While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that has not happened yet? In this article, I argue that future projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives, performance, and material forms. They are particularly evident in what I call “sites of hyperprojectivity,” that (...) is, sites of heightened, future-oriented public debate about possible futures. As a pilot project, I examine contending narratives about possible futures in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. I propose a framework for studying how public interventions into debates about “sustainable futures” and the “green economy” differ on various dimensions of projectivity, including their temporal reach, attention to contingency and causality, and network mapping of future actors. I present a preliminary analysis at the level of narrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative, and subjunctive verb forms in both programmatic and oppositional texts. I close with a discussion of how different genres of future projection might be put to analytical use in studying processes of interest to social scientists, such as coalition formation, institution building, political mobilization, and policy change. (shrink)

Lizardo argues that The Social Theory of Practices is refuted by the discovery of mirror neurons. The book argues that the kind of sameness of tacit mental content assumed by practice theorists such as Bourdieu is fictional, because there is no actual process by which the same mental content can be transmitted. Mirror neurons, Lizardo claims, provide such a mechanism, as they imply that bodily automatisms, which can be understood as the basis of habitus and concepts, can be shared and (...) copied from one person to another. This response to Lizardo points out that the Gallese arguments on which Lizardo relies relate to phylogenetic and universal body movements, not to the learned movements characteristic of practices, and that there is no sameness producing mechanism parallel to the genetic one. (shrink)

Michael Burawoy’s recent book-length engagement with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu constitutes, at root, a Marxist critique of its inability to conceive of the dominated as anything other than duped and submissive, despite this sitting uneasily with Bourdieu’s own research and political practice later in life. Burawoy wonders whether Bourdieusians will be able to recognise the limits of their master’s thought, and set about revising and extending it, in the same way as Marxists did of their own master. This article (...) responds by doing precisely that. After clarifying a different reading of misrecognition, symbolic violence and habitus, it draws out a Bourdieusian theory of social change and a ‘thicker’ conception of contemporary social orders that can accommodate or dissolve Burawoy’s arguments while maintaining fundamental separation from the Marxist project. (shrink)

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the notion of ecological and social embeddedness is one of the most exploited philosophical ideas these days, both in the academia and beyond. The most troublesome about the overall trend is that many proponents of the idea of social embeddedness simplistically consider selfhood as a form of aberration which merely provides vindication for inequality and violence. In this paper, instead of attacking the problem of the individual versus the collective (...) head-on, I approach it by way of a critique of Stephen Turner’s repudiation of transcendental collectivism. According to Turner, transcendental entities, such as tacit knowledge, presuppositions, or traditions, should be altogether removed from explanatory schemata in the social sciences. I believe that Turner’s razor cuts too deep and the rejection of implicit framing is at best premature. Against the background of the identified shortcomings of Turner’s model of interactive learning, I track the interrelations between social development and the development of the self with an eye to showing that the relationship between individual selves and social reality is an extremely complex and multifactorial matter which we cannot hope to navigate without a proper transcendental frame. The frame is what mediates the relationship between the individual and the collective. (shrink)

One of the most basic paradoxes of social life is that while we experience ourselves as individuals, we do so only in the context of the pre-existing social environment into which we were born. This environment existed before us and will exist after us . Given this, there are at least two logical ways to study the relationships between the social environment and the individual. On the one hand, you can start at the individual level and analyze how individuals become (...) aggregated to form a social group. But you can also proceed in the opposite direction by asking how the social group creates the individual. Both are valid approaches. The biological sciences .. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the "real" physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conceptualization of social behavior from that basis. Formalism tends to lead toward a conceptually independent sociology that (...) in principle requires only minimal reference to the empirical and ontological storehouse of other disciplines, while behavioral-realist theory leads to an interdisciplinary sociology that can be located within a hierarchy of behavioral sciences, leading to questions regarding the relationship between sociology and other disciplines as well as issues of transdisciplinary unification and possible interdisciplinary reduction. I explore the consequences of this split for the project of explanatory sociological theory within the context of how it has manifested itself in sociological network theory and social psychology. I close with a critique and assessment of formalist tendencies in sociological theorizing. (shrink)

This paper clarifies the terms “institutions” and “social structures” and related terms “rules”, “conventions”, “norms”, “values” and “customs”. Part one explores the similarities between institutions and social structures whilst the second and third parts explore differences. Part two considers institutions, rules, habits or habitus and habituation, whilst part three critically reflects on three common conceptions of social structures. The conclusion comments upon reflexive deliberation via the internal conversation.

In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus’s recently systematized “functionalist” approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus’s brand of “functionalism” and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter’s original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus’s functionalism ultimately falls short of providing a coherent alternative to the Durkhemian position or (...) serving as a useful starting point from which to understand the origins of abstract categories in concrete experience. (shrink)

What role does “discursive consciousness” play in decision-making? How does it interact with “practical consciousness?” These two questions constitute two important gaps in strong practice theory that extend from Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to Stephen Vaisey's sociological dual-process model and beyond. The goal of this paper is to provide an empirical framework that expands the sociological dual-process model in order to fill these gaps using models from cognitive neuroscience. In particular, I use models of memory and moral judgment that highlight the (...) importance of executive functions and semantic memory. I outline each model as it pertains to the aforementioned gaps in strong practice theory. I then use the models from cognitive neuroscience to create an expanded dual-process model that addresses how and when conscious mental systems override and interact with subconscious mental systems in the use of cultural ends for decision-making. Finally, using this expanded model I address the sociological debate over the use of interview and survey data. My analysis reveals that surveys and interviews both elicit information encoded in declarative memory and differ primarily in the process of information retrieval that is required of respondents. (shrink)

The sociology of knowledge is a heterogeneous set of theories which generally focuses on the social origins of meaning. Strong arguments, epitomized by Durkheim's late work, have hypothesized that the very concepts our minds use to structure experience are constructed through social processes. This view has come under attack from theorists influenced by recent work in developmental psychology that has demonstrated some awareness of these categories in pre-socialized infants. However, further studies have shown that the innate abilities infants display differ (...) in systematic and theoretically significant ways from adults' explicit knowledge. This paper moves beyond the constructionist/nativist dichotomy by outlining the complex relationships between innate intelligence and explicit knowledge. I end by suggesting that there are four, distinct ways the social world influences thought- facilitation, division, specification, and construction. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the analysis of contemporary theories of culture and cognition in cultural sociology. It identifies two major research traditions within cognitivist cultural sociology, based on micro-individualist and collectivist modes of sociological explanation respectively. Two prominent theoretical frameworks within the "micro-individualist" tradition are then critically examined: Stephen Vaisey's dual-process models of culture in action and Omar Lizardo's typology of cultural kinds. It is argued that both frameworks, although well-defined and theoretically insightful, are prone to unwarranted microfoundationalist reductionism. The (...) paper then proceeds to evaluate the presuppositions of the explicitly "collectivist" Zeru-bavelian paradigm of cultural sociology, as well as a series of recent contributions to the field by scholars representing the neo-Durkheimian "strong program". Both are argued to contain problematic assumptions about the location and means of transmission of cultural content. It is concluded that neither "micro-individualist" nor "collectivist" theories of culture and cognition can provide an adequate account of how culture and cognition interrelate since both frameworks are based on explicitly reductionist social ontologies. The article then calls for the adoption of Tuukka Kaidesoja's "naturalized critical realist" social ontology that seeks to overcome these philosophical biases. The paper examines two major sources of Kaidesoja's ontological doctrine, namely Mario Bunge's systemic materialist ontology and the "distributed cognition" perspective. The article then seeks to outline a preliminary sketch of an alternative account of culture that involves the generation, transmission, and transformation of representational states across different media within distributed cognitive systems. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it examines the pragmatic ramifications of recent research in certain areas of cognitive science (embodied mind theory, extended mind theory). Second, it shows how the Chicago pragmatists (George H. Mead, John Dewey) not only envisioned these findings but also how, within certain strains of cognitive science, their work is explicitly appreciated for important preliminary insights which help us interpret the outcomes of current research. The argumentative line of the paper revolves around Mead’s (...) and Dewey’s treatment of the relation between perception and action. Cognition, in the view of the Chicago pragmatists, is not divisible into atomistic, ontologically disconnected units but rather should be seen as an organic circuit within which stimuli and responses are mutually interdependent phases of an ongoing goal-directed active involvement of the organism in the environmental structures. According to Mead and Dewey, as well as the presently burgeoning branch of cognitive science called the “extended mind theory,” cognition is not something that takes place exclusively in our heads but should be rather seen as an objective relation between organism and the environment. On the background of Mead’s theory of the act (with its four stages – impulse, perception, manipulation, and consummation) the author points to certain surprising similarities between the pragmatists’ treatment of the notion of cognition and ideas recently suggested by defenders of the extended mind theory. (shrink)