Structure/agency theories presuppose that there is a unity to structure that distinguishes it from the (potential) diversity of agents' responses. In doing so they formally divide the robust social processes shaping the social world (structure) from contingent agential variation (agency). In this article we question this division by critically evaluating its application to the concept of role in critical realism and structural functionalism. We argue that Archer, Elder-Vass and Parsons all mistakenly understand a role to have a singular structural definition (...) which agents may then diverge from. Drawing on the work of Gross, Mason and McEachern we argue instead that if agents diverge in their conceptions of what role incumbents should do, there is no single role definition, but rather a range of diverse role-expectations. Acknowledging this can help us to understand variation in role behaviour, with different incumbents potentially being more exposed to some expectations than others. We argue that considering roles in this way can extend the ability of social scientists to identify robust social processes shaping role behaviour and decrease the extent to which they need to call on contingent factors in such explanations. (shrink)

This article argues that Durkheim's theory of suicide is deficient because of its monocausal reasoning, its conception of suicide as an action without subjects, and its characterization of preliterate societies as harmonious, self-contained, and morphologically static. It shows that these deficiencies can be overcome by including cultural and social-psychological considerations in the analysis of suicide-specifically by including culture as a causal force in its own right and drawing links between social circumstances, cultural beliefs and values, and individual dispositions. The authors (...) make their case by analyzing ethnographic and quantitative data on the preliterate Guarani-Kaiowá of southwestern Brazil, one of the most suicide-prone groups in the world. (shrink)

In my view, we need a sociological analysis to show how the crisis stemmed from a certain set-up of the so-called global society. Such a set-up is the product of a long historical development, which goes beyond the financial crisis? outbreak in 2008. The question I ask is the following: from a sociological standpoint, why did this crisis break out? And what remedies can be put in place? The measures adopted these days cannot solve the crisis, but, for a number (...) of reasons, they can at most provide temporary stoppers and remedies. (shrink)

Durkheim's underdeveloped notion of fatalism is the keystone for a bridge between two conceptual categories central to Marxian and Durkheimian theory: alienation and anomie. Durkheim does not necessarily disagree with Marx that excessive regulation can be socially damaging but chooses to highlight the effects of under- regulation. A Durkheimian critique of overregulation becomes possible if we turn away from anomie and toward Durkheim's idea of fatalism-a concept that I will argue here is unexpectedly consistent with Marx's notion of alienation. We (...) can infer that Durkheim presents us with a notion of an "optimal" human condition that exists between anomie and fatalism. The structure of modern societies, it will be argued, is characterized not just by excessive control leading to alienation or by a lack of integrative restraint leading to anomie but also by active efforts to optimally regulate social life. (shrink)