{"title":"Modernity and the Politics of Newness: Unraveling New Time in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1968","authors":"Xiaohong Xu, I. Reed","doi":"10.1177/07352751231183721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231183721","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops a new approach to the sociology of time by examining how the contentious politics of newness shapes modern revolutionary politics. It goes beyond the prevalent dualistic conception of social time and develops a tripartite model by distinguishing two kinds of unordinary time—carnival time and new time—that are conflated in the dualistic conception. We analyze the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CCR) as a crucial case for understanding the importance of new time to modern revolutionary politics. The effort to forge an ongoing, widely experienced “new time” created a series of contradictions and difficulties in the CCR regarding the power dynamics and boundaries of the experiences of radical newness. The eventual failure of the Jacobin politics of the CCR conditioned the post-CCR suspicion of mass movements and political changes. More broadly, the politics of the interpretation of time provides a different angle on the sociology of political modernity.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"229 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46320548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Charismatic Mimicry: Innovation and Imitation in the Case of Volodymyr Zelensky","authors":"P. Joosse, Dominik Želinský","doi":"10.1177/07352751231174436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231174436","url":null,"abstract":"Moving beyond frameworks of charisma scholarship that stress antagonism between charisma and establishment society, this article discerns and theoretically accounts for more mutualistic forms of influence between charismatic leaders and elite representatives of traditional or rational-legal institutions. Specifically, we combine contemporary work in the cultural sociology of charisma with Girard’s notion of mimesis to provide a theory of charismatic mimicry; we explain situations where, rather than opposing the charismatic leader, elites align themselves with the new sources of legitimacy being proffered by the charismatic leader. At times, these institutional elites even co-opt new charismatic protocols into their own vocabularies of leadership. We demonstrate the usefulness of our model for interpreting the case of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his encounters with European leaders.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"201 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48553887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exit, Voice, and Gender","authors":"Rogers Brubaker","doi":"10.1177/07352751231169955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231169955","url":null,"abstract":"Albert Hirschman’s exit-voice paradigm provides a useful lens for analyzing the current neo-categorical phase of gender politics in which attention has shifted from the content of the binary gender categories to the structure of the gender category system. During this phase of categorical destabilization, exit from originally assigned categories—in bureaucratically recorded, statistically reported, and informally negotiated forms—has become culturally legitimate and institutionally supported in a broadening range of milieus. Hirschman’s paradigm brings into focus the selectivity of exit and its potentially—and paradoxically—stabilizing consequences for the traditional gender order. The increased ease and pronounced selectivity of exit can channel dissatisfaction with gender arrangements into exit rather than voice or—as exit may itself be a form of voice—into individualized, psychologically driven forms of voice. And the selective exit of gender-nonconforming individuals from originally assigned categories can reinforce the stereotypical associations of these categories with gender conformity.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"154 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48345642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unmasked: A History of the Individualization of Risk","authors":"Greta R. Krippner","doi":"10.1177/07352751231169012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231169012","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I explore how risk transformed from being understood as a property of groups to being understood as a property of individuals by examining the history of public and private insurance in the United States. Rather than locate changes in how risk is managed in our society in the “great risk shift” that occurred with the emergence of neoliberalism, I suggest the individualization of risk in recent decades is only the latest instantiation of a recurrent conflict between security and freedom that has marked the evolution of capitalism. Seen from this longer historical perspective, the “personal responsibility revolution” appears not as the handiwork of neoliberal policymakers but, rather, as the unintended result of social movements that contested discriminatory practices in insurance markets. Thus, paradoxically, my account suggests that struggles against discrimination seeded the individualization of risk that is now the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"83 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44046475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Soils of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories of Environmental Racialization","authors":"Ankit Bhardwaj","doi":"10.1177/07352751231164999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231164999","url":null,"abstract":"Sociologists have canonized W.E.B. Du Bois as a theorist of race but have neglected his engagement with environmental themes. Not only was he concerned with ecology, such as the health of soils and water, but environmental themes also figured in his explanations of racism. Du Bois prefigured contemporary scholarship on environmental racism, detailing colonial capitalism’s uneven distribution of environmental benefits—such as natural resources—and harms—such as flooding and pollution. Moreover, Du Bois had novel insights on the role of environmental entities in shaping the adoption of racism, a process I term environmental racialization. He demonstrates how struggles over land led workers to pursue racism rather than solidarity. He argues that capitalist planters adopted racism to blame laborers for degraded soils. Du Bois is one of sociology’s earliest environmental theorists, uniquely illuminating how environment-society relations shape racism.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"105 - 128"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45325653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Is Populism Good for Liberal Democracy?","authors":"Josh Pacewicz","doi":"10.1177/07352751231167389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231167389","url":null,"abstract":"Debates over populism pit those who see it as dangerous for liberal democracy against those who view it as necessary for mobilizing the marginalized. This article flips the question and asks whether and how populist rhetoric supports liberal democracy. I synthesize accounts of voting behavior, poststructural Marxism, and pragmatism to develop a cognitive theory of populist resonance focused on how people use rhetoric to solve conceptual problems and illustrate it with interviews from the American Rust Belt during the Obama elections. In the main, voters use populist rhetoric to simplify political decisions when cross-pressured. Therefore, many traditional partisans, who saw party politics as rooted in blue- and white-collar identities, routinely made populist claims to sideline anti-pluralist appeals, whereas those alienated from politics were given to illiberalism. The analysis provides micro-sociological foundations for the intuition that populism is democratically functional in a stable party system, whereas illiberal populism is a symptom of enfeebled political parties.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"129 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45522549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mating Call, Dog Whistle, Trigger: Asymmetric Alignments, Race, and the Use of Reactionary Religious Rhetoric in American Politics","authors":"Samuel L. Perry","doi":"10.1177/07352751231153664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231153664","url":null,"abstract":"Asymmetric social alignments are transforming American partisan rhetoric, particularly how politicians leverage identity-based appeals. For example, asymmetric religious, racial, and ideological alignments within the Republican party now make reactionary religious rhetoric increasingly strategic. Focusing on that case, I propose a novel conceptual model to understand what such rhetoric aims to accomplish. Reactionary religious rhetoric advertises, appeals, and activates on a spectrum from overt to subconscious registers, which I explain using three metaphors: mating call, dog whistle, and trigger. Within a context of asymmetrical partisan “sorting,” Christian nationalist rhetoric overtly advertises partisanship (mating call). Rhetoric deploying encoded terms like “Christian” and “socialist” appeals to ethno-culture, connecting specific political opponents to abstract ethno-religious threats (dog whistle). Lastly, research on overlapping identities increasingly suggests rhetoric involving threats to “Christianity” may unconsciously activate White racial threat (trigger). I consider applications of this conceptual model to growing political appeals to nationalist and populist identities.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"56 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44074624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Problem of Class Abstractionism","authors":"M. McCarthy, M. Desan","doi":"10.1177/07352751231152489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751231152489","url":null,"abstract":"With renewed interest in Marxism, class is back on the intellectual agenda. But so too is the familiar charge of “class reductionism.” This charge conflates two distinct claims regarding what we term the structural and political primacy of class. Structural primacy refers to the determinant role of class in social explanation, whereas political primacy refers to its centrality in radical politics. Crossing these distinct claims, we identify four possible positions on the primacy of class. Here, we focus on the two that affirm the structural primacy of class. What we call “class abstractionism,” which presumes to derive the political primacy of class from an account of its structural primacy, ultimately relies on an abstract conception of class that effectively presupposes its political primacy. In contrast, a more adequate account of structural primacy—what we call “class dynamism”—requires us to abandon the presupposition of class’s necessary political primacy.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"3 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46550912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Problem of Infinite Regress: A Stopping Rules Approach","authors":"A. Verghese","doi":"10.1177/07352751221142929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221142929","url":null,"abstract":"How can social scientists uncover the root causes of contemporary outcomes? Many scholars have assumed that a problem associated with identifying root causes—the problem of infinite regress—poses a central impediment to this endeavor. However, few have attempted to clearly conceptualize infinite regress or offer more than solutions in passing. This article undertakes the challenge. I begin by conceptualizing infinite regress as the potentially endless cycle initiated when assessing the relative weight of proximate versus antecedent causes in a causal chain. Next, how do we weigh causes in such causal chains? I build on Mahoney, Kimball, and Koivu’s “sequence elaboration” method, and argue that this method is best suited to approach the problem. Yet, sequence elaboration cannot tell us when to stop our search. How do we know we have arrived at a root cause? I evaluate six potential “stopping rules” using various historical examples and suggest that three of these offer coherent possible solutions: the “critical juncture stopping rule,” the “necessary and sufficient cause stopping rule,” and the “mechanism stopping rule.”","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"41 1","pages":"27 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41432868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queering Doing Gender: The Curious Absence of Ethnomethodology in Gender Studies and in Sociology","authors":"S. L. Crawley","doi":"10.1177/07352751221134828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221134828","url":null,"abstract":"“Doing Gender,” Candance West and Don Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, has become a folk concept—a trope or commonsense resource within the sociology of gender. Yet at the same time, most gender scholars overlook its ethnomethodological premise, visible in both poststructuralist misunderstandings of its argument outside the discipline of sociology and what I term a realist misunderstanding of it in the study of structures and identities within the discipline. Reading West and Zimmerman queerly while clarifying ethnomethodology’s ontology, I refocus attention for critical scholarship on ethnomethodology’s analytic sensibilities for research on gender, race, and sexuality, among other embodiments. Specifically, ethnomethodology reframes a vision of actors as relational, practical actors; repositions gender as accountable, jointly produced social relations, not individual identity; and foregrounds resistance in addition to conformity. Hence, my gender (race/class/sexuality) is not mine; it is ours. Ethnomethodology’s ontological shift in temporality to reality-in-production enables interpretive-materialism: a queer, anti-racist, intersectional sociology that is future-facing and in motion.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"366 - 392"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46441191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}