Using social media as a social theorist
A video of my talk is available here, starting at 2 hours in.
Using social media as a social theorist
In the new year, I’ll be giving a talk at the Arctic University of Norway on using social media as a social theorist. This post is an initial attempt to get my thoughts on paper before the break, in order to make it easier to get the talk written when […]
Margaret Archer as neo-classical British social theorist
While Margaret Archer’s theoretical work is widely respected, it is often categorised as little more than an elaboration of Roy Bhaskar and a critique of Anthony Giddens. This framing leaves it secondary to Critical Realism and Structuration Theory, understandable (though limiting) in the former case and deeply inaccurate in the […]
Erving Goffman: the rag-and-bone man of Sociology
There’s a wonderful essay by the playwright Alan Bennet in the London Review of Books, written 35+ years ago, reflecting on his fascination with Erving Goffman’s micro-sociology. His preoccupation was with the minutiae of everyday conduct, identified and described so astutely in Goffman’s work. Sociological observations in this register highlight our commonality, helping […]
The acceleration of social theory
There’s a section in this 1997 chapter by Roger Burrows which my thoughts have been intermittently turning to since reading it last week. On pg 235 he writes: It is not just technology which appears to be accelerating towards meltdown, so are our cultural and sociological understandings of the world. […]
Accounting for the distinctiveness of the contemporary age
My relationship with the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens, Richard Sennett and Ulrich Beck has been a complicated one. Discovering their work as an intellectually frustrated philosophy student led me to move sideways into a sociology department rather than starting a PhD in political philosophy. Their approach excited me, […]
The aestheticised mode of social theorising
One of the targets in Kieran Healy’s Fuck Nuance paper is connoisseurship in social theory, the tendency to “call for the contemplation of complexity almost for its own sake” and “remind everyone that things are more subtle than they seem”. As he astutely observes, this tendency sits uneasily with abstraction as a […]
The Impact of Social Theory
The Sociological Review has just published a thought-provoking review of Doug Porpora’s Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. It gives a lucid, though brief, overview of the book’s core arguments: seven myths which afflict American sociology and seven philosophical counter-points. But what caught my attention was the account of how theoretical […]
Some really interesting theory reading lists
Looking at Omar Lizardo’s website, I found links to the reading lists for the courses he is teaching. I’d really like to work through these in future, particularly the one of Cognitive Sociology. http://www3.nd.edu/~olizardo/courses.html
On Teaching Theory
This short exchange with Michael Burawoy offers some thought-provoking reflections on teaching social theory. He identifies the major traditions of teaching theory within American sociology, before outlining his own ethnographic approach: The Survey: surveying extracts from a comprehensive range of social theorists, each one treated as an instance of a broader category. Essentially disconnected and […]
A conversation with Peter Walsh about Zygmunt Bauman, Academic Celebrity and Social Theory
In 2014 Peter Walsh identified extensive self-plagiarism (as well as some actual plagiarism) in Zygmunt Bauman’s work and made his findings public. He was subject to some remarkable attacks by senior figures (including Brad Evans and Henry Giroux invoking the image of “a Stasi witch hunt” to attack the “micro-fascist” Walsh) which […]
What’s the collective noun for a group of social theorists?
A discourse of theorists. — Plashing Vole (@PlashingVole) September 15, 2016 a murder — Dr Christian Vaccaro (@DrCVaccaro) September 15, 2016 French ones are known as Un Pack — jacqueline (@jacqc1) September 15, 2016 https://twitter.com/AodhBC/status/776463919330136064 A discourse of theorists. — Plashing Vole (@PlashingVole) September 15, 2016 a scrum — A. […]
the riddle of society
From pg 165 of Margaret Archer’s Realist Social Theory: What is it that depends on human intentionality but never conforms to anyone’s intentions? What is it that relies upon people’s concepts but which they never fully know? What is it that depends upon human activity but never corresponds to the […]
the esoteric appeal of tony giddens
From How to become an internationally famous British social theorist by Stewart Clegg, 585-586: “Giddens’s later concerns with structure and agency allow him to tap into many prestigious intellectual products as resources, such as linguistics, analytical philosophy and the Heideggerian tradition. These connections allow for far great consumption in more […]
The International Origins of Social and Political Theory
This looks like it’ll be very interesting: The International Origins of Social and Political Theory What is the relationship between history and theory? Much of the time, theory is held to stand outside history. Theoretical systems are applied to, rather than drawn from, historical events. Structural functionalism in sociology, neorealism […]
A new resource for teaching social theory
Along with Cheryl Brumley, I’ve been producing ‘virtual dayschools’ for the Centre for Social Ontology. They’re intended to provide accessible introductions to difficult topics by mixing up text, image and video. They’re intended as a preliminary to engaging with what is often difficult literature rather than as a replacement for […]
The unavoidability of sociological theory
There’s an important way in which sociological theory is unavoidable. I mean this in the sense in which Alexander describes the problems of action and order as non-optional: “every theory takes some position on both” (Alexander 1987: 12). This is an empirical statement about sociological practice as much as anything else. Against those […]
An introduction to analytical sociology
This is an excellent critical introduction to analytical sociology: Analytical Sociology and The Rest of Sociology by Daniel Little
Notes for a Sociology of Thinking 1.4
In a recent paper Tero Piiroinen argued that the intellectual axis of contemporary sociological theory has shifted from a concern with individualism and holism to what he terms dualism and anti-dualism. I’m not convinced as to the accuracy of this as a claim about the state of the field given the […]
What would happen if an evil scientist wiped the memories of everyone within a workplace?
In a recent paper Tero Piiroinen suggests that “if we all just suddenly lost our memories and other relevant neural dispositions—if no one was able to remember his or her own name, let alone relatives, friends, possessions, occupation, place of residence, and so on—there would be nothing left of social relations and structures”. […]
