New Publications
|
ASA Theory section members' most recent publications will be posted here, twice monthly, on our "New Publications" page.
If you are a member of the Theory section of ASA please submit your "new" publication information to:asatheorysection@gmail.com. Please include all relevant information about your publication for consideration. |
book
The Demonstration Society
by Claude Rosental YouTube demos of makeup products by famous influencers, demonstrations of strength during street protests, demonstrations of military might in North Korea: public demonstrations are omnipresent in social life. Yet they are often perceived as isolated events, unworthy of systematic examination.
In The Demonstration Society, Claude Rosental explores the underlying dynamics of what he calls a “demonstration society.” He shows how, both in today's world and historically, public demonstrations constitute not only tools to prove, persuade, and promote, but fundamental forms of interaction and exchange, and, in some cases, attempts to lead the world. Rosental compares demos with other forms of public demonstrations, drawing out both their peculiarities and common features. He analyzes the processes through which demonstrations are conceived and carried out, as well as the skills of their producers. He also compares contemporary demos with historical demonstrations including theaters of machines in the Renaissance, public demonstrations of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, and demonstrations of the magic lantern in the nineteenth century. Above and beyond the entertainment they sometimes provide, demonstrations are experienced as intense moments that broadly involve alliances, material and symbolic goods, and, more generally, the future of individuals and collectives. Rosental elucidates the many ways in which we live today, as in the past, in a society of demonstration. Claude Rosental, The Demonstration Society, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 2021. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/demonstration-society 
Logical Skills: Social-Historical Perspectives
Editors Julie Brumberg-Chaumont & Claude Rosental Logic has long been seen as a natural and universal human ability, as much as a series of skills that only “sane,” “educated,” and “civilized” men can master.
The Volume investigates this tension. It explores how various logical skills have been established as social norms and attributed, or denied, to some actors or groups in different spaces throughout history. Written by historians, philosophers, and sociologists, and drawing on several case studies, it examines how these skills were defined, taken as standards and identified in some individuals, while they were deemed missing in others. It studies how they have been mobilized in educational theories, practices, and policies. It examines the dynamics of valuation (i.e., assessment and valorization) and implementation of these skills across different epochs, ranging from the Middle Ages until the present day. It specifies the different conceptions of logic underpinning these approaches, as well as their social and political stakes. Julie Brumberg-Chaumont & Claude Rosental (eds.). 2021. Logical Skills: Social-Historical Perspectives. New York: Birkhaüser. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030584450 
Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought.
by
Emily Erikson In the seventeenth century, English economic theorists lost interest in the moral status of exchange and became increasingly concerned with the roots of national prosperity. This shift marked the origins of classical political economy and provided the foundation for the contemporary discipline of economics. The seventeenth-
century revolution in economic thought fundamentally reshaped the way economic processes have been interpreted and under- stood. In Trade and Nation, Emily Erikson brings together historical, comparative, and computational methods to explain the institutional forces that brought about this transformation. Erikson pinpoints how the rise of the company form in confluence with the political marginalization of English merchants created an opening for public argumentation over economic matters. Independent merchants, who were excluded from state institutions and vast areas of trade, confronted the power and influence of crown-endorsed chartered companies. Their distance from the halls of government drove them to take their case to the public sphere. The number of merchant-authored economic texts rose as members of this class sought to show that their preferred policies would contribute to the benefit of the state and commonwealth. In doing so, they created and disseminated a new moral framework of growth, prosperity, and wealth for evaluating economic behavior. By using computational methods to document these processes, Trade and Nation provides both compelling evidence and a prototype for how methodological innovations can help to provide new insights into large-scale social processes. Erikson, Emily. 2021. Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought. New York: Columbia University Press. 
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: Culture and Art
by Zygmunt Bauman
Brzeziński, Dariusz, Thomas C. Campbell, Mark E. Davis, Jack Palmer, eds. Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska
The sociological imagination and the artistic imagination have been historically intertwined, at once reciprocal and conflicting, complementary and tensional. This connection is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. His conception and practice of sociology were always infused with a literary and artistic sensibility. He wrote extensively on the relationship between sociology and the arts, and especially on sociology and literature; he frequently drew on literary writers in his exploration and elucidation of sociological problems; and he was an avid and passionate consumer and practitioner of art, especially film and photography.
This volume brings together hitherto unknown or rare pieces by Bauman on the themes of culture and art, including previously unpublished material from the Bauman Archive at the University of Leeds. A substantial introduction by the editors provides readers with a lucid guide through this material and develops connections to Bauman’s other works. The first volume in a series of books that will make available the lesser-known writings of one of the most influential social thinkers of our time, Culture and Art will be of interest to students and scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences, and to a wider readership. 
by Rebecca Elliott
Building on earlier award-winning work on “the sociology of loss,” Elliott explores how families, communities, and governments confront problems of loss as the climate changes. The book offers the first in-depth account of the politics and social effects of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which provides flood insurance protection for virtually all homes and small businesses that require it. In doing so, the NFIP turns the risk of flooding into an immediate economic reality, shaping who lives on the waterfront, on what terms, and at what cost.
Drawing on archival, interview, ethnographic, and other documentary data, Elliott follows controversies over the NFIP from its establishment in the 1960s to the present, from local backlash over flood maps to Congressional debates over insurance reform. Though flood insurance is often portrayed as a rational solution for managing risk, it has ignited recurring fights over what is fair and valuable, what needs protecting and what should be let go, who deserves assistance and on what terms, and whose expectations of future losses are used to govern the present. An incisive and comprehensive consideration of the fundamental dilemmas of moral economy underlying insurance, Underwater sheds new light on how Americans cope with loss as the water rises. 
Knowledge Evolution and Societal Transformations: Action Theory to Solve Adaptive Problems.
By Jerald Hage
Foreword by Michael Quinn Patton Action theory provides career possibilities for sociologists and examples provide ways of reducing educational, income, and political inequality. While it doesn't specifically deal with the virus crisis or policing, the model provides solutions to both of these problems.
The book integrates sociological theory with economic and political science theory, representing 60 years of Hage's work. The theory is grounded with comparative research in the United States and in Western Europe over 100 years. This book updates Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, making them more relevant to contemporary problems. For example, Chapter two explains why there are Trump voters. Each chapter can be purchased separately and represent whole courses in sociology.
Chapter One: Courses on sociological theory, social change and the evolution of societies. Chapter Two: Courses in social psychology. Chapter Three: Courses in organizational innovation. Chapter Four: Courses in regional sociology and for urban departments. Chapter Five: Courses in social stratification. Chapter Six: Courses in organizational sociology and for the theory of organizations in business schools. Chapter Seven: Courses on networks and for schools of social work. Chapter Eight: Courses in sociology of education and for some courses in schools of education because there are recommendations for pre-school, primary, and secondary. Chapter Nine: Courses in economic sociology and for some courses in departments of economics. Chapter Ten: Courses in political sociology and for some course in departments of political science. |
Chapter in Book"Habit Is Thus the Enormous Flywheel of Society”: Pragmatism, Social Theory, and Cognitive Science.
Stephen Turner
Turner, Stephen. 2020. “Habit Is Thus the Enormous Flywheel of Society”: Pragmatism. Social Theory, and Cognitive Science. In Italo Testa and Fausto Caruana (eds.). Habit: Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroscience, and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 320-336.
"Response: Normativity, Practices, and the Substrate."
Stephen Turner
Turner, Stephen. 2021. Response: Normativity, Practices, and the Substrate. In Stephen Turner
and the Philosophy of the Social. Edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 243-266. "Democracy, Liberalism, and Discretion: The
Political Puzzle of the Administrative State." Stephen Turner
Turner, Stephen. 2020. Democracy, Liberalism,
and Discretion: The Political Puzzle of the Administrative State. In Reclaiming Liberalism. Edited by David F. Hardwick and Leslie Marsh. London: Palgrave, 41-62. "The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals."
Stephen Turner
Turner, Stephen. 2021. The Naked State: What the
Breakdown of Normality Reveals. In Pandemics, Society and Politics: Critical Reflections on Covid-19. Edited by Gerard Delanty. Berlin: De Gruyter. |
articleSummer & Fall 2021
Emily Erikson & Hirokazu Shirado. 2021. "Network
Structure, Property, and the Division of Labor." American Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224211027893 Smångs, Mattias. 2021. "The White Working Class
and the Legacy of the 1960s Ku Klux Klan in the 2016 Presidential Election". The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162211019679 Fall 2020 & Spring 2021
Deb, Nikhil. 2020. “Law and Corporate
Malfeasance in Neoliberal India.” Critical Sociology 46(7-8):1157–1171. doi: 10.1177/0896920520907122. Deb, Nikhil. 2020. “Corporate Capitalism, Environmental Damage, and the Rule of Law: The Magurchara Gas Explosion in Bangladesh.” In the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, edited by Nigel South and Avi Brisman. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315207094 Deb, Nikhil and Maya Rao. 2020. “The Pandemic and the Invisible Poor of the Global South: Slum Dwellers in Mumbai, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh.” In Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19: Volume 2 – Global Perspectives, edited by Muschert, Glenn, Budd, Kristen, Lane, David, and Jason Smith. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. 2020. “Slums provided ideal conditions for COVID- 19 to spread.” December 14th, 2020. London School of Economics Covid-19. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2020/12/14/slums-provided-ideal-conditions-for-covid-19-to-spread/ Brossard, Baptiste, and Natalia Ruiz-Junco. 2020.
“On the Shoulders of Citers: Notes on the Organization of Intellectual Deference.” The Sociological Quarterly 61:567-587. Blume Oeur, Freeden. 2020.
"Fever Dreams: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Racial Trauma of COVID-19 and Lynching.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Special Issue: “Race and Ethnicity in Pandemic Times.” Online First. Erikson, Emily. 2020. “State-Merchant Relations
and Economic Thought: The Dutch Republic and England, 1580 to 1720” Socio-Economic Review. 03 December 2020. Emily Erikson. 2020. “A Networked Public: Formal
and Relational Approaches to the Public Sphere” Kybernetes. 18 November 2020. Hallett, Tim, and Amelia Hawbaker. 2020. "The
Case for an Inhabited Institutionalism in Organizational Research: Interaction, Coupling, and Change Reconsidered." Theory and Society (2020). Ken, Ivy, & Helmuth, Allison Suppan. 2021. "Not
Additive, Not Defined: Mutual Constitution in Feminist Intersectional Studies." Feminist Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120987393 Pula, Besnik. 2020. "Disembedded Politics:
Neoliberal Reform and Labour Market Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe." Government and Opposition 55(4):557-77. Pula, Besnik. 2020. "From Habitus to Pragma: A
Phenomenological Critique of Bourdieu’s Habitus." Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 50(3):248-62. Singh, Sourabh. 2020 "To rely or not to rely on
common sense? Introducing critical Realism's insights to social network analysis." Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 50(2): 203-222. Singh, Sourabh. "Rethinking Political Elites' Mass
Linkage Strategies: Lessons from the Study of Indira Gandhi's Political Habitus." Journal of Historical Sociology (2020). Staubmann, Helmut: C. Wright Mills’ The
Sociological Imagination and the Construction of Talcott Parsons as a Conservative Grand Theorist. In: The American Sociologist Vol. 52 (1) (Special Issue on Talcott Parsons and Politics, guest editors: Victor Lidz and Helmut Staubmann), online first published October 10, 2020. Open access Turner, Stephen and George Mazur. 2020. What
are Democratic Values? A Neo-Kelsenian Approach. In Πολιτεία [Politèia]. Liber Amicorum Agostino Carrino. Edited by Carmine De Angelis and Antonino Scalone. Milano: Mimesis, 525-540. Turner, Stephen. 2020. “The Stone in the Shoe:
Weber Today.” Max Weber Studies 20(2): 273- 275. Turner, Stephen. 2020. Freud in Many Contexts,
Book Review Symposium, on Howard L. Kaye (2019) Freud as a Social and Cultural Theorist: On Human Nature and the Civilizing Process, Routledge, New York. Society 57(3), 269-275. 10.1007/s12115-020-00478-3 Turner, Stephen. 2021. “Polanyi’s Social Theory:
Was There One, and What Was It?” Discussion on Gábor Bíró, The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi. Tradition and Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 47(1): 10-15. Turner, Stephen. 2020. The Philosophical Origins of
Classical Sociology of Knowledge. In Miranda Fricker, Peter J. Graham, David Henderson, Nikolaj Pedersen, and Jeremy Wyatt (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology. London: Routledge, pp. 31-39. Weng, Jeffrey. 2020. “Uneasy Companions:
Language and Human Collectivities in the Remaking of Chinese Society in the Early Twentieth Century." Theory & Society 49(1):75– 100. Yang, Yuchen. 2020. "What’s Hegemonic about
Hegemonic Masculinity? Legitimation and Beyond.” Sociological Theory 38(4): 318-333. Zhang, Yueran. 2020. "Political Competition and
Two Modes of Taxing Private Homeownership: A Bourdieusian Analysis of the Contemporary Chinese State.” Theory and Society 49(4): 669- 707. |
