{"title":"Contentious Tactics as Jazz Performances: A Pragmatist Approach to the Study of Repertoire Change","authors":"Tomás Gold","doi":"10.1177/07352751221110625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221110625","url":null,"abstract":"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 definition of repertoires, understood as relational sets of collective practices that become routinized as habit-sets and become a baseline for innovation when actors face puzzling situations. I then provide a theoretical model for analyzing change in contentious repertoires, which relies on the study of the co-constitutive relation between tactical affordances, actors’ strategies and identities, and contexts. I illustrate this model with three secondary cases of unexpected tactical innovation.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"249 - 271"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44833065","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":"Interpellative Styles: Choreographies of Identity Disruptions and Repairs","authors":"Taylor Paige Winfield","doi":"10.1177/07352751221117509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221117509","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on ethnographic research with two Orthodox Jewish outreach organizations, this article conceptualizes interpellative styles and offers a framework to analyze how styles are variously situated, mediated, performed, and disruptive. I mobilize a micro-interactional approach to parse out how these four dimensions shape ideological recruitment and their roles in the choreographies of identity disruptions and repairs. The two case studies illuminate why and how groups deploy different interpellative styles and what elements shape whether styles are (in)effective. In these ways, the article contributes to scholarship on how people become persuaded to take on new identities and provides insight into the resistance and failures groups encounter when attempting to interpellate others. I conclude with a discussion of how a theory of interpellative styles can be applied more broadly and used to investigate the overlap between cultural, physiological, and psychological processes in identity formation and alteration.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"342 - 365"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49288309","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":"“All the Old Illusions”: On Guessing at Being in Crisis","authors":"Ioana Sendroiu","doi":"10.1177/07352751221113019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221113019","url":null,"abstract":"Models of culture and action argue that crises can be generative of change, with changing contexts setting off reflexivity—a view of crisis as self-evident that is echoed in comparative historical work. Looking to the beginning of the Cold War in Romania and France, this article elaborates two instances when crises did not produce reflexive recognition. This echoes performative approaches that highlight actors needing to interpret crises into being yet underscores that crisis claims nonetheless take place in contexts potentially marked by shifting sociocultural scaffoldings. Rooted in the empirical finding that actors can live through—and be affected by—structural transformations without thinking of themselves as being in crisis, I put forward a conception of crises as unclear as they are taking place. Actors can guess at being or not being in crisis, with no guarantee their guess is fortuitous. Crisis management will be the result of these guesses: some informed, some lucky—and some, indeed, disastrous.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"297 - 321"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46493802","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":"Signs and Their Temporality: The Performative Power of Interpretation in the Supreme Court","authors":"A. Moore","doi":"10.1177/07352751221110240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221110240","url":null,"abstract":"Building on pragmatist uses of semiotics as a heuristic for understanding social interaction, this article argues that temporality is a significant and undertheorized component of signs and their interpretation. Using transcripts from the oral argumentation of a Supreme Court case, I examine how different interpretations of the same sign (a burning cross) rely not only on differing understandings of the sign’s object and how that object is signified but also, more specifically, differing understandings of the sign’s relationship to the past, present, and future.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"322 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47294139","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":"Varieties of Misrecognition: Connecting Bourdieu and Fanon toward an Analysis of Racialized Islamic Fields","authors":"Z. F. Parvez","doi":"10.1177/07352751221103825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221103825","url":null,"abstract":"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 varies according to the degree of (1) subaltern minority integration into educational institutions and (2) proximity of the subaltern to the dominant classes. I bring in the work of Fanon, whose writings on the psychological effects of racial domination are a crucial complement to a Bourdieusian analysis. Together, they provide a more refined understanding of misrecognition in racialized religious fields and, in turn, potential for political resistance.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"272 - 296"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48060544","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":"Theorizing from the Margins: A Tribute to Lewis and Rose Laub Coser","authors":"K. Hoang","doi":"10.1177/07352751221106199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221106199","url":null,"abstract":"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 involved in trying to publish marginal ideas in mainstream journals. I argue that the relationship between mainstream sociology and what I refer to as “marginal” requires a relational perspective that (1) situates both marginalized scholars and their scholarship in the broader discipline of sociology and (2) examines the epistemic oppression of their theories regardless of their sometimes-powerful institutional positioning in highly ranked departments or as leaders within various professional associations.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"203 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46151903","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":"Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship","authors":"Areej Sabbagh-Khoury","doi":"10.1177/07352751221095474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221095474","url":null,"abstract":"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 were displaced from their places of origin. I conclude by asserting citizenship’s double paradox in settler colonial contexts: It regulates certain rights and mobilities but simultaneously entraps the indigenous in a structure in which recursive accumulation is constitutive, thus entrenching dispossession and the further loss of collective rights and other claims.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"151 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46972140","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":"A Sociological Perspective on the Experience of Contention","authors":"J. Gøtzsche-Astrup","doi":"10.1177/07352751221097115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221097115","url":null,"abstract":"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 apart is that it expresses a potential for conflict that underlies all social formations. We can take these expressions of conflict as objects of analysis. This means asking how the conflict expressed in contentious practices is ascribed meaning. I develop this perspective theoretically and show how it may facilitate new empirical analyses of contention’s boundaries, its relation to truth, and ethical relations in contention.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"224 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48608556","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":"How Can Theories Represent Social Phenomena?","authors":"J. Fuhse","doi":"10.1177/07352751221087719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221087719","url":null,"abstract":"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 this system, theoretical sentences can be considered true if they meet two conditions: (1) They are consistent with the theory at hand and (2) adequately map empirically observable relations between objects denoted by theoretical constructs. Truth is therefore relative to a perspective; it is not objectively determinable. Theories should be assessed not for their ontologies but for what they allow us to see and how they connect to empirical observations.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"99 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47254886","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":"Chance, Orientation, and Interpretation: Max Weber’s Neglected Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory","authors":"Michael Strand, Omar Lizardo","doi":"10.1177/07352751221084712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221084712","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":48131,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Theory","volume":"40 1","pages":"124 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42782497","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}