalism both in late medieval and Protestant (especially Calvinist) theology as well as in the dissenting nonconforming traditions that worked for the disestablishment of the Church. This very disestablishment is part of what creates modern liberalism. This article both sketches a partly alternative history to the one Milbank and Pabst provide, pointing to the role of creative minorities in certain dissenting Protestant churches and movements for the emergence of the type of liberality Milbank and Pabst defend, and tests these claims against quantitative social science studies on democracy, social trust, and corruption.

The Multiverse: What Philosophers and Theologians Get Wrong

ABSTRACTThe multiverse hypothesis has drawn tremendous attention recently from philosophers and theologians. Some of their arguments about it rest on sociological claims regarding the beliefs and motivations of cosmologists, others on metaphysical claims regarding the nature of universes. There is no survey evidence supporting these claims. To fill this evidential gap, a survey was conducted of a large, representative sample of cosmologists. Thematically, three questions about the multiverse hypothesis were explored: whether cosmologists regard it as fully scientific, what motivates cosmologists to explore it, and what the nature of a universe is. The results are presented and discussed.

Generic Social Processes: Reimagining a Conceptual Schema for Grounded Theory in the Contemporary Era

ABSTRACTGrounded theory (GT) has gone through a number of changes since Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss’s seminal introduction to the tradition. Newer constructivist versions of GT allow for pre-formed theoretical and conceptual strategies to guide data collection, for the idea that knowledge should emerge only inductively from the field is no longer seen as tenable. Within this context, we present Robert Prus’s “generic social processes” framework as a set of conceptual tools especially useful in guiding constructivist GT. Yet this framework has been challenged in light of contemporary debates on the epistemological status of generalized sociological claims, the ontological nature of the social world, and the importance of explanatory knowledge. These debates lead us to consider new adaptions to this now-classic schema of generic social processes with an eye to the future of GT and a more conceptually rich ethnography.

“I’m Not Spanish, I’m from Spain”: Spaniards’ Bifurcated Ethnicity and the Boundaries of Whiteness and Hispanic Panethnic Identity

This study counters potentially premature demographic and sociological claims of a large-scale Hispanic transition into mainstream whiteness. Via in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of recently arrived Spanish immigrants in the United States, it presents a distinctive shift in American categorization logic, whereby race and ethnicity switch in order of everyday importance. Despite Spanish immigrants’ direct links to Europe and few structural social boundaries between them and mainstream U.S. whites, their everyday experience is of a largely “symbolic whiteness” that is subservient to the more consequential and essentialist Hispanic panethnic identity. Forced to maneuver this unique “bifurcated ethnicity,” Spaniards highlight a theoretically important deviation from the established ethnic options for European coethnics in the United States. Overall, Spaniards’ ethnoracial adaptations and their identity vary by institutional sites, by social settings, and along gender lines. Their ethnic bifurcation brings into question the overall logic and stability of the U.S. Hispanic/white boundaries.

Evaluating Distal and Proximal Explanations for Withdrawal: A Rejoinder to Varnum and Kwon's "The Ecology of Withdrawal".

In their 2016 commentary on our theorizing about how youth withdrawal from economic and social participation in Japanese society (i.e., NEET and Hikikomori phenomena) stems from generational inequality of economic opportunities, Varnum and Kwon correctly point out that our explanation for withdrawal is yet untested. They then offered an alternative, evolutionary psychological explanation for withdrawal in which they claim that in resource-rich ecologies like Japan, the option to withdraw from participating in society is a possible life strategy, a strategy that would be much more costly in resource-poor ecologies. While we agree with this premise, we argue that this distal explanatory framework, at least in its current form, has limits in reconciling some of the more recent cross-cultural observations, as well as well-established sociological claims about the causes of withdrawal. Thus we argue that much work remains in refining and expanding the explanatory power of more distal explanations on the issue of withdrawal. Until then, the more proximal and culture-specific explanations are probably the useful and meaningful explanations for the withdrawal phenomenon.

Kultura mezi materialitou a diskursem: případ Higgsova bosonu a „božské částice“

The article discusses the neglect that cultural sociology pays to the sciences and technology.Even though the “strong program” in cultural sociology claims that cultural meanings exist in every socialfact, its research focuses mainly on culture in a narrow sense, e.g. ethics, aesthetics, politics, memory, religionetc. I overcome this shortcoming by development of two approaches: 1) ethnography of a scientific facilitybased on science and technology studies (STS); and 2) cultural-sociological analysis of symbols, discoursesand narratives related to the research of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. Re-interpretingethnographic studies conducted at CERN and sociological research focused on quantum physics, the articledemonstrates that media and popular-cultural discourses on the Higgs boson are tightly related to its materialaspects. While the strong program traditionally presumes the arbitrariness of symbolic structures, the“iconic turn” in cultural sociology stresses the importance of the aesthetic material surface in the resultingmeaning. Conceiving the Higgs boson as a “secular icon”, we can see that the practically oriented actions ofresearchers at CERN relate to cultural meanings that reach far beyond the “laboratory” of quantum physics.

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'Doing good by proxy': human-animal kinship and the 'donation' of canine blood.

This article demonstrates the relevance of animals to medical sociology by arguing that pet owners’ accounts of veterinary decision‐making can highlight key sociological themes which are important to both human and animal health. Based on semi‐structured interviews, the article argues that interspecies ‘kinship’ allows for the extension of sociological claims regarding altruism, self‐interest and mutuality from human blood donation to companion animal blood ‘donation’. Furthermore, this study extends sociological understanding of the human‐animal bond by showing how the dog's status as kin meant they were expected to donate blood, and that the act of donation itself represents an important opportunity for family ‘display’. However, owners who do not or cannot donate blood themselves describe pet blood donation as an opportunity to lessen associated feelings of guilt or obligation through ‘doing good by proxy’. These findings raise critical sociological and ethical questions concerning the risks and benefits of donation, and for how we understand third‐party decision making. Finally, the article argues for the close entanglement of human and animal health, and concludes that sociologists of health and medicine should explore the radical possibility that decision‐making in healthcare more generally might be influenced by experiences at the veterinary clinic, and vice versa. (A Virtual of this paper can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_979cmCmR9rLrKuD7z0ycA)

Co je dnes v sociologii obhajitelné? Prezentismus, historická vize a proč je sociologie užitečná

In recent years, sociology in Britain – and in national contexts influenced by British sociology – has been diagnosed by various parties as suffering from a wide range of ailments. These forms of selfcriticism become ever more acute in terms of their potential effects as huge transformations in university funding regimes are brought to bear on the social sciences. But none of these critiques engages satisfactorily with what is a much more foundational and serious set of problems, namely the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production. Sociology claims to know the world around it, but in Britain today much sociology seriously fails in this regard, because it operates with radically curtailed understandings of the long-term historical forces which made the social conditions it purports to analyse. A sophisticated understanding of the contemporary world is made possible only by an equally sophisticated understanding of very long-term historical processes, precisely the sort of vision that mainstream British sociology has lacked for at least the last two decades. This paper identifies the reasons for the development of this situation and the consequences it has for the nature of sociology’s knowledge production, for its self-understanding, for its claims to comprehend the contemporary world, and for its apparent social “usefulness”. A markedly more selfaware and historically-sensitive sociology is proposed as the answer to the pressing question of what aspects of sociology should be defended in the turbulent context of British higher education today.

Our Stories, Our Companions: A Conversation with Arthur W. Frank

Arthur W. Frank is professor of sociology at the University of Calgary. His publications include The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics and The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live, both published by the University of Chicago Press, as well as At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (Houghton Mifflin) and Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-narratology (University of Chicago Press). Dr. Frank has been honored with the Natalie Davis Spingarn Writer's Award from the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (Canada) and the Abbyann Lynch Medal for Bioethics from the Royal Society of Canada. He is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Hastings Center. The following is a redacted transcript of a telephone interview that took place on September 19, 2013.Caren S. Neile: Your work is a potent expression of sociology's claims on narrative and story. I'd like to begin with some of the issues you raised in your most recent book, Letting Stories Breathe. Could you tell me what your experience and thinking were that led you to that book?Arthur W. Frank: I worked on Letting Stories Breathe for a long time. I was first invited to give workshops on narrative analysis back around the year 2000 and spent the next ten years offering half- or full-day, and sometimes two-day, workshops all over the world. During this time, I was constantly revising my notes. Those workshops were the big influence for the book. And so the readers I had foremost in mind while writing it were researchers who wanted to use narrative in studying whatever they were working on. Most of the people I was talking to during that decade were doing some kind of health research, collecting stories that generally had to do with health, either on the side of the health-care worker or that of the ill person.The problem I found in giving those workshops was distinguishing narrative from more general discourse analysis. Thinking through what makes an analysis a narrative rather than discourse analysis led me to realize that in the center of it was stories. There is a significant difference between what's useful to say about discourse and what there is to say about stories.Also, as I've read over the years what I often find lacking in books about stories are the stories. I wanted to write a book where stories themselves would carry the argument as much as possible. There are parts of Letting Stories Breathe where I succeed more and parts where I succeed less, but it was important to me. By endeavoring to place stories in the foreground and my comments in the background, I'm trying to trust both stories and storytellers to teach us what stories do.CN: There are so many different ways of distinguishing between story and narrative. What are your definitions of these vexed terms?AF: I think about the distinction between story and narrative in terms of a Venn diagram. That is to say, there's a certain area of overlap, where you can legitimately use the words interchangeably. It's not that I myself am always able to maintain a strict difference; sometimes it just doesn't matter. But there are also the outer areas of the diagram where the two don't overlap. For me, the distinction goes back to classic, perhaps dated, linguistics of Noam Chomsky and Ferdinand de Saussure. Chomsky distinguishes between competence and performance. Competence is the sum of ever ything that a speaker is able to say, while performance is an actual speech act. For de Saussure, la langue is the theoretical sum of possibilities for speaking, while la parole is the empirical occurrence of people actually speaking.In my usage, narrative is on the side of competence or la langue, that is, general types of stories available as cultural resources for storytellers. So we would speak of Cinderella narratives-that is, a type of story in which someone who is oppressed gets a lucky break, is elevated, and things work out wonderfully-or we would talk about progress narratives or narratives of death and regeneration. …

What is Worth Defending in Sociology Today? Presentism, Historical Vision and the Uses of Sociology

In recent years, sociology in Britain – and in national contexts influenced by British sociology – has been diagnosed by various parties as suffering from a wide range of ailments. These forms of self-criticism become ever more acute in terms of their potential effects as huge transformations in university funding regimes are brought to bear on the social sciences. But none of these critiques engages satisfactorily with what is a much more foundational and serious set of problems, namely the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production. Sociology claims to know the world around it, but in Britain today much sociology seriously fails in this regard, because it operates with radically curtailed understandings of the long-term historical forces which made the social conditions it purports to analyse. A sophisticated understanding of the contemporary world is made possible only by an equally sophisticated understanding of very long-term historical processes, precisely the sort of vision that mainstream British sociology has lacked for at least the last two decades. This paper identifies the reasons for the development of this situation and the consequences it has for the nature of sociology’s knowledge production, for its self-understanding, for its claims to comprehend the contemporary world, and for its apparent social ‘usefulness’. A markedly more self-aware and historically-sensitive sociology is proposed as the answer to the pressing question of what aspects of sociology should be defended in the turbulent context of British higher education today.

The Implications of Social Neuroscience for Expectation States Theories

AbstractWe review recent findings from the social neuroscience literature that links status differentiation between individuals to neurological processes, and draw out the implications of those findings for expectation states theories, including its dominant theory of status‐organizing processes – Status Characteristics Theory. Our underlying assumption and implicit argument is that social neuroscience research is useful for both bolstering and corroborating some core sociological claims. In addition, it sheds light on some of the ongoing theoretical debates within sociology. We highlight and discuss the following four social neuroscience findings: 1) Neural activity varies depending on whether an individual is interacting with someone of a lower, equal, or higher status; 2) There is an interplay between status and affect such that status processes may promote the control of emotional reactions; 3) Both men and women are neurologically attuned to high status opposite sex conspecifics; and, 4) Status differences are processed in the same region of the brain as numerical or size differences, and this region is responsible for the coding of information along continuous dimensions. The implications of these points are discussed with respect to sociological theories.

Fascism, capitalism, modernity

In this article I respond to the important questions raised by Roger Griffin and David D. Roberts by asserting the following points. First, that there is no justification to the position that the historical function of fascism was to establish the political hegemony of finance capital, as Marxist-Leninist scholars have maintained without providing a shred of evidence in support of their position. On the contrary, fascism was an epochal phenomenon which occured on several continents and had features which point to a declaration of war against bourgeois society, its power structures, its values and its way of life. It was a revolt generated by disgust for a world dominated by those whom Hitler called ‘the worshippers of Mammon’. Second, that fascism was not at all an alternative modernity, but a violent and radical reaction which rejected all the values and institutions of the modern world, from individual freedom to the rights of man and citizen, from pluralist democracy to secularization. Third, that the history of fascism, like the history of communism, has shown that ideas are no mere fantasmagorical reflexes of the socioeconomic structure, as Marxist sociology claims. This was demonstrated by its political ideology, which was intent on revolutionizing the foundations of society and producing a new man, diametrically opposed to the ‘bourgeois’.

Power and truth

In the literature, the power debate is divided between modern and postmodern positions. The former hold that power and truth are opposites, while the latter view them as mutually constitutive. These debates mix epistemological, normative and sociological claims. Using classical sociological methods, strict criteria for valid functional explanations are set out and the relationship between power and truth is explained in these terms. It is argued that agents use truth to create local social capital for themselves, which has the unintended functional effect of reinforcing the effectiveness and stability of social systems. This entails an account of authority as a performative act that meets with a felicitous reaction by others.