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. (shrink)

Social theorists in recent years have concerned themselves with the matter of the kind and intensity of people’s everyday reflective capacities. In this respect, Bourdieu has mostly been found wanting. This article seeks to counter this sentiment with recourse to an ‘anti-mechanistic’ reading of Bourdieu’s theory of practice. It begins by arguing that in imposing a strict delineation between consciousness and habitus, Bourdieu and his critics alike at times unwittingly conflate habitus and mechanistic habit, at once vaunting conscious deliberation and (...) neglecting the non-habitual acts that habitus makes possible. Next it turns to the treatment, within the mechanistic reading, of the notion of the ‘social world’. The argument is that in this reading the social world is reified and rendered the mere background or setting for social practices rather than the product of those practices. Without recognition of this latter quality, the social world becomes hypostatized and exists outside of time. The secondary aim, then, is to argue for a thoroughgoing temporal relation to social reality in Bourdieu’s theory. (shrink)

Like any other regime, authoritarian regimes mutate. Many of these mutations depend upon the upshot of internecine elite conflicts. These condition the ability of a ruler or would-be ruler to seize state resources and acquire the capacity to exercise violence. It is therefore crucial to investigate the factors that shape the dynamics and outcomes of contention among elite groups in authoritarian regimes. This article pursues this line of investigation by examining from a micro-analytical, process-oriented, and phenomenological perspective how institutions of (...) collective leadership affect power struggles in oligarchic power configurations. Drawing on the case of Serbia in the late 1980s, the following inquiry lays bare three institutional effects. First, collective organs of deliberation and decision-making channel intra-elite contention by defining the arenas in which elite members expect contention to take place (channeling effect). Second, by exacerbating actors’ mutual awareness and coordination dilemma, the forum setting of these collective organs lends itself to the emergence of open-ended situations (indeterminacy effect). Third, the verdicts delivered by institutions of collective leadership shape elite members’ expectations about group allegiance (collective alignment effect). In conjunction with this sequential argument about impact, the present article engages the conceptualization of authoritarian regimes, the analysis of institutional effects, and the study of delegitimation in an interactional setting. (shrink)