Blog Archives

Letter from the Editors

12/12/2014

Erin Metz McDonnell, University of Notre Dame

Damon Mayrl
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

You may have noticed we've completely redesigned the Theory Section website. Please let us know how you like it in the comments!

Greetings! We write to introduce ourselves as the new editors of Perspectives. This is an exciting time to be a member of the Theory Section, and we look forward to continuing the great work that Claire Decoteau and her predecessors did in making Perspectives into a vibrant hub for theoretical discussion. We’re also working to find new ways to make the newsletter more interactive and engaging for our membership, and in this letter, we lay out our plans for making that happen, including a new online format for accessing newsletter content, efforts to create and sustain dialogue, and a preview of this issue's great content.

6 Comments

Theory Of, Theory And, Theory From

12/12/2014

4 Comments

Andrew Perrin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

It is a strange artifact of the ASA structure that we have a distinct section on sociological theory. For some time in our discipline's history, virtually everyone in the discipline was mostly doing things that are now labeled “theory.” And a nod to theory-building remains a hallmark of most empirical work in sociology, even as formal training in theory becomes less central. Theory-as-specialty is sometimes understood as a ritualistic paean to disciplinary forebears: the textual touchstone for graduate students before moving on to real sociology. Sometimes, by contrast, it is the work every sociologist does to abstract or generalize empirical findings, or to set them in context. How ought we understand, even promote, theory-as-specialty in the context of a discipline that understands theory in these ways?

4 Comments

Whither Theory?

12/12/2014

2 Comments

Claudio E. Benzecry, University of Connecticut

When I arrived in the US in the early 2000s, I was surprised to find that most of the people I had read, taught and learned to think after as sociologists of culture—Robert Darnton, E. P. Thompson, Carlo Ginzburg, Richard Hoggart, Paul Willis, Michel de Certeau—were, in some cases, not sociologists, excluded from the US sociological conversations on culture, and rarely cited in the major journals.

You have to wonder why. These are all relational, agonistic, meaning-centered approaches; they look at practical and sensuous dimensions of social life, and the role of contradiction and contingency in producing action. All of them give us clues; they provide explanations that, in unraveling how things happen, give way to the “why.” They are basically in line with what US sociology has come to expect of theoretical work. So what explains this exclusion, and how does it relate to the question posed by the JTS organizers about the boundaries of theory?

2 Comments

Suggest Your Favorite Theories by Use and Design

12/12/2014

1 Comment

In this issue of Perspectives 36(2), Stefan Bargheer's essay The Use(Fulness) of Theory builds the interesting distinction between theories by use and theories by design. We asked Stefan to kick off a conversation on great works in each tradition, and we invite you to join in through the comments, offering your own suggestions for favorite works that are theories by use or design.

We will compile the suggestions into a resource for teaching theory, which will be listed in the Resources section of the website.

Stefan's Favorite Theories:

Theories by Use

Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Norbert Elias: The Court Society
Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish

Theories by Design

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann: The Social Construction of Reality
Anthony Giddens: The Constitution of Society
Ralf Dahrendorf: Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society
Hans Joas: The Creativity of Action
Charles Taylor: Sources of the Self

Please join the conversation and add your own suggestions below...

1 Comment

What are the most "Theoretical" ASA Sections?

12/10/2014

2 Comments

All of this year's JTS afterpanelists engage the central question of "what is theory" often reflecting that question through empirical observations about what we as scholars identify as theory in practice, and unpacking the assumptions that undergird those attributions. For example, Maggie Frye's essay examines why some sections think of themselves as more engaged with "theory" than others. Maggie draws on ASA section membership overlaps with the Theory Section for data, as an expression of self identification with "theory."

In this interactive feature we give you the opportunity engage the question from another angle: what are the ascriptive identifications for the extent to which other sections have a reputation for being "theoretical"?

2 Comments

Calls for Papers & Conferences

12/10/2014

2 Comments

Two Calls for Abstracts:

2015 Junior Theorists Symposium
Deadline: Feb 13, 2015
Chicago, IL
August 21, 2015

Call for Abstracts: Symposium for Early Career Theorists (SECT)
Deadline: Feb 2, 2015
University of Ottawa, in Ottawa, Ontario
June 1 – 5, 2015.

2 Comments

Conference Recap: The 2014 Junior Theorists’ Symposium

12/10/2014

2 Comments

Jordanna Matlon,
Institute for Advanced Study, Toulouse

Dan Hirschman, University of Michigan

The eighth Junior Theorists’ Symposium (JTS) was held at the University of California, Berkeley on Friday, August 15th. The one-day conference featured the work of nine junior scholars and three senior discussants: Omar Lizardo (University of Notre Dame), Marion Fourcade (University of California, Berkeley), and Saskia Sassen (Columbia University).

As an entry point for novel ideas and a place where sociologists at the earliest stages of their career engage with some of the most prolific and critical theorists in the field, we envisioned JTS as fertile ground for engaging the full spectrum of sociology and for provincializing our contemporary theoretical traditions. In our commitment to preserving JTS as one of the few places where not only junior scholars, but also junior scholarship (half-baked ideas, unfinished pieces of much larger puzzles), receives a public platform, we were particularly interested in selecting papers that were both highly original and at times still in the process of their conceptual development.

This year, we wanted to push the boundaries of theory and interrogate how sociologists demarcate sociological “theory” from empirical work and from other theoretical traditions.

2 Comments

The Use(fulness) of Theory

12/9/2014

1 Comment

Stefan Bargheer,
University of California, Los Angeles

Theory, as Robert Merton (1945) pointed out more than half a century ago, is not a unified concept. There were at least six different notions of theory in use at the time he was writing, and it seems that since then the list has grown longer rather than shorter. A text identified as good theory from the point of view of one of these notions may not qualify as such based on the criteria of another. I would like to carry the argument one step further: not only does the value assigned to a text as theory change depending on which category of theory is used, but the classification of a text as “theory” in the first place is likewise contingent. Scholarly texts have careers or biographies. Some of the most recognized sociological texts started as one thing and ended up as another—that is, they were labeled as “empirical research” when they were first published and became re-classified over time as “sociological theory.”

1 Comment

Why Is Culture Theory, and Demography Not?

12/9/2014

1 Comment

Margaret Frye
Harvard University

"...what leads some fields to be considered 'more theoretical' than others? "

The prompt for the 2014 Junior Theorists’ Symposium (JTS) after-panel, provided by Jordanna Matlon and Dan Hirschman, read in part: “We would like to use the after-panel to initiate a conversation as to why some areas are considered ‘theory’ while others stand at the discipline's margins, and similarly why some empirical work seem to be considered ‘more theoretical’ than other work.”

As any self-respecting demographer would, I began by searching for data. In particular, I sought to identify which areas or subfields are considered “more theoretical” within sociology. I identified four separate sources of data, two collected in 2004 and two that I collected myself in preparation for the panel. To foreshadow my results, I found a surprising amount of consensus concerning which subfields emerge as the most centrally “theoretical.”

1 Comment

Theory: Check Your Privilege

12/9/2014

1 Comment

Julian Go,
Boston University

"...all theory is situated, and all “knowledge” is partial..."

What comprises sociological theory, and what are the boundaries around that category “theory”? In other words, why are some areas considered “theory” while others are more marginal? Why do some perspectives or approaches or categorical schemes for understanding the social world attain the status of “theory” while others do not? One way to approach these very big questions is to take a more specific case. In particular, I’d like to ask: why have perspectives such as feminism, queer studies or postcolonial theory been comparably marginalized in the world of “theory”?

I am going to assume for the purposes of my discussion that indeed there is something called “sociological theory,” and that there are schools of thought, like feminist theory or postcolonial theory, that are not considered by most sociologists as part of its canon or as “proper” theory (Bhambra 2007a; Ray 2006; Stein and Plummer 1994). This is an arguable contention, of course. But let us make these assumptions. If we do, we could easily come up with some answers for why certain perspectives are comparably marginalized.

1 Comment

Member News & Notes

12/9/2014

0 Comments

An overview of the books and articles newly published by section members, as well as member updates including promotions.

0 Comments

Perspectives
A NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION

Letter from the Editors

Theory Of, Theory And, Theory From

Whither Theory?

Suggest Your Favorite Theories by Use and Design

What are the most "Theoretical" ASA Sections?

Calls for Papers & Conferences

Conference Recap: The 2014 Junior Theorists’ Symposium

The Use(fulness) of Theory

Why Is Culture Theory, and Demography Not?

Theory: Check Your Privilege

Member News & Notes

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PerspectivesA NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION﻿

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Perspectives
A NEWSLETTER OF THE ASA THEORY SECTION