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. 

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.”

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.”