Blog Archives

Letter from the CHair: Theory – the Hydra-Matic™ Transmission to the Future

12/12/2017

John R. Hall
University of California - Davis and Santa Cruz

Indulge me for giving Theory a Durkheimian pat on its collective back. What a great section! We are more than 800 members strong, with participants from most every wing of our rambling split-level (social and sociological) theory house, truly impressive scholars honored each year by the section’s awards and prizes, strong theory journals, and a healthy engagement on the part of young sociologists, most spectacularly in the Junior Theorists Symposium held each year around the ASA meetings (Nota bene: you don’t have to be very junior to attend, trust me). To see more about all of this, check out the section website, http://www.asatheory.org, where you also can learn how to make a (self or other) nomination for next summer’s prizes and awards. We can all take pride in how much commitment there is to theory and the section.

At the 2017 ASA meetings in Montréal, section chair Neil Gross organized terrific Theory sessions on issues too rarely addressed – about the professional challenges of being a practicing theorist. For next year’s sessions, we will walk the other side of the street, by zeroing in on the scholarly stakes of theory. I am going to “back in” to previewing the 2018 sessions through a bit of stocktaking about theory’s prospects.

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On SOcial Theory Now: Communicating Theory Now

12/12/2017

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Paul Lichterman
University of Southern California

The following two essays were delivered at a session organized at the Social Science History Association's annual meeting in Montreal. Professors Paul Lichterman and Lyn Spillman reflected on the contributions of Social Theory Now (Chicago 2017), edited by Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac A. Reed.

I was going to preface my comments by saying I’m honored to have been asked to share them. After all, I don’t often identify as a theorist, even if my own work orients to questions sociologists consider theoretical. Then I realized that my modest disclaimer assumes a particular notion of what do when we communicate theory, and this book is inviting us to move beyond that. That will be my gambit then, a suggestion that taken as a whole, the book itself is communicating theory in a distinctive way. Given my own notion of what social theory itself is, that means the book offers a fresh vision of what it is to do social theorizing.

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On Social Theory Now: Maps and Dialogues

12/12/2017

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Lyn Spillman
University of Notre Dame

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this important collection. I am really pleased to have had a good excuse to make reading all these essays my highest priority, and I learnt a lot. It’s great to feel a little bit closer up to date to than I can usually claim.

The goals of the collection are to introduce and map the field of major theoretical traditions currently in circulation, to offer reflection about limitations and directions to proceed from within each tradition, and hopefully to create a platform for dialog and debate (2). I am going to focus my remarks on the first and third of these goals, as more feasible to address in brief remarks. It is impossible to do justice to the particularities of each of the many excellent chapters: suffice it to say that they do indeed offer critical introductions and articulate new lines of inquiry within each of the perspectives they address, and they will be influential for that.

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What Constitutes a theoretical contribution when an empirical study is evaluated

12/12/2017

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Richard Swedberg
Cornell University

Omar Lizardo has recently addressed the question of what a theory paper should look like in order to be published in ASR (“Publishing Theory at ASR”, Perspectives Spring 2017). This note intends to complement Lizardo’s article by raising a related question, namely how are we to look at and evaluate the way that theory is handled in the average empirical research paper?

There exists a tendency today to ignore the theory part in sociological studies, not only its value but its very existence. This is in my experience often the case during seminars, when a paper is being discussed; in the comments you get when your paper is being reviewed; and also at faculty meetings, when decisions are made to hire someone or suggest someone for tenure. There is often plenty of discussion of the data and the methods that have been used in some research, but not of the theory part.

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Notes on the Coser Lecture: Of Rhythms, Culture and Interaction

12/12/2017

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Iddo Tavory
New York University

Tracing the temporality of interaction is an uncomfortable project. Beyond the minute passage of interactional time or the social careers ethnographers can sometimes trace, lies the larger realm of “culture.” This is where imagined social trajectories play out, and where largely naturalized temporal landscapes seem to await. Looming above interaction are also the ways in which situations recur, the pulsating rhythms of social life. Yet, interactionism is usually suspicious of facile evocations of social structure and of culture writ large. For one thing, it is often unclear what we are talking about. But, for another, the problem of talking of broader structures of meanings is that we may lose precisely where the action is—in the back and forth of interaction, and in the ways actors constantly remake their worlds.

Still, there is something alluring about this problem. This is, partly, rooted in my biography. I came into American sociology steeped in the study of meaning. Like many products of Israeli academia, I read more Bourdieu and Foucault than was probably good for me. I also arrived committed to ethnography, and to a study of interaction and experience. This was a matter of intellectual conviction, but probably more so of aesthetics. I conducted an ethnography of New Age in Israel and realized that I felt most alive when I try to make sense of the fleeting, reconstructing social worlds from the minutiae of interaction. I was thus lucky to get into UCLA for graduate studies (it was also the only program where I was accepted). Working with Jack Katz, Stefan Timmermans and Mel Pollner, I got a healthy dose of interactionism and ethnomethodology. More importantly, they helped me transform a philosophical proclivity for pragmatism and phenomenology into the tools of a working sociologist.

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Shils-Coleman Award Winner: The Feminist Question in Realism*

12/12/2017

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Paige Sweet
University of Illinois - Chicago

In the early 1980s, a young photographer named Donna Ferrato was beginning a project on polyamorous couples in New York City. Ferrato was photographing a couple in their home one evening when the husband became angry with his wife and began to scream at her, holding her up against the bathroom sink and striking her multiple times. Ferrato began snapping photos, believing it would stop him. It did not. In a Time Magazine piece in 2012, Ferrato notes, “I took the picture because without it I knew no one would ever believe it happened” (Sun 2012). For Ferrato, this set of images would become the first of thousands in which she documented the lives of domestic violence victims and perpetrators. In these photos, Ferrato is very clearly in a situation. Ferrato is visible in the mirror, both in the center and background of the scene. In the second photograph, she appears between the violent scene and the reflection of the violent scene, her own image spliced by the corner of the mirror.

To observe and document this social phenomenon – hidden beneath ideological layers of masculinity and the private family – Ferrato unavoidably finds herself between the reality and its representation, literally at the nexus between the subjects and their mirror images. Ferrato is located multiply in this encounter – she is an observer of the events, she is commanding the method of documentation (the camera), she is intervening in the situation by documenting it, and in so doing she finds herself permanently placed in the center of her representational project. Like any photograph, these tell us both more and less than what is there. We cannot see the context of this man’s violence, for example, or the vulnerabilities in the woman’s social situation, or her negotiation tactics and options for escape. Even Ferrato’s exit plan is unclear to us. What we can see, though, is something typically invisible to us: the place of the analyst in the representation.

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JTS: 2017 Conference REcap

12/12/2017

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katrina quisumbing king
University of Wisconsin

Shai Dromi
Harvard University

The 11th annual Junior Theorists’ Symposium met a day before the ASA Annual Meeting. Composed of work presented by graduate students and recent PhDs, JTS brought to light some of the most exciting theoretical work currently underway. The Junior Theorists’ Symposium is sponsored by the Theory Section, as part of the section’s mission to support scholarship in social theory within the discipline. This year, we were generously hosted by the Université du Québec à Montréal.

For the past eleven years, JTS has provided an opportunity for early career sociologists to share their creative works-in-progress. Junior scholars receive feedback from and enter into conversation with both established theorists and an engaged audience. Through this one-day symposium, scholars sharpen their contributions and refine their works-in-progress.

This year, as in past, admission to JTS was highly competitive. We received 107 précis for only 9 slots. We were surprised by the diversity of interpretations of what it means to ‘do’ theory. Not only that, we received many methodologically innovative papers. As it is the mission of JTS to provide a space for critical engagement, we chose papers that were not only theoretically informed, but explicitly aimed to extend, critique, or add precision to how we understand the social world. Our chosen presenters grappled with phenomena that existing theory does not seem to cover.

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JTS After-Panel: Theory, the Good society, and Positionality

12/12/2017

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Seth Abrutyn
University of British Columbia

Hae Yeon Choo
University of Toronto

Claire Decoteau
University of Illinois- Chicago

The following remarks were adapted from the After-Panel at the Junior Theorist Symposium in Montreal. The remarks of Gabriel Abend, who also participated in the panel are not included here.

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