Ethnocentrism, it is said, involves believing certain things to be true: that one's culture is superior to others, more deserving of respect, or at the ‘centre’ of things. On the alternative view defended in this article, ethnocentrism is a type of bias, not a set of beliefs. If this is correct, it challenges conventional wisdom about the scope, danger, and avoidance of ethnocentrism.

This article introduces the Culturally Meaningful Networks (CMN) approach. Following a pragmatist perspective of social mechanisms more broadly, it develops and demonstrates an approach to understanding networks that incorporates both structure and meaning and that leverages time to understand how these aspects influence each other. I apply this approach to investigate a longstanding puzzle about why some of those who leave military service for civilian life fare well, and others badly. In a mixed-methods analysis, I follow a sample of individuals (...) moving through the transition from military to civilian life in the contemporary United Kingdom. I find that the higher the proportion of alters (i.e., “contacts”) with a military background in the networks of leavers before discharge, the worse they fare after discharge. The CMN approach helps me locate a specific structural embedding that explains the presence or absence of durable cultural frames that set the context for the actual experience of the transition and cause problems during it. Attention to the temporal unfolding of network structure and social meaning is essential to bringing out this finding. By re-embedding networks within people’s experiences over time, the CMN approach helps grasp the distinctions by which leavers understand their interactions. I conclude by arguing that the CMN approach has implications for network sociology and cultural sociology that go beyond this substantive case. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Beitrag diskutiere ich Whitehouses Theorie der Modi der Religiosität, die den imagistischen Modus, basierend auf dem episodischen Gedächtnis, dem doktrinalen Modus, basierend auf dem semantischen Gedächtnis, gegenüber stellt. Anhand von drei Beispielen aus der religiösen Praxis und der Geschichte einer südafrikanischen Kirche – dem sakralen Tanz, dem öffentlichen Zeugnis von persönlichen Heilungserlebnissen sowie der Spaltung der Kirche – zeige ich die Begrenztheit von Whitehouses kognitivem Erklärungsmodell. Dennoch ist Whitehouses Theorie für die säkulare Religionswissenschaft von Nutzen, da er ihren (...) von postkolonialer Kritik in Frage gestellten vergleichenden Ansatz naturalistisch untermauert. Wünschenswert ist dabei die verstärkte Aufmerksamkeit für die vielfältigen Wechselwirkungen zwischen kognitiven, sozialen und kulturellen Faktoren, auch unter Preisgabe der einfachen Klarheit von Whitehouses bipolarem Erklärungsmodell. (shrink)

Max Weber's understanding of the role of people's interests in determining their behavior has been widely misunderstood, because of a misinterpretation of a famous passage in which he analogizes interests to railway “switchmen.” Contrary to this widespread view, Weber does not see material self‐interest as the driving force behind human action. Rather, he distinguishes between material and “ideal” interests; emphasizes the latter; and, arguably, suggests that even the former are, to a great extent, culturally constructed, not least because they rely (...) on ideas about the way the world is. It is almost fair to say, then, that the notion that Weber reduces ideas to interests has things completely backwards. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the recent interest shown by critical realists in the study of generative mechanisms in sociology and proposes stronger integration of hermeneutics into this theoretical approach. There are important differences between realism and hermeneutics. While realism strives to overcome the extremes of empiricism and interpretivism with a new version of naturalism, hermeneutics bases its explanations of society on research into meanings. The question is whether underlining these differences is useful for social theory. On the one hand, underestimating (...) hermeneutics makes it difficult for realists to recognize fully the role that processes of understanding play in generating social change. On the other hand, hermeneutical arguments in sociology idealistically identify being with interpreted being. The concept of generative hermeneutics is designed to help to build an alliance between realism and hermeneutics, since one-sided overemphasis on mechanistic logic devaluates the study of social interaction pursued by interpretative sociology. (shrink)

The ethnographic turn in religious studies has responded to important developments, such as the rejection of value neutrality and the need to better address the lived experience of individuals and communities. In this essay, I affirm the value of ethnography as a method in comparative religious ethics, but distinguish between two ways of framing ethnography in relation to ethics. The first way insists on the hard limits of translating values across cultures, and tends to marginalize or dismiss normative inquiry. The (...) second way allows for the interpretation of practices of ethical justification in diverse cultural contexts. I argue that this second category of ethnography is more congenial to the work of comparative religious ethicists, since an integral part of ethical inquiry involves reflecting on, and making arguments about, social norms and practices. (shrink)

My thesis situates itself within the field of the Philosophy of Worldviews. Specifically, it aims to address the normative question of what the task should be of such a philosophy when faced with the problem of conflicting beliefs between religious worldviews. To answer this question, I turn to the procedure of aporetical analysis, in short, aporetics. Firstly, aporetics offers a distinct method of consistency restoration within inconsistent sets on the basis of thesis rejection and thesis modification. Secondly, aporetics leads to (...) an understanding of the availability of aporetic exits on the basis of epistemic criteria. On the one hand, this leads us to opt for an orientational monism/pluralism, which steers the middle course between the epistemic stances of exclusivism and pluralism. On the other hand, it allows us to identify epistemic criteria for worldview acquisition on the basis of three distinct superclasses. These superclasses can be derived from Jürgen Habermas' validity claims, and applied to the self-understanding of contemporary theories of religion. (shrink)

Men's passage to fatherhood: an analysis of the contemporary relevance of transition theory This paper presents a theoretical analysis of men's experiences of pregnancy, birth and early fatherhood. It does so using a framework of ritual transition theory and argues that despite its earlier structural‐functionalist roots, transition theory remains a valuable framework, illuminating contemporary transitions across the life course. The paper discusses the historical development of transition or ritual theory and, drawing upon data generated during longitudinal ethnographic interviews with men (...) undergoing the transition to fatherhood, analyses its relevance in understanding contemporary experiences of fatherhood. (shrink)

In the standard native tradition of Albanian studies, descriptive and empirical research has only confirmed their own ultimate goal of constructing national specificity and a particularly antiquated view of national culture. In this article, I show how and why an articulate analysis of the main intellectual traditions and their impact can provide fresh insights into grasping the cultural particularism of Albanian studies. Methodologically, a new picture of knowledge production must arise if we consider the historical, cultural, political and ideological terrain (...) on which certain influential ideas and practices in Albanian studies of people’s culture have emerged. The aim, then, is not to provide an exhaustive picture of a positive knowledge of culture and society, but to show the urgent need for avoiding any adoption of concepts that might be pure reconstructions of arbitrary and timeless structures and values, while rejecting any approach in terms of survivals and folklorism. (shrink)

Concern for NGO accountability has been intensified in recent years, following the growth in the size of NGOs and their power to influence global politics and curb the excesses of globalization. Questions have been raised about where the sector embraces the same standards of accountability that it demands from government and business. The objective of this paper is to examine one aspect of NGO accountability, its discharge through annual reporting. Using Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and specifically its validity claims, (...) the research investigates whether NGOs use their annual reporting process to account to the host societies in which they operate or steer stakeholder actions toward their own self-interests. The results of the study indicate that efforts by organizations to account are characterized by communicative action through the provision of truthful disclosures, generally appropriate to the discharge of accountability and in a manner intended to improve their understandability. At the same time, however, some organizations exhibit strategically oriented behaviors in which the disclosure content is guided by the opportunity to present organizations in a particular light and there appears a lack of rhetor authenticity. The latter findings cast doubt on the ethical inspiration of NGOs and the values they demand from business communities, and questions arise as to why such practices exist and what lessons can be learnt from them. (shrink)

The “class play” is an annual tradition in residency training programs and medical schools that celebrates the end of the academic year. It is also a locally generated narrative that reveals important components of an institution’s values, culture, and group dynamics. Exploring the class play is a reflexive exercise that allows one to reflect on his or her professional development and place in the department in a structural, historical, and experience-near driven way. In this way, the creation of and examining (...) of the class play may be seen as an opportunity to understand and expand upon medicine’s Hidden Curriculum. (shrink)

Despite the fact that business people and business students often cast doubt on the relevance of universal moral principles in business, the rejection of relativism is a precondition for business ethics to get off the ground. This paper proposes an educational strategy to overcome the philosophical confusions about relativism in which business people and students are often trapped. First, the paper provides some conceptual distinctions and clarifications related to moral relativism, particularism, and virtue ethics. More particularly, it revisits arguments demonstrating (...) that virtues in business are not in contradiction with the relevance of universal principles, despite the fact that virtue ethics is often identified with particular relationships and contexts. It goes on to show how students and managers, but also researchers, often mix up radically different conceptions of moral relativism. It is also argued that this confusion is in part created by the cross-cultural management literature in which the methodological stance of the value-freedom of the social sciences is, in a perplexingly mistaken way, transformed into a rejection of all normative discussion and a plea for relativism. The remainder of the paper presents some tools that may be helpful in steering people toward less simplistic views about moral relativism and virtue ethics. It further argues that it is equally important to spell out that moral universalism can be understood in a humble way, without implying either arrogant ethnocentrism or omniscience, as part of an ongoing debate that progresses gradually. (shrink)

Now more than ever, critical discourse analysis is urgently called upon to deconstruct the discourses of arrogant power and division which are largely secret for most citizens and which baldly contradict the discourses of populist solidarity propagated in an official democracy. This paper focuses on deconstructing two legal discourses, the craftily named “Patriot Acts,” designed to polarize the citizenry into “patriots” supporting the current US administration and its wars, versus “terrorists” who oppose them, and to use “homeland security” as a (...) cloak to legitimize a maximum of secrecy for the government and its agents, and a minimum for the citizens. (shrink)

While there is extensive literature on both the expansion of human rights and solidarity movements, and on micro-solidarity and violent actions, here I ask what is the relationship between human rights, micro-solidarity and social action? Based on a case study of structured, face-to-face dialogue group encounters in the Israeli/Palestinian context, I draw on Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory to demonstrate why emotional energy and the ritualization of historical narratives have very limited potential to translate into human rights-based moral actions. (...) Instead, I suggest, these encounters produce micro-solidarity that ascribes additional weight to ethnic categories, serving to polarize and homogenize groups along ethnic lines. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...) indeterminacy of belief. (shrink)

A noteworthy development that has transpired in American sociology in the past quarter century has been the increasingly sophisticated interest in the analysis of human cultural systems. Sadly, however, these analyses reveal that social scientists rarely appreciate the profoundly evolutionary aspects of human culture. The chief purpose of this essay is to address this shortcoming and to offer some tentative suggestions toward its rectification. The essay begins by briefly reviewing recent developments in the analysis of cultural systems, primarily by reference (...) to the influential work of Wuthnow. Second, a common flaw in these approaches is addressed—namely, the absence of any recognition of the value of grounding sociocultural theory in an informed evolutionary framework—and the case is made that this shortcoming is avoidable, even within the context of the intellectual traditions of the social sciences. Third, the evolutionary foundations of human cultural behavior are explored in terms of an analysis of relevant theoretical and empirical developments in the evolutionary neurosciences. Fourth, the value of these insights is illustrated by reference to an evolutionary critique of a recent and thought-provoking contribution to the study of modern political culture—Douglas and Wildavsky’s analysis ofRisk and Culture. Finally, the article concludes by emphasizing the value of and the necessity for incorporating evolutionary reasoning into the domain of sociocultural theory. (shrink)

In 2016, the Five Stars Movement (5SM), one of the parties currently in power in Italy, launched the ‘Rousseau platform’. This is a platform meant to enhance direct democracy, transparency and the real participation of the people in the making of laws, policies and political proposals. Although ennobled with the name of Rousseau, the 5SM’s redemptive promise has been strongly criticised in the public sphere for being irresponsible and ideological. Political realism, I will argue, can perform both a diagnostic and (...) a corrective task, by providing some tools to unveil populist distortions and by offering more solid grounds for political opponents’ critique. Three aspects of realism, in particular, will be pointed out as remedies against populist drifts. First, anti-moralism, complemented by anti-utopianism and contextualism, criticises the populists’ moralistic picture of politics, its anti-pluralistic attitude and its rejection of the role of experts in politics. Second, the Weberian ethic of responsibility offers standards to assess politicians’ actions, instead of embracing the populist aversion towards any professional politician; besides, it contrasts the populist image of politics as a derogatory activity. Finally, realism as ideology critique unveils the distorting narratives underlying populist propaganda and fostering uncritical support. (shrink)

The relationship of law and culture has long been a concern of legal anthropology and sociology of law. But it is recognised today as a central issue in many different kinds of juristic inquiries. All these recent invocations of the concept of culture indicate or imply problems at the boundaries of established thought about either the nature of law or the values that law is thought to express or reflect. The consequence is that legal theory must, it seems, now systematically (...) take account of the notion of culture. The present paper asks how this might best be done. I argue that a concept of culture, as such, is of limited utility for legal theory because the term “culture” embraces a too indefinite and disparate range of phenomena. But legal theory needs conceptual resources to consider at a general level the relations of law and culture. This paper suggests that these resources should include, above all, a rigorous distinguishing of different abstract types of community. Legal theory requires a sociologically‐informed concept of community. What is encompassed by the vague idea of culture is actually the content of different types of social relations of community and the networks (combinations) in which they exist. (shrink)

The article reviews Italian semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco’s vision of semiotics as a discipline, the aim of which is to study the ‘whole of culture’. It focuses especially on Eco’s trajectory out of structuralism and on the development of a cognitive semantics based on strong pragmatist principles, that inform his notion of interpretability as the key process of semiosis and on the encyclopedia as the format more apt to describe the cultural space. After a consideration of the interface between (...) the cognitive, the pragmatic and the cultural dimensions of semiosis, the article highlights a few open problems in contemporary, culturally-oriented sociological theory that could benefit from a deeper engagement with these concepts. (shrink)

This article addresses how the field of religion and science will change in the coming decades by analyzing the attitudes of emerging adults. I first present an overview of emerging adulthood to set the context for my analysis, especially highlighting the way in which emerging adults find themselves “in between” and in an “age of possibilities," free to explore a variety of options and thus often become “spiritual bricoleurs." Next, I expand on how a broadening pluralism in emerging adult culture (...) changes both the conversation of “religion and science,” on one hand, and the locus for their interaction on the other. In the third section, I address the question of whether there exists a consensus view of how to relate religion and science. Paradoxically, though 18–30-year-olds perceive that there is conflict between science and religion, they personally endorse collaboration or independence. Finally, I draw conclusions for practitioners and theorists. (shrink)

This article presents an overview and discussion of qualitative research in education by analyzing the roles of researchers, the history of the field, its use in policymaking, and its future influence on educational reform. The article begins by describing the unique position that qualitative educational researchers have in higher education, as they often attempt to serve both academic and policymaking audiences. The article then moves to discuss the ascent of qualitative methods in the social sciences and educational research. The article (...) concludes by attempting to work through a number of pressing concerns that qualitative researchers may face in upcoming decades; specifically, the final section presents possible strategies to improve the relevance and impact of qualitative researchers? work on reframing educational policy at local, state, and federal levels to meet the demands of equality and social justice. (shrink)

The role of the cultural anthropologist in studying the results of information technology and artificial intelligence should be to contribute and reaffirm a sense of life which considers the human being in his or her totality, and to recognize the role of diversity and the imaginary. Technical revolutions have also proved to be cultural revolutions.The skills required by one culture, the identification and creation of problems and the solutions are interrelated. These interrelationships are worked out in a cultural context endowed (...) with its own experiences, knowledge and needs which define and make it different from other societies. The advanced technologies require new competences and new skills.This paper examines imaginary from two different viewpoints: (a) the imaginary aspect of body-mind relations, influenced by research into artificial intelligence and its prospects for the future; and (b) the roles and forms assumed by the imaginary in human-computer relations. (shrink)

A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis biases explanatory judgment (...) along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science. (shrink)

This paper addresses questions of friendship and political community by investigating a particular complex case, comradeship in the life of the soldier. Close attention to soldiers’ accounts of their own lives, successes and failures shows that the relationship of friendship to comradeship, and of both to the success of the soldier’s individual and communal life, is complex and tense. I focus on autobiographical accounts of basic training in order to describe, and to explore the tensions between, two positions: (1) Becoming (...) a soldier is a corrupting loss of individuality and moral sensitivity, and friendship is resistance to it. (2) Becoming a soldier is one form of flourishing, and comradeship—the soldier’s distinctive form of friendship—is one of its constitutive virtues. I draw particularly on George Orwell’s account of basic training and fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and on Tim O’Brien’s account of basic training and fighting in Vietnam. (shrink)

This paper argues against particularism about social criticism of the form presented by Walzer. I contend that while limitation of the scope of criticism depends on the existence of our shared meanings, which are not shared by them, shared meaning itself depends on society. So, an account of society showing that societies are not discrete and mutually inaccessible refutes particularism. I argue for such an account. I deal with the objection that the focus of particularism is culture, not society, and (...) conclude that the conditions of possibility of shared meaning have anti-particularist consequences. (shrink)

The essay investigates the possibilities and limitations of cross-denominational, intercultural and inter-religious hospital chaplaincy. With a view to the actual situation of hospital chaplaincy in Germany and the economic, social and theological constraints under which it offers its services, the author concludes, that the different Christian denominations must organizationally cooperate and share their work if such services are to survive the growing pressures. Constructivist cognition theory is invoked for analyzing the hermeneutical and theological implications of inter-denominational, intercultural and inter-religious pastoral (...) care and counselling. A Lutheran interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma provides a foundational frame of reference. (shrink)

Over time, according to popular and academic accounts, alternative trade initiatives [such as fair trade, organics, forest certification, and socially responsible investing ] almost invariably lose their oppositional stance and go mainstream. That is, they lose their alternative, usually peripheral, and often contrarian character. In this paper, I argue that this is not always the case and that the path to going mainstream is not always an unproblematic one. I observe that while scholars have documented various aspects of specific alternative (...) trade initiatives, little comparative work has been done to theorize their different trajectories. To advance the scholarship, I compare two alternative trade movements, fair trade and SRI, and develop three hypotheses—the relation motivations hypothesis, the material interests hypothesis, and the organization of credibility hypothesis—that explain why going mainstream has been so hotly contested in the fair trade movement but not the SRI movement. I articulate these hypotheses and evaluate their merits. (shrink)