Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealing the dynamic, embodied conservation of belief in the temporality of practice, (...) hysteresis appears when environmental contexts change in a way that leaves actors without an ontologically complicit relationship to institutions as scaffolds of action. Under these circumstances, a past-inflected reflexiveness replaces a forward-inflecting practical belief in the actor's temporal relation to the world. Drawing from a variety of historical case studies, we locate hysteresis in routine disjunctures between the temporality of practice and the temporality of environments. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of reflexiveness produced the hysteresis effect, each with a unique dispositional impact on actors and extensions to group-level phenomena. We conclude the article by emphasizing the non-eliminativist relationship between belief as disposition and belief as representation. (shrink)

Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealing the dynamic, embodied conservation of belief in the temporality of practice, (...) hysteresis appears when environmental contexts change in a way that leaves actors without an ontologically complicit relationship to institutions as scaffolds of action. Under these circumstances, a past-inflected reflexiveness replaces a forward-inflecting practical belief in the actor's temporal relation to the world. Drawing from a variety of historical case studies, we locate hysteresis in routine disjunctures between the temporality of practice and the temporality of environments. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of reflexiveness produced the hysteresis effect, each with a unique dispositional impact on actors and extensions to group-level phenomena. We conclude the article by emphasizing the non-eliminativist relationship between belief as disposition and belief as representation. (shrink)

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 (...) rendered interpretable, rather, to the extent persons orient themselves to possibilities and probabilities, which remain real but unknowable. In this framework, interpretation and probability are allies, not antagonists. Weber’s systematic use of the probabilistic notion of Chance as a central resource for concept formation and sociological explanation seriously challenges current understandings of probability as a purely statistical, atheoretical concern. We outline the conceptual difference it makes when basic categories of sociology are understood as rooted in Chance, and we point to the larger implications of Weber’s probabilism for contemporary debates around issues of prediction, action, and interpretation. (shrink)

Sociologists generally agree that history affects or conditions moral belief, but the relationship is still only vaguely understood. Using a case study of the appearance of social justice beliefs in Victorian-era Britain, this article develops an explanation of the link between history and morality by applying field theory to capture the historical genesis of a field. A moral way of evaluating poverty and inequality developed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century in Britain, with a trajectory extending back to (...) Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and moving forward to the Fabians, the Settlement Movement, and other social reformers at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing from field theory, I argue that social justice beliefs emerged during this time through the genesis of moral universalism as a distinct mode of experience. Several recognizable moral beliefs appeared in the process, including “equality of opportunity,” “equality of reward,” “character,” and “effort,” “ability,” and “duty” as forms of merit (among others). I argue for treating moral beliefs as historical and relational entities that are situated and dated by the conditions marking their appearance in a field. As I conclude, this lends the sociology of morality to a critical moral reflexivity instead of moral relativism or moral realism. (shrink)

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and the use of (...) explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes. (shrink)

This article uses participant objectivation in sociology and philosophy as two knowledge fields to provide a reflexive comparison of their synced field effect in historical circumstances. Drawing on the philosopher and historian of science Gaston Bachelard, I theorize fielded knowledge as a social relation that combines the prior presence of folk knowledge with a socioanalytic exchange between field and folk that includes positions of either defense, replacement or critique. A comparison of post-Wittgenstein Anglophone philosophy and post-sixties American sociology describes their (...) mutual confrontation with folk psychology as an “epistemological obstacle” that generates a remarkable concern with action as a position-taking on the folk relation. A reflexive objectivation of folk knowledge is therefore necessary for a revised understanding of action that correlates with the distinction of sociology’s knowledge capital and how it fares as an explanatory resource in competitive circumstances. The article concludes by leveraging the synced field effect even further to make a recommendation that sociologists can increase the distinction of their knowledge capital by producing discourse that can recognize, legitimate and officialize experiences that otherwise remain obscure, nameless or impossible within the bounded universe of folk psychology. (shrink)

The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the family resemblance between the two, and takes apart that family resemblance to (...) reveal differences. The ingredients of practice theory (historical inheritance, embodiment, cognitive limits, loose coupling between conscious thought and action) are in many cases also distinctive traits of conservative thought. But the similarity is deceptive. Practice theory and conservative thought constitute two distinct interpretations of practice, two disparate endeavours for connecting human science with political strategy, and two different formulas for opposing theory and practice. The present study will argue that this is primarily a political opposition for conservative thought, while it is a human-scientific opposition for practice theory. Conservative thought is initially political and then human-scientific; practice theory is initially human-scientific and then political. This article advocates for practice theory against conservative thought as differently amended versions of a politics that recognizes human finitude. (shrink)

Interest in postmodernity has stagnated over the past decade and has come to be partially replaced by a concern with globalization. While the two terms are often considered to be divergent there is continuity as theoretical discourse transfers from one to the other. In what follows, we first distill the heuristic models employed by various knowledge-geographical traditions of social thought in conceptualizing postmodernism. We then transpose these models into recent debates on globalization. Globalization theory has become the provenance of British (...) and American theorists because of a contiguity that extends back to a propitious model employed to understand postmodernism. Globalization theory in France and Germany are largely non-existent or tangential for similar reasons that find opposite tendencies. The spatial and temporal aspect inherent to both the modern and postmodern indicates that both already present a stance on globalization. Among the key factors predicting the fortunes of heuristic models is the continuation of classical theoretical concerns in the present situation of globalization. Post-classical tendencies in heuristic models indicate that more cloistered postmodern concerns do not transfer well to globalization. Those heuristic models that conceive of a postmodernist break are those whose application to present instantiations of globalization is subsequently limited. (shrink)

Public health is currently evolving, expanding, and reinforcing itself as a governance project in which health authorities’ concerns meet and blend with epidemiology and civil engineering. Rarely, however, are those concerns found worthy of examination, at least not to account for the multiplying involvements of public health, its ability to find political life in things, and its many translations. The shape of public health is dictated as much by its matters of concern as it is by biopolitical and brute matters (...) of fact. This article presents a genealogy of public health in Victorian England between 1834 and 1848 in order to glimpse the matters of concern around which it stabilized. The political medicine that preceded public health holds the clue in its assertion of life as a form of worth, as prominent a criterion for the assessment of sociomaterial arrangements as profitability or efficiency. This article describes public health as an ensemble presence, a unique gathering, in which political will follows medical diagnosis, and life is worth at least as much as money. (shrink)

This article attempts a self-clarification of practice theory by providing a genetic history of ‘practice’ as a figure in social thought. This locates two different versions of practice theory in Marx’s ‘practical question’ and Hobbes’ ‘Kingdom of Darkness’, respectively, and shows how both historically comprise a practical critique of testing reason. This article examines how the practical critique performs a dialectic of politicization and depoliticization that finds family resemblances and paradoxical alignments between the political left and right. The article evaluates (...) the strength of the practical critique and asks whether it results in a power politics with both left and right versions. (shrink)