Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2021.18389
Barış Büyükokutan
{"title":"Sociological Stoicism","authors":"Barış Büyükokutan","doi":"10.1525/cs.2021.18389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2021.18389","url":null,"abstract":"This article initiates a conversation between sociological theory and the contemporary revival of Stoicism. Identifying four problems common to historical and contemporary incarnations of Stoicism and tracing them to their shared individualism, I contend that only a sociological Stoicism is viable. I then sketch this sociological Stoicism by redefining key Stoic terms in the collective register; outlining a Stoic logic of case selection; assessing the fit of redefined Stoic concepts and logic of case selection with Marxian, Weberian, and Bourdieuvian frameworks; and developing a Stoic research agenda. These exercises culminate in the proposal to significantly alter sociology’s methods and epistemology.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126863070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2022.57498
T. Modood, Elisabeth Becker
{"title":"Normative Sociology in the Bristol School of Multiculturalism: An Interview with Tariq Modood","authors":"T. Modood, Elisabeth Becker","doi":"10.1525/cs.2022.57498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2022.57498","url":null,"abstract":"In this interview, Elisabeth Becker interviews Tariq Modood about his understanding of and contribution to normative sociology. Professor Modood describes his personal and professional trajectory, culminating in his leadership of the Bristol School of Multiculturalism. This school unites sociology and political theory to ask pressing questions about British society (and beyond) regarding migration, diversity, and inclusion. In this interview, Professor Modood further draws attention to the need for an explicit “big N” Normative Sociology, where the scholar’s aims for the betterment of society are made explicit and argued for; where subjectivity is seen not as a weakness but as a component for both critiquing and transforming the societies in which we live.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122194250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2022.37887
A. Rajagopal
{"title":"Robert Bellah: A Cold War Sociologist?","authors":"A. Rajagopal","doi":"10.1525/cs.2022.37887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2022.37887","url":null,"abstract":"Comment on Matteo Bortolini’s A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124418294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"THE SECOND CONVIVIALIST MANIFESTO: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World","authors":"Convivialist International","doi":"10.1525/001c.12721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.12721","url":null,"abstract":"As a sequel to the Convivialist Manifesto: A Declaration of Interdependence (2013), The Second Convivialist Manifesto: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World was originally published in French and signed by three hundred intellectuals from thirty-three countries. Convivialism is a broad-based humanist, civic, and political philosophy that spells out the normative principles that sustain the art of living together at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Over and against neoliberalism, productivism, and populism, it values relations of cooperation that allow humans to compete with each other without hubris and violence, by taking care of one another and nature.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124966442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2023.57492
Gunter Weidenhaus
{"title":"Social Space-Time: On the Concept of Social Space-Time and Its Empirical Relevance to Biography","authors":"Gunter Weidenhaus","doi":"10.1525/cs.2023.57492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2023.57492","url":null,"abstract":"Attempts to reconcile space and time from a social-science perspective have recently become more common. This article goes about this task by developing a workable concept of social space-time, focusing on the connections between historicity—the relationship of the past, present, and future as it is constructed in the social sphere—and social constitutions of space such as the home or the nation-state. In the context of an exploratory study within the area of biographic constructions, this article draws upon twenty-four biographical-narrative interviews to reconstruct constitutions of time and space. It will be shown that certain relationships between past, present, and future concur with certain spatial constitutions. Space-time is therefore a concept that enriches empirical and theoretical work in the social sciences. Macrosociological analyses of modernity, of a transition to flexible accumulation, or processes of exclusion can be elucidated by differentiation between the proposed concentric-linear, networked-episodic, and insular-cyclical space-time types.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129900771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2022.32635
K. Quinn
{"title":"The University Library as Bellwether: Examining the Public Role of Higher Education through Listening to the Library","authors":"K. Quinn","doi":"10.1525/cs.2022.32635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2022.32635","url":null,"abstract":"This article engages the university library with live debates concerning the transformation of higher education. Focused within the British context, the article draws together previously distinct literatures from sociology, studies in higher education, and library and information studies to argue that the library represents an untapped lens through which to understand the university, its interface with civil society, and efforts to retain and reenergise its civic role. Beyond being solely diagnostic, the library is introduced as a bellwether—an institution that can also incubate trends towards privatisation and against publicness in higher education. Through exploration of an unusual joint-use public-academic library in Britain which combines academic and public collections, staff, and communities, the article’s analysis highlights both the opportunities that this “disruptive” shared space provides and the challenges posed by such an arrangement. Examples explored include the encroachment of private academic institutions in public spaces, the increasing asymmetry of fortunes between public and academic bodies, and the consequences of new library management technologies on the temporality and integrity of the library, and by consequence, the university.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115813641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2023.74337
Matteo Bortolini
{"title":"In Search of a Schema in a Joyfully Serious Life: Robert Bellah, the Cold War, Psychoanalysis, and Intimate Experimentations","authors":"Matteo Bortolini","doi":"10.1525/cs.2023.74337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2023.74337","url":null,"abstract":"A rejoinder to comments by Amy Borovoy, Chad Alan Goldberg, Arvind Rajagopal, and Joan W. Scott on my book, A Joyfully Serious Man. I begin with a brief narrative of how I came to write the book and how I worked on it with the help of many different people. I then move to the place of psychoanalysis in the book, my analysis of Bellah’s early positioning in Cold War social science, and a few questions regarding American culture, religion, and politics. The article ends with a few remarks on my current research on the life and work of Clifford Geertz.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123882077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2022.37710
A. Borovoy
{"title":"Robert Bellah as Modernization Theorist: Comments on Matteo Bortolini’s A Joyfully Serious Man","authors":"A. Borovoy","doi":"10.1525/cs.2022.37710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2022.37710","url":null,"abstract":"Bellah’s early Japan work was important to his thinking. Reflecting on Bellah’s Japan work offers an interesting window into some of the contributions and limitations of his broader ideas. Putting Bellah’s early work together with his later theories raises questions about the kind of social community that Bellah envisioned in his theories of civil religion and communitarianism.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"412 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123566246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2022.55639
Daniel Chernilo, Sebastian Raza
{"title":"The “Normative Turn” in Sociological Theory: Sociology’s Garden of the Forking Paths","authors":"Daniel Chernilo, Sebastian Raza","doi":"10.1525/cs.2022.55639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2022.55639","url":null,"abstract":"In his “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” Argentinean storyteller Jorge Luis Borges devises an ever-growing maze of diverging and converging paths. While the underlying structure of these paths is the explicit object of his quest, the protagonist becomes increasingly aware that, in fact, his quest mirrors such big questions as the nature of space and time. We use this provocative image to kick off our much more modest quest on the current state of sociological theories of normativity that have become salient in the past three decades. What once seemed to be the specific object of critical theory, as it has constantly shown a special sensibility towards normative issues, is now a pressing theme in various theoretical traditions, and perhaps the very universe in which divergent sociological worlds concatenate with each other. We focus on three traditions that have made clear progress in explicitly analysing what is the normative: Neo-Durkheimianism, Neo-pragmatism, and Critical Realism. We identify their more salient aspects and reflect on their similarities and differences. We conclude that, to all three, normative ideals are congealed in social “facts” that cannot be explained, naturalistically or mechanistically, in causal terms. Equally, they all make apparent the autonomy of normative ideals in the structure of human agency by focusing on different aspects of it. Finally, we reflect on the different temporal dimension on which they focus: spaces of ritualism to past normative commitments (Neo-Durkheimians); spaces of reasons to present problematic events (Neo-pragmatism); and spaces of aspirations to imagined future states (Critical Realism).","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124683662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Civic SociologyPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1525/cs.2023.77386
Saori Murakami
{"title":"The Role of Social Research in Opposing Injustice","authors":"Saori Murakami","doi":"10.1525/cs.2023.77386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/cs.2023.77386","url":null,"abstract":"This study uses a post-disciplinary and synthetic methodology to explore how social research can contribute to helping those struggling against injustice. First, it reviews recent initiatives that have emerged from sociology and moral and political philosophy to reconnect normative inquiry with empirical social science. Second, applying Amartya Sen’s nonideal theory of justice, it brings these diverse initiatives together and develops a systematic proposal for social justice. It proposes that (1) injustice can be reduced through public reasoning in which people exercise practical reason on what constitutes injustice and what actions should be taken to remedy it; (2) all of us are agents of change whose reasoning and action have leverage in reducing injustice; and (3) theoretical concepts invented by academics can move public reasoning towards the reduction of injustice by affording people, including those struggling against injustice, with critical perspectives and discursive resources. Third, to increase the effectiveness of the proposal, it delineates three routes through which academics can contribute to making public reasoning more inclusive, interactive, and iterative: (1) as public intellectuals, academics can disseminate their normative and empirical research to the general public and make public reasoning more interactive; (2) through coalition-building, academics can help marginalised people come up with solutions to the injustices they face and help magnify marginalised people’s voices to influence public reasoning; and (3) through teaching, academics can cultivate normative consciousness amongst students coupled with their habit of developing refined opinions, using impartial spectators, and acknowledging the human rights of different others, all while working towards making universities more inclusive.","PeriodicalId":390930,"journal":{"name":"Civic Sociology","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124627562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}