Theoretical Repertoire Research Articles

Modes of existence, capitalism, and lived socio-ecological struggles: Whither actor-network theory in a world in crisis?

In response to the forum article ‘What Next for Actor-Network Theory?’, this piece takes up the suggestion that a fruitful way forward for actor-network theory (ANT) would be to engage with ideas ‘originating from elsewhere’, such as from other theoretical traditions. Examining this, I suggest that the version of ANT brought into such dialogue matters, and that – contrary to the suggestion of the forum article – Latour's late ‘modes of existence’ project is not the most conducive for this purpose. I then assess the prospects for a productive cross-fertilisation between a less meta-ontological articulation of ANT and other theoretical repertoires, identifying an obstacle to this in the tendency of ANT to use other traditions of social thought largely as a foil against which to define itself, which mitigates against proper engagement with the strengths of those traditions. Taking a lead from the examples discussed in the forum article, I flesh this out by highlighting some of the shortcomings of ANT, relative to political ecology for instance, as a way of understanding socio-ecological relations and conflicts, in part because of its habitual disdain for certain sorts of ‘grand abstractions’, in particular, ‘capitalism’. I argue conversely that such abstractions not only speak to the lived realities of historically embedded structural violence and dispossession at the heart of socio-ecological struggles, but are crucial for situating people's lives in the context of wider relations and processes, something one might well deem a key purpose of sociology.

The World Paradigm: A New Proposal for Sociology

In this article, I advance the formulation of a paradigm whose components have arisen inorganically in the sociological field in the Western Hemisphere since the beginning of the 21st century. This intellectual corpus, which I call the “World Paradigm” (WP), contains a scientific device structured on the basis of the dialectic between three principles: globalization, localization and historicization. The WP also has a critical and a political device, which, activated by the scientific device, would make it possible to recreate a dynamic designed to renew sociology’s commitment to social change. I present the central elements comprising the WP, distinguishing them from the levers supporting the already consolidated modern and postmodern paradigms. These systemic structures create both enduring patterns of inequality and state systems of classification and can raise questions about the people whom the state classifies into the categories we use. I conclude with a brief analysis of the benefits that could arise from expanding our theoretical repertoires through the inclusion of knowledge produced in the Global South.

Foreign languages in advertising: Theoretical implications for language-related IB research

AbstractGiven the multilingual nature of global business, language influences international business (IB) in almost all areas. IB scholars have studied the complex influence of language with manifold theoretical lenses, but have not systematically integrated linguistic theories. Aiming to broaden IB’s theoretical repertoire, we draw on a field that has integrated a rich array of linguistic theories with business perspectives: research on foreign languages in advertising. We review the theories linguists and advertising scholars have applied to their joint topic and apply content analysis to organize them in three theory clusters: ‘language as a symbol’, ‘language in the mind’, and ‘language as means of accommodation’. These theoretical lenses provide novel insights into the meanings and mechanisms of language, which open new avenues to scrutinize the role of language in IB. For example, theories on language as a symbol may add new perspectives to research on foreignness in IB or to emerging markets research. Theories on language in the mind can explain hurdles to the strategic use of language in foreign locations and support a more sophisticated view of translation in IB. Theories on language as a means of accommodation can advance research on cross-border legitimacy and on countercultural practices in IB.

From Silence to Noise – The Politics of the Other in Organization Theory

Building on the work of Rancière, this paper theorizes otherness in organization. Extant research primarily understands the Other as a subject silenced by the voices of the One. The underlying assumption is that albeit silent, the Other is still perceived as a subject able to articulate him-/herself in intelligible ways to the One. But what happens when the Other is not even perceived as a subject part of the community of human speech? We introduce the concept of noise to understand such otherness that has remained theoretically neglected and empirically understudied so far. We develop how affect plays a significant role for how the position of Other as noise is produced and overcome – something that we term miscounting and recounting. The paper extends the theoretical repertoire of organizational scholarship by developing the notion of the Other as noise, the role of affect in struggles over otherness and the significance of in/equality enacted in practice.

Shaping In-Destination Group Decision-Making: The Sociomateriality of Smartphones

In-destination travel decisions exist due to uncertainties after arrival and the flexibility of leisure travel. Concurrently, smartphone use encourages instant information searching and communication, which promotes in-destination decision-making and plan changes. However, previous studies have provided a limited understanding of in-destination decisions, particularly when travel companions are involved. This study thus adopted sociomateriality as a theoretical tool to offer a sociotechnical perspective in examining the interactions between travelers and their smartphones in an in-destination group decision-making context. We identified three communication patterns in group decision-making during trips and four features of smartphone sociomateriality: knowledgeability, thriftiness, referenceability, and negotiability. This study responds to recent calls to extend the theoretical repertoire of information technology and tourism research, and to conduct more empirical studies on tourists’ in-destination behaviors in the mobile Internet age.

State Categories, Bureaucracies of Displacement, and Possibilities from the Margins.

In this presidential address, I argue for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through classification systems based on rules and regulations that reflect powerful interests and ideologies, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. I propose adopting a critical perspective when using formalized categories in our work, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that engender both enduring patterns of inequality and state classification systems, and reframe questions about the people the state sorts into the categories we use. I end with a brief discussion of the benefits that can accrue from expanding our theoretical repertoires by including knowledge produced in the Global South.

Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators.

Character backgrounds are one of many elements players use to customize their protagonists in fantasy computer role-playing games. By documenting the narrative trappings, mechanical benefits, and hierarchical availability of character backgrounds in Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001) and Dragon Age: Origins (2009), this paper considers how real-world socioeconomic class markers and racial stereotypes have been repeatedly associated with fictitious races such as orcs, dwarves, and elves. Class is an understudied axis of identity in media studies and this research scrutinizes how developers construct socioeconomic class, particularly through character-creator interfaces. We begin by building a theoretical repertoire for studying identity in digital game interfaces while also scrutinizing long-established discourses of race and gender in the fantasy genre. We then analyze the hierarchies embedded in both games' character creators, connecting them with broader gameplay and narrative themes and contextualizing them in established media stereotypes and existing scholarship.

Translation, hegemony and accounting: A critical research framework with an illustration from the IFRS context

• Translation is, in many ways, crucial for accounting. • However, approaches to translation have not been critically examined. • This paper introduces a critical research framework from Translation Studies. • The framework focuses on the conflict between hegemonic and non-hegemonic. • The framework helps escape limitations of technically oriented translation research. Translation research in accounting has in the past decades recognized the significance of translation for international accounting communication, but only recently started to discuss the relevance and legitimacy of the approaches in which translation is used and studied. Generally, translation in accounting has been seen as a technically challenging task that serves an assumedly neutral functional purpose. This perception is problematic in that it neglects the multifaceted cultural, political and societal implications of translation. In order to expand the theoretical repertoire of translation research in accounting, this paper introduces a critical lens that questions the seemingly neutral use of translation in various contexts. Drawing on the influential work of translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, it is argued that translation both reveals and factors in intercultural hegemonies, imbalances and asymmetries. To explore the relevance of Venuti’s theorizing for accounting, the context of IFRS translation is examined. Attempting to become a global institution across cultures and languages, the IFRS indeed depend on translation in their diffusion. The IFRS context is, however, embedded in current linguistic and cultural hegemonies: the dominant position of the English language and the canonical role of Anglo-American accounting. Combining a critical theoretical conceptualization and empirical data from the translation work of Finnish-language IFRS, this paper illustrates how translation in accounting is not a technical exercise but can entail linguistic and cultural conflicts between dominant and marginal(ized) concepts, traditions and values. Above all, this paper shows how applying a different theoretical lens to translation can yield critical insights.

Ideologies, Power and the Politics of Punishment: The Case of the British Conservative Party

AbstractRecent scholarship has underscored the limitations of a theoretical repertoire that reduces the politics of punishment to debates over punitiveness, neoliberalism or penal exceptionalism. In this paper I argue that greater understanding of the dynamic interplay between ideologies and power can provide a richer account of the complex and contradictory landscapes of contemporary penal politics. I seek to show that political parties occupy a prominent position within representative systems of government and this mediating role, at the intersection between ideology and power, is closely associated with the production of penal policy outcomes. Reflecting upon the recent history of the British Conservative Party, I conclude that the politics of punishment is shaped, not only by inter-party competition (and consensus), but the dynamics of intra-party conflict.

Global Religious History

Abstract Understandings of religion have been fundamentally transformed since the nineteenth century. The respective contradictions, ambiguities, continuities, and ruptures can be most comprehensively grasped when viewed against the background of global entanglements. For this purpose, the approach of global religious history proposes a range of theoretical and methodological tools. Its theoretical repertoire is largely informed by a critical engagement with poststructuralist epistemology and postcolonial perspectives embedded in a consistent genealogical approach. At the outset, it aims at bridging divisions, including those between postcolonial and global history, between disciplines such as religious studies and history, as well as between different area studies. This implies a theoretically robust reflexion of the question of what global entanglements mean in global religious history, along with the question of how to distinguish global religious history from approaches usually qualified by the prefix trans as, for example, in “transregional.” In this introduction, we offer an in-depth discussion of the theoretical foundations and methodological implications of global religious history.

International rituals: An analytical framework and its theoretical repertoires

AbstractThe performance of ritual and the ritualisation of performance are the two main theoretical repertoires of ritual study in international politics and beyond. However, they also escalate tensions between those who insist on ritual's ability to operate by virtue of participants’ presence and those who believe that global networks of media call for a representational turn, which must tie participants and audiences across borders. Should we fail to understand how these distinct theoretical repertoires interact, it would be difficult to study international ritual, identify its functions, and trace its effects. Anchored in the sociology of ‘social occasions’, this article weaves ritual's patterns, properties, and resources into a coherent analytical framework. The framework enables us to better to grasp how actors move between/within different worlds (ritual and performance) and to what effects. The comparative study of two post-terrorism ritual occasions (the 2011 Rose March in Oslo and the 2015 Republican Marches in France) illustrates the usefulness of this theoretical proposition and its related framework.

A very Nordic set of concerns?

This article identifies visionary circumspection as a conceptual vector running through Nordic urban research – a diverse enterprise with robust empirical outputs, but relatively little premium placed on the generation of urban theory. To foster new cross-regional conversations that can bolster the theoretical fecundity of Nordic urban studies, the author overviews key themes in the region’s urban research portfolio – well-being, diversification and socio-spatial transformations, governance and development models, and sustainable futures – and then delineates sites in other world regions that are grappling with related topics but sometimes with different approaches or conceptualizations. By situating Nordic urban research vis-a-vis these disparate sites and theoretical repertoires, the article aims to leverage Nordic self-regard and open up discussions that could enable more ambitious theoretical engagements between the region’s cities and the rest of the world.

Disability studies in academic production: a cartography of the global arena

What would be the place of disability studies in contemporary scientific practice? To what extent is the circulation of investigations that question ableist ontologies and position disability as a relevant social marker for understanding the different forms of erasure and social oppression? From a mapping of 2,825 documents registered in the Scopus and Web of Science databases between the years 1956 and 2020, this article seeks to describe the general trends in production and the intellectual structure of disability studies over the past seven decades. The intention is to offer an updated map of the leading publication outlets, authors, theoretical repertoires, heuristic approaches and political subjects that compete for visibility in the international scenario of knowledge production regarding disability. This investigation suggests that disability is an analytical and political category that participate in the co-production of different models of interpretation and construction of the lives of people with disabilities.

Estudos de imaginário do jornalismo no Brasil = Imaginary studies of journalism in Brazil

This article intends to examine, in a documented and systematized way, the main contributions of scholars of the imaginary to research in journalism in Brazil, since the mid-1990s. It begins by presenting the idea of Juremir Machado da Silva (journalism as an operation of information and mythologization), followed by Vera Franca (journalism as a form of sociability), both postgraduates under Michel Maffesoli's guidance, in France. Then, the theses of Gislene Silva (journalism as a mythic-symbolic manifestation) and Ana Tais Barros (journalism as a potential generator of myths) are discussed, authors also affiliated with the French tradition initiated by Gilbert Durand, in the 1960s. The investigation seeks to examine the specific findings of each research, while promoting comparison between them, in order to highlight both the similarities and the differences in the way of viewing the news media. The strongest conclusion is that, despite the theoretical repertoire shared by Brazilian academics in the area — notably around the anthropological theory of the imaginary and the sociology of everyday life — their journalistic analyzes show conflicting results on the phenomenon in contemporary times.

Auto-organização social no mundo do trabalho e produção: notas para uma crítica à economia solidária

O debate contemporâneo sobre experiências alternativas de organização do trabalho e da produção se encontra no Brasil dominado pela chamada “economia solidária”. Disseminadamente conhecidas como “cooperativas” ou “fábricas e empresas recuperadas”, muitas dessas experiências evidentemente não são novas, remontando às primeiras práticas de resistência e de auto-organização social protagonizadas pela classe trabalhadora. Ao mesmo tempo, sua condição e potencial de “alternativa” societária em variadas circunstâncias são minimizados e mesmo colocados em xeque pelo modo como estas se inserem no âmbito de relações de subordinação e dependência com agências, mecanismos e operadores do Estado e do mercado capitalista. O artigo em questão pretende apresentar um suscinto balanço crítico do repertório teórico mobilizado por expoentes da economia solidária à luz de perspectivas oriundas do campo anarquista e marxista heterodoxo, relacionando-o com a proposta da “economia participativa” (PARECON). Dessa forma, espera-se contribuir com uma crítica a este marco teórico através da recuperação do sentido antissistêmico do conceito de autogestão, subsidiando a reflexão e análise relativas a tais experiências

Políticas de vida nas margens: resistência e reexistência ante as desigualdades e o racismo nada cordial das cenas urbanas brasileiras

Este artigo pretende discutir os modos literários de resistência às desigualdades sociais. Para tanto se dispõe a analisar dois contos Espiral e O ônibus branco escritos respectivamente por Geovani Martins e Ferrez. Estes dois autores contemporâneos expressam nas suas produções literárias o cotidiano de desigualdade e racismo encarado por jovens periféricos dos grandes centros urbanos. A leitura proposta se alimenta do repertório teórico das Ciências Sociais, articulando e aproximando os dois escritos ao mesmo tempo que evoca categorias de análise eficazes para compreensão do fenômeno social apresentado e descrito poeticamente. Nosso entendimento é que mais do que uma mera tendência estética, a escritura periférica é ela própria um ato de resistência, uma forma artística que não hesita em apontar suas armas para as persistentes desigualdades e para o racismo estrutural que marcam o Brasil contemporâneo.

Societal resilience – Clarifying the concept and upscaling the scope

This reflection piece explores societal resilience as an emerging field in safety science research. Based on the growing interest for safety in a societal context – and the natural continuation of the expanding scope of each of the phases in the ‘three ages of safety’ – societal resilience is portrayed as a fourth age of safety. While safety science through the decades has developed steadily, providing many different, complementary perspectives, theories and models for human, technical and organisational aspects of safety and resilience, the research on societal safety and resilience is less mature, and does not yet enjoy the same theoretical repertoire as organisational safety. Second, the reflection piece explores the possibilities for approaching resilience as a systemic trait. While there is a tradition to address resilience at the scale of individuals/teams and organisations, resilience – with its root metaphors derived from ecological systems – could also be addressed at the societal or global scale, and this reflection piece explores the translation of resilience from the organisational to the systemic realm. In doing so, the dominating scope of critical infrastructures in contemporary societal safety research is challenged. It is argued that societal resilience research should go beyond critical infrastructures and the national/inter-organisational scope, to explore the shaping of risks in the Anthropocene, including such risks as climate change and global migration, across networks of livelihood-, scientific- and political practices.

Explorando el campo de conocimiento del video participativo. Un recorrido por las principales aportaciones teórico-prácticas

-

The Adaptive Roles of Positive and Negative Emotions in Organizational Insiders’ Security-Based Precaution Taking

Protecting organizational information is a top priority for most firms. This reality, coupled with the fact that organizational insiders control much of their organizations’ valuable information, has led both researchers and practitioners to acknowledge the importance of insiders’ behavior for information security. Until recently, researchers have employed only a few theories to understand these influences, and this has generated calls for a broadened theoretical repertoire. Given this opportunity, we incorporate the previously developed framework of emotions and add the broaden-and-build theory (BBT) to understand the influence of discrete positive and negative emotions on insiders’ precaution-taking activities. Our findings demonstrate that the relationship between both positive and negative emotions and precaution taking is mediated by insiders’ (1) psychological capital (PsyCap), a higher-order, work-related construct of positive psychological resource capabilities; and (2) psychological distancing, a coping mechanism characterized by insiders’ attempts to detach themselves psychologically from a situation. By considering these factors, our model explains 32% of the variance in insiders’ precaution taking in organizations. Researchers and practitioners can use these findings to develop information-security programs that more effectively utilize emotional appeals to promote insiders’ precaution taking.

A contribuição do ensino de ética no desenvolvimento da competência moral de discentes em administração pública

A esfera pública é permeada por dilemas morais, cujas soluções não necessariamente estão expressas em códigos de conduta. Assim, é imprescindível que o gestor público possua capacidade para lidar com situações complexas. A competência moral é uma habilidade que pode auxiliar o administrador a lidar com essas situações, sendo que tal competência é passível de ser influenciada por processos educacionais. O objetivo deste estudo foi o de analisar de que modo o ensino de ética pode contribuir para o desenvolvimento da competência moral. Para tanto, analisou-se a influência da disciplina de ética em Administração Pública na competência moral de discentes, que foi auferida pelo Teste de Competência Moral (MCT). Constatou-se, a partir da etapa quantitativa desta pesquisa, que a disciplina referida não influenciou a competência moral dos discentes. Por outro lado, percebeu-se, a partir de dados qualitativos, que o repertório teórico sobre temas relacionados à ética foi impactado positivamente, como resultado do ensino das teorias morais, que serviram de base para a formulação de argumentos. A fim de efetivamente elevar a competência moral de discentes, sugere-se que a disciplina de ética seja ministrada a partir de uma metodologia ativa de ensino, por meio da inclusão de debates sobre dilemas morais em sala de aula.