Sociological Theory

ISSN: 0735-2751

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  1.  28
    Contentious Tactics as Jazz Performances: A Pragmatist Approach to the Study of Repertoire Change.Tomás Gold - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (3):249-271.
    The metaphor of “repertoire” is increasingly used in the study of contention to convey the fact that people act collectively through a limited set of cultural routines. Yet despite its broad adoption, the term is loosely defined and rarely subject to empirical verification. This has led to unfruitful scholarly disputes, with most perspectives assuming that change in repertoires is independent from how actors perform them. Drawing a parallel between the dynamics of repertoire performance and jazz improvisation, I propose a pragmatist (...)
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  2.  19
    A Sociological Perspective on the Experience of Contention.Johan Gøtzsche-Astrup - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (3):224-248.
    Contention in the form of protests, riots, and direct action is a central political practice in contemporary democracies. It is also a staple of sociological analysis, after slowly crystallizing as a distinct object of analysis from the 1970s onward. Lately, however, it has become unclear what this distinctiveness consists of and how it may help guide studies of contention: What distinguishes contention from other practices? I argue that contention can be seen as an ontologically distinctive experience. What sets this experience (...)
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  3.  29
    Theorizing from the Margins: A Tribute to Lewis and Rose Laub Coser.Kimberly Kay Hoang - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (3):203-223.
    This article is an adaptation of the sixteenth Lewis A. Coser lecture, given virtually in 2021 for the American Sociological Association Meetings. In this article, I pay tribute to Lewis and Rose Laub Coser by engaging with their past work, which inspired a theoretical provocation about what it means to theorize from the margins. I specifically address the questions of who gets to be a theorist and what kinds of theoretical work get marginalized. I outline the process of epistemic oppression (...)
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  4.  29
    Varieties of Misrecognition: Connecting Bourdieu and Fanon toward an Analysis of Racialized Islamic Fields.Z. Fareen Parvez - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (3):272-296.
    This article explains variations in misrecognition of domination among the racialized subaltern. I draw on a comparative analysis of the fields of Islam in France and India, informed by the work of Bourdieu and Fanon. I first argue that Bourdieu’s concept of the religious field provides a crucial reframing of the Islamic field whereby religious judgments represent classification struggles over legitimate Islam. Second, I approach misrecognition in the field by distinguishing the field’s discourse from its doxa. I argue that misrecognition (...)
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  5.  31
    Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context.Gordon Brett - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):179-201.
    Sociologists increasingly draw on dual-process models of cognition to account for the ways context, cognition, and action interrelate. Drawing from 40 interviews with improvisers and observations from improvisational theater, I find that dual-process model scholarship is limited in three respects: It does not consider how cognition operates in situations where order and disruption are concurrent, it fails to realize there is interindividual variation in cognitive processing, and it underestimates the creativity emerging through automatic processes. Interactions in improv contain elements of (...)
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  6.  49
    How Can Theories Represent Social Phenomena?Jan A. Fuhse - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):99-123.
    Discussions in sociological theory often focus on ontological questions on the nature of social reality. Against the underlying epistemological realism, I argue for a constructivist notion of theory: Theories are webs of concepts that we use to guide empirical observations and to make sense of them. We cannot know the real features of the social world, only what our theoretical perspectives make us see. Theories therefore represent social phenomena by highlighting certain features and relating them in a logical system. In (...)
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  7.  31
    Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship.Areej Sabbagh-Khoury - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):151-178.
    This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons—Palestinians who received Israeli citizenship even as they (...)
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  8.  41
    Chance, Orientation, and Interpretation: Max Weber’s Neglected Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory.Michael Strand & Omar Lizardo - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):124-150.
    The image of Max Weber as an “interpretivist” cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber’s sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber’s late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of the orders sociologists seek to understand is not chaos. Action is (...)
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  9.  31
    Aesthetic Style: How Material Objects Structure an Institutional Field.Gary J. Adler, Daniel DellaPosta & Jane Lankes - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (1):51-81.
    How does material culture matter for institutions? Material objects are increasingly prominent in sociological research, but current studies offer limited insight for how material objects matter to institutional processes. We build on sociological insights to theorize aesthetic style, a shared pattern of material object presence and usage among a cluster of organizations in an institutional field. We use formal relational methods and a survey of material objects from religious congregations to uncover the aesthetic styles that are part of the “logics (...)
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  10.  47
    Inequality without Groups: Contemporary Theories of Categories, Intersectional Typicality, and the Disaggregation of Difference.Ellis P. Monk - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (1):3-27.
    The study of social inequality and stratification has long been at the core of sociology and the social sciences. In this article, I argue that certain tendencies have become entrenched in our dominant paradigm that leave many researchers pursuing coarse-grained analyses of how difference relates to inequality. Centrally, despite the importance of categories and categorization for how researchers study social inequality, contemporary theories of categories are poorly integrated into conventional research. I contend that the widespread and often unquestioned use of (...)
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  11.  42
    Can Habitus Explain Individual Particularities? Critically Appreciating the Operationalization of Relational Logic in Field Theory.Sourabh Singh - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (1):28-50.
    Bourdieu’s concept of habitus claims to solve the problem of the individual/society duality. However, the concept of habitus appears to be inadequate to explain the idiosyncratic features of individual field actors’ practices. In this article, I argue that to explain the particularity of individual habitus, we must appreciate the operationalization of relational logic in field theory. I further argue that individuals learn to prediscursively identify certain types of practices as meaningful for a given field position because of their embodied experiences (...)
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