MORAL COMMUNITIES AND ADOLESCENT DELINQUENCY:

This study bridges the sociological subdisciplines of religion and criminology and examines whether religious characteristics of groups and social contexts might profitably augment social disorganization theory, providing a morally and socially organizing force in a community. Building on the "moral communities" thesis of Rodney Stark (1996), I test whether religion, when understood as a group property, is linked significantly with lower delinquency among individuals in schools and counties where select religious characteristics are high. Moreover, I also examine whether—as Stark suggests—the efficacy of individual religious traits is heightened in social environments where religiousness is more pronounced. Employing multilevel regression models, I test several hypotheses using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. While individual religious effects remain strongest, conservative Protestant homogeneity in both countries and schools corresponds with lower theft and minor delinquency counts. Additionaly, such religious homogeneity interacts with individual-level measures of conservative Protestantism, further reducing incidence (especially of theft). I explore the mechanisms by which communities' religious characteristics likely influence individual behavior and conclude that religion is a neglected yet potentially important cultural aspect of social organization in communities.     

Reconciling commodities and personal relations in industrial society

Conclusions I began this article with Colin Campbell's lament about the productionist bias in sociology and the related point that most sociologists concerned with consumption have ignored private meanings and small-scale structures in favor of public meanings and large-scale structures. This article calls attention to and builds on an emerging alternative approach to what happens after production, using an understanding of the social nature of objects that springs from Marcel Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities.Mauss's model directs attention to the conflict in industrial societies between the two realms of commodity exchange and gift exchange, which I have cast as the conflict between the world of work and the world of family, and as the contrast between commodities and possessions. Thus, the model directs attention to the fact that objects are not simply transformed in production and displayed in consumption. However important these facts may be for understanding objects and society, they do not exhaust the important ways that people experience, use, and think about the objects that surround them. In particular, Mauss's model throws into relief the problematic nature of the objects that surround us and that we use in our social relations. And in doing so it directs attention to the ways that people try to reconstruct and redefine those objects by transforming them into personal possessions. This transformation makes objects acquired as commodities suitable for gift transactions, and hence suitable for the key task of recreating social relationships and social identities, the task of creating, not merely defining, who we are and how we are related to each other.Although the Maussian model addresses many of the links between people in the worlds of work and the home, and many of the ways that objects are part of these links, I am concerned here primarily with the ways that people can appropriate commodities in the process of purchase: shopping. This concern with shopping points out the social significance of retail trade, which I take to include advertising and shopping. This is not simply a passive conduit between production and consumption. Instead, it is an important point at which objects begin to leave the realm of work, commodities, and commodity relations and enter the realm of home, possessions, and gift relations. Shopping is an ubiquitous activity in industrial society and one that is highly significant culturally: we spend vast amounts of time, energy, money, and attention on it. Doubtless part of the reason for this is utilitarian, for we need to buy to live, but it would be foolish to reduce the significance of shopping to some combination of the need of individuals to acquire in order to survive and the need of companies to generate demand in order to profit. Thus, retail trade needs to be seen as well as a set of relations and transactions between seller and buyer that define and are defined by the objects and services involved, their history, and their future. My focus on purchasing food in supermarkets has the advantage of throwing into relief the problem of appropriation, because of the impersonality of object and social relations in large, self-service supermarkets. However, the very extremity of this example can create a false impression. As I noted, in other forms of shopping the social relations between buyer and seller, like the social identity of objects, can be more personal. This personality can be real, as when buyer and seller know each other or where the object is hand-made or even unique. Alternatively, it can be more purely symbolic, as when the selling company touts itself or its employees as friendly and caring or where the manufacturer advertises the personal nature of its commodities. In some cases, indeed, the manufacturing or trading company can present itself in such a way that the company itself becomes the person with whom the purchaser transacts. In addition, because of the focus on the appropriation of commodities in purchasing, I have touched only briefly on production and the world of work more generally. As does life at home, so life at work involves the transaction of objects and labor. Relations at work, then, will shape and be shaped by the nature of what is transacted. Co-workers who transact things that are more clearly stamped with their own identity, as among service workers and craft producers, will likely have more personal relations with fellow workers than will those who transact things that are themselves relatively impersonal, as in assembly-line production. This variability in the objects and relations at work suggests that people will have diverse understandings of work, and hence of manufactured objects more generally, which will affect the need they feel to appropriate commodities. In all, though, the point of this article is simple. People use objects to create and recreate personal social identities and relationships, and in industrial capitalist societies these objects are likely to be produced and purchased as commodities and understood as manufactures in Miller's sense. Our experience with and understanding of the production and sale of objects will affect the way we use them in transactions that create and recreate social identity and relationship, and will affect our understanding of the social identities and relationships that are created and recreated. Thus, the objects that people use in social relationships mediate between realms of economy and society, between the public realms where those objects are produced and distributed, and the private realms where those objects are transacted as part of social reproduction. The fact of this mediation and its effects on people's understanding of objects and social relations deserve careful attention.

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Can there be a sociological concept of interest?

This article raises the question of whether it is possible to have not only an economic concept of interest but also a sociological one, and, if so, what such a concept would be like. By way of an answer, the history of how sociologists have tried to use the concept of interest in their analyses is traced, starting with Gustav Ratzenhofer in the 1890s and ending with Pierre Bourdieu and John Meyer today. This focus on what sociologists have to say about interest represents a novelty as the conventional histories of this concept pass over the contribution by sociologists in total silence. The various attempts by sociologists to use the concept of interest are divided into two main categories: when interest is seen as the driving force in social life, and when interest is seen as a major force in social life, together with other factors. I also discuss the argument by some sociologists that interest is of little or no importance in social life. The different strategies for how to handle the concept of interest in a sociological analysis are discussed in the concluding remarks, where it is argued (following Weber and Bourdieu) that interests can usefully be understood to play an important role in social life, but together with other factors.     

Restricted and Elaborated Modes in the Cultural Analysis of Politics1

The “cultural turn” that swept across the social sciences a generation ago ushered in renewed attention to the cultural analysis of politics. Yet despite this growing area of research, there remains a lack of integration between cultural and noncultural studies of political phenomena. Should this state of affairs be a source of concern for cultural sociologists? I believe it should be. In this essay, I outline reasons why this is the case and what might be done to address this issue. Drawing loosely on Basil Bernstein’s distinction between “restricted” and “elaborated” codes, I suggest that cultural analyses of politics need to be more “elaborated” in nature and I offer three guidelines that can orient this type of research program.     

Of pride and prejudice: the role of sociology and social networks in integrating the health sciences

Calls have been issued for understanding the "contexts" or "environment" shaping the causes and consequences of health and health care. Existing efforts raise concerns about how a panorama of influences can be considered simultaneously. Sociology's view of contexts as social network structures that shape and are shaped in social interaction offers one key to resolving this dilemma. Because social networks have become central in the social, natural, and physical sciences, this perspective provides a common platform for bringing in sociology's rich theoretical and methodological insights. Yet, to do this well, three conditions must shape our response. First, all levels relevant to health and health care must be considered, separated out, and linked by network mechanisms. The genetic-biological level, perhaps the most foreign level to sociologists, represents the greatest need and best prospect for advancing a sociologically based solution. Second, room must be made to tailor models to populations, whether defined socially or medically. Third, sociologists must find a voice within "big science " to address problems from social construction to social causation that contribute to basic social processes as well as health. I trace developments in the Network-Episode Model as one theoretical starting point.     

“An Army of Civil Servants”: Max Weber and Émile Durkheim on Socialism

This paper is a comparison of the views of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim on socialism; these two have yet to be compared on this topic. They offered shared critiques of socialism, but differed in assessment of its overall worth, with Durkheim being more welcoming. After considering possible explanations for this divergence I argue it reflects the contrasting methodologies adopted by both. Whilst Weber places questions of the “value” of socialism solely in the conscious of the individual, and therefore beyond sociology, Durkheim sees this as a social question and therefore part of the practical concerns of sociologists.     

The cultural environment: measuring culture with big data

The rise of the Internet, social media, and digitized historical archives has produced a colossal amount of text-based data in recent years. While computer scientists have produced powerful new tools for automated analyses of such “big data,” they lack the theoretical direction necessary to extract meaning from them. Meanwhile, cultural sociologists have produced sophisticated theories of the social origins of meaning, but lack the methodological capacity to explore them beyond micro-levels of analysis. I propose a synthesis of these two fields that adjoins conventional qualitative methods and new techniques for automated analysis of large amounts of text in iterative fashion. First, I explain how automated text extraction methods may be used to map the contours of cultural environments. Second, I discuss the potential of automated text-classification methods to classify different types of culture such as frames, schema, or symbolic boundaries. Finally, I explain how these new tools can be combined with conventional qualitative methods to trace the evolution of such cultural elements over time. While my assessment of the integration of big data and cultural sociology is optimistic, my conclusion highlights several challenges in implementing this agenda. These include a lack of information about the social context in which texts are produced, the construction of reliable coding schemes that can be automated algorithmically, and the relatively high entry costs for cultural sociologists who wish to develop the technical expertise currently necessary to work with big data.     

Social Movements and Tactical Choice

For much of the past 40 years, the study of social movement tactics has viewed organizers' choices as driven by a desire to maximize efficacy and efficiency within a context of scarce resources and structural constraints. As sociologists increasingly turned toward culture, a new orientation emerged to view tactical choice as a process of gathering, interpreting, and evaluating information within dynamic, uncertain, and often‐contradictory contexts. The importance of the cultural turn has been amply demonstrated in studies of such things as identities, emotions, and collective action frames, but the full implications of its insights continue to be discovered. Four insights in particular warrant greater attention: many core concepts in the study of social movements have an interpretive, subjective, and contingent nature; tactics are a means of communication; social structures are imbued with culture, and culture is thoroughly structured; and social movements sometimes behave irrationally, and what appears to be irrational behavior often is in fact rational. I briefly discuss three areas of scholarship – collective identities, diffusion, and institutional fields – that demonstrate innovative ways that sociologists continue to combine and incorporate these insights and point the way toward a more sophisticated understanding of social movements and tactical choice.     

Discipline & style

Conclusion The formation of a professional discipline of design in the United States was not a foregone conclusion. It was a particular achievement carried out by particular agents, taking advantage of particular social and cultural resources to construct a coherent practice. As a strategy that organized the efforts of widely dispersed practitioners, however, this formation displayed a discernible logic. It was not simply a question of the impact of external constraints nor of the working out of the internal logic of particular architectural traditions, but of the specific ways the latter could be mapped on to the former by practitioners operating within certain immediate social and institutional contexts.The Beaux-Arts episode is a particularly clear example of the dynamic of architectural development that resulted from efforts to maintain a discipline of design under changing historical circumstances. These efforts were shaped in fundamental ways by the social basis of the practice of architectural design as it first emerged in the United States. At the core of professional design, there has been a persistent tension between countervailing forces of eclecticism and discipline. The structure of the market produced a centrifugal tendency that eroded standards and disrupted the organization of the professional production of architecture. At their core, the projects typically associated with professionalization reflected a strategic counter-tendency toward a purification of disciplinary ideals, and away from unmediated reflection of the social conditions of practice.Throughout the history of American architecture, these contradictory tendencies have produced an oscillation in the balance between the expression of formal ideals and responsiveness to the needs of client and society, each swing an expression of recurrent reforming tendencies in the profession. Discipline could be achieved only with effort against the tendency of individualized practice towards eclectic, idiosyncratic responses to particular local clienteles. Modernist criticisms of Beaux-Arts design (in the 1930s) and postmodernist criticisms of modernist design (in the 1970s–1980s) suggest that incorporation of various forms of responsiveness has typically set in motion a dynamic of stylization and a move toward abstracted formalism. It is no accident that postmodernist complaints with regard to the architecture of the modern movement echo the modernists' own criticisms of Beaux-Arts formalism. This recurrent cycle of formalism and reform has been driven by tensions inherent in the disciplinary structure of professional design, tensions that reflect the problematic nature of the profession's efforts to contain an awkwardly broad and culturally diffuse jurisdiction within a certain kind of social structure: a professional labor market.The structure of professional status set up tensions that have been played out in the practices of design and that are evident in the patterns of development of architectural style. At each point in the history of the profession, the disciplinary effort to contain these tensions within a rhetoric of style has mediated the effects of large-scale historical developments originating outside the discipline. Demands and pressures from outside the profession elicit responses from individual practitioners, in pursuit of their function and their careers. These responses are what presents these pressures to the discipline as a whole as a problem of integration. Innovations have to be both ideologically and socially located before they become significant.As the discipline moves toward the abstract and architectural, it moves away from problems that immediately concern clients but also from those that plague practitioners. The irony of the American Renaissance is that while allowing the profession to establish a clear identity and an authoritative jurisdiction, it came at the cost of the discipline's capacity to respond in coherent ways to the pressing social, economic, and technological problems that the architect had to confront as practical problems. The reception of European Modernism in the thirties can be understood as a response to dilemmas set up by the Beaux-Arts construction of the discipline. European Modernism offered precisely the same advantages as the Ecole model: a rational and unified conception of design that drew on contemporary high cultural aesthetic conceptions, a systematic approach to design education, an established language of form with the mystique of an avantgarde that could also be codified for broad diffusion of its principles (the International Style), and an elite of expatriate Europeans to focus its introduction into the academy (Gropius, Breuer, Moholy-Nagy). In addition, it offered something Beaux-Arts historicism could not: a final abstraction from history and a modus vivendi with industrial technology that was anything but submission to its pressures. It represented a final reification of the medium of architecture into a symbolic practice abstracted from cultural traditions, a final step toward the separation of the rhetorical framework within which the designer's intentions were formulated from the framework within which the users' experience might be interpreted. The dominance of Beaux-Arts design in the American architectural profession was a crucial step in the transition from the eclecticism of High Victorian architecture to construction of a modern discipline of design - for sociological reasons. It represented a routinization of the charisma of eclecticism that was necessary for the construction of the social and institutional foundation on which a distinctive discipline could be sustained.This analysis of the sociological determinants of the reception of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States suggests some general consequences for a sociology of cultural production. In his essay, Art as a Cultural System, Geertz argues that it is necessary to get away from a narrow focus on art as a specialized cultural institution, and to regard it in its broader cultural context. It is out of participation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular form we call art, which is in fact but a sector of it, is possible. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise. Geertz's concern is to situate art as one manifestation of the seamless web of meaning that makes up a particular culture. Forms of art have power and purpose because of their connection (or their ability to make connections) to a general cultural sensibility that they participate in creating.Although Geertz's general point is well taken, the location of art in the web of cultural meaning is not seamless. In fact, much of the meaning of artworks and the significance of art in general depend on particular arrangements of the seams between art and general culture, the particular ways that art stitches itself into the fabric of social life. In modern western societies, artists have developed specialized professional skills: techniques, notions of genre, stylistic conventions, and their own sensibilities related to specific techniques and materials. As Geertz points out, following the vivid example provided by Baxandall, artists rely on the perceptual and interpretative capacities of their audiences; these capacities reflect, derive from, and depend on skills and knowledge available in the broader culture. Artists also rely, however, on the ability and willingness of their audience to apply these skills within an interpretative framework that is specifie to art; it is this framework that grafts an additional level of significance, additional possibilities for the activation of meanings, on to the objects produced. Baxandall, for example, examines specific capacities for looking at pictures that were relevant to the institution of fifteenth-century painting, capacities that emerged as part of changes in the relation between painters and patrons. Painters made use of what Baxandall refers to as the period eye, but they worked with the capacities of the audience to produce a relatively specialized taste for paintings. Much of what we call taste lies in this, the conformity between discriminations demanded by a painting and skills of discrimination possessed by the beholder. Artists, as creative workers, co-opt cultural material and incorporate it into practices that make sense within the specialized cultural institution of art.As the institutional theories of art have made clear, the context in which art is interpreted includes the art world itself, in which specialized aesthetic practices are generated and sustained. This production of a distinctive body of practices has both an ideological and a sociological side: an art world is a cultural enclave in which works refer to each other within a specialized context of interpretation and producers can establish identity and reputations both among themselves and for a relevant public. These processes cannot be reduced to direct reflections of material conditions or simple instances of a culture-wide sensibility. If architecture can be seen as an expression of more general cultural sensibilities and in some way, as Geertz puts it, inseparable from the feeling for life that animates it, this relation is mediated by historically specific forms of cultural expression and by specific institutional contexts that make these forms of creativity possible.Sociological studies of art worlds have been either phenomonological in focus, zooming in on the art world itself, or they have tended to focus on contextual factors as a structure of external constraints. The tendency has been to view art worlds either from the inside or the outside. Many analyses, however, point to the importance of the boundary itself as a potential object of analysis and explanation. Becker, for example, has proposed a view of art as collective action, and has called attention to the importance of conventions in art worlds. His focus is on the way people in art worlds use conventions to communicate with their audiences and to organize cooperation within the art world. Becker also notes that aesthetic values are closely tied to structures of status in art worlds, that conventions both enable and constrain artistic production as they are built in to institutionalized structures, suggesting that this dual communication might be seen in more structural terms. His discussion of the distinction of art and craft focuses attention on the social construction of the distinction as a folk category used to identify kinds of work within art worlds, and he uses changes in usage to give the notion of an art world a historical dimension. From a more macro-structural perspective, Mukerji has argued in favor of recognition of continuities between fine art and commercial culture, and focuses attention on the way the discontinuities between the two are constructed, using the example of the transformation of film from industrial production to art work in the United States. She provides an illuminating discussion of the both the ideological articulation and social bases of the discontinuities of art, craft, and industrial design. Where Becker's analysis emphasizes the use of conventional understandings as part of the organization of art work, Mukerji focuses on contextual conditions that stimulated and made a redefinition of existing objects possible in the American film industry.A third alternative is to focus on the boundary itself as a social production, and on the specific way that a relatively autonomous field of cultural production is produced as practitioners actively situate themselves within broad structures of constraint and opportunity. In the case of science, Gieryn has noted that as sociologists and philosophers argue over the uniqueness of science among intellectual activities, demarcation is routinely accomplished in practical, everyday settings... He focuses on the boundary work carried out by scientists: the attribution of selected characteristics to the institution of science ... for purposes of constructing a social boundary that distinguishes some intellectual work as non-science. Boundary-work appears empirically, for Gieryn, in the explicitly invoked ideologies of science. Boundary-work, however, can also be seen as implicit in any practice, in the conventions that define and sustain it. The attribution of selected characteristics to the institution can be seen not only in explicit ideological claims made to the public, but in the work itself, in the articulation of stylistic codes that signify the status of any particular work by signifying the claimed characteristics of the institution. This communication is carried on most significantly among practitioners, who must collectively sustain the rhetorical structure that makes their work possible.The boundaries that articulate art worlds are not produced simply by intentional definition (although there are such efforts) or by being explicitly defended when attacked; they are actively reproduced in and through the practices in which the constitutive conventions of the cultural form are manifested, and by the way in which these practices are structured by their institutional situation. It is this practical articulation of a boundary, furthermore, that is the point at which the intersection of culture and social structure can be examined.Sociological studies of culture commonly focus on material or social structural constraints on the production and distribution of particular cultural objects. Studies of the production of culture typically look at the work of artists as productive labor like any other, at cultural productions as objects that are produced, sold, distributed. Some have suggested that these effects are mediated at the level of aesthetic codes, by the specific forms of cultural production. I suggest that this mediation can be located not in reified forms, or in the codes and conventions that define them, but in form-giving practices in which these codes are activated, as they are situated and organized within particular, historically formed fields. Analytical focus is shifted from the production of particular objects to the production of a structure of justification within which the practice of giving significance to objects can be sustained as a form of expert authority.The social production of an architecture (or any cultural form) is a form of collective action organized within a structure of constraints. Creative workers produce not only cultural objects of a certain kind, but at the same time collectively produce and reproduce the immediate practical contexts in which their productions can be registered as meaningful. In other words, they produce and reproduce a certain kind of cultural capacity: in this case, practices of design through which certain kinds of formal order can be imposed on the built environment. A sociology of art as cultural production might, therefore, focus on the specific ways in which materials drawn from the more general culture are organized into distinctive practices within specific art worlds, and the ways in which these practices contribute to the reproduction of the semi-autonomous field that makes them possible. In examining the production of culture at this level, the key questions focus not on the constraining effects of social and material conditions, but on the way a particular cultural practice is organized within the limits and according to a logic determined by specific social contexts.The key problem of an art world is the problem of autonomy. Artists and art worlds need the social and cultural space to develop and maintain the standards and conventions of their art. They must be able to define their own problems and seek appropriate solutions within the operative structures of justification. At the same time, they have to maintain some controlled connection with broader social contexts, if only to maintain the flow of material and symbolic resources. The structural problem of relative autonomy of an art world is reflected in the works themselves, in the tension between reference to external structures of meaning and legitimation and the self-referential qualities of a distinctive field of practice. This tension is manifested particularly clearly in architecture, because of the limitations on its autonomy created by the need to respond to the functional dimensions of most building tasks and by its generally public nature.The case of architectural design suggests ways in which creative workers' construction of a system of occupational control, within a particular market context, are linked to the substantive construction of the nature of the work. This process might be analyzed historically by focusing on the formation of a discipline, and the way a particular culture of production, manifested in a rhetoric of style, is implicated in a system of occupational control. Such a perspective integrates analysis of the structural context of resources and constraints with an analysis of the processes of actively constructing a practice that makes sense within this context. In this way, one can bring into focus the structural determination of a cultural form without losing grasp of the active, creative, and historically contingent dimensions of cultural production.

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Surviving as a qualitative sociologist: Recollections from the diary of a state worker

In this paper I describe my experience as a qualitative sociologist on the research staff of a government policymaking agency. Using specific examples from my experience, strategies for survival as a qualitative sociologist in a quantitatively-oriented setting are presented. It is proposed that: 1) qualitative methods need to be promoted as a credible and valuable approach to research and the individual researcher must sell him or herself as competent in the use of such methods; 2) social support networks with similarly inclined co-workers and sociologists outside of the workplace need to be developed and maintained and used to enhance the status of qualitative methods and qualitative sociologists; and 3) as is true for all researchers working in a policymaking or applied setting, it is necessary to recognize the reticular nature of social research and to demonstrate how qualitative methods generate information that is useful to policy or other applied purposes. By application of this approach in my own workplace, qualitative research methods have become an acceptable and even desirable part of many research projects of the agency and I have been able to continue to practice and to maintain my identity as a qualitative sociologist.Thanks to Vincent D. Manti and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Robert K. Merton for assuring me that the application of sociology is important and for giving me the word reticular. Nonetheless, opinions and points of view expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of any reader nor of the State of New York or any of its Divisions and no official endorsement should be inferred.     

Generally Speaking: The Logic and Mechanics of Social Pattern Analysis1

This paper examines social pattern analysis, the yet‐unarticulated research strategy that guides formal sociologists in their efforts to distill generic social patterns from their specific cultural, situational, and historical contexts. Following in the implicit methodological footsteps of Georg Simmel, social pattern analysts view specific sociohistorical configurations as mere instantiations of such patterns, thereby deliberately disregarding various idiosyncrasies of the particular communities, events, and social situations they examine. Analytically focused, they thus draw their evidence from multiple social contexts, thereby making their essentially decontextualized findings more generalizable. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to historians and ethnographers, they try to highlight universality rather than singularity, thereby focusing their attention on the common formal features of any given pattern across those contexts while deliberately ignoring differences among its various specific manifestations. The outcome of such transcultural, transsituational, and transhistorical (that is, transcontextual) mode of inquiry is an empirically grounded “social geometry.”     

Embodiment, experience and theory: in defence of the sociological tradition

This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the ‘lived experience’ of embodiment. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists. Many of sociology's central concepts, indeed, evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era. In order to illustrate this argument, I focus on the writings of Durkheim and Simmel. Their work is rarely central to writings on the body, but provides good examples of the diversity of theoretical approaches within sociology that remain relevant to body theorists. Specifically, I want to use it to develop the outlines of a theory of embodiment as a medium for the constitution of society which has at its centre a concern with human experience. I conclude by reassessing the strategic options sociologists of the body confront in developing their analyses.     

Ideology,cultural frameworks,and the process of revolution

Conclusions: The varying role of culture The English and French revolutions were not the product of uniquely Western crises of capitalism or absolutism. They shared many elements with profoundly similar crises in the Eastern states of the Ottoman Empire and China. The divergence of Eastern and Western civilizations after the mid-seventeenth century thus cannot be simply attributed to a structural difference between Western revolutions and Eastern peasant rebellions or dynastic crises. In terms of institutional changes, particularly changes in local class structure, more extensive changes followed the seventeenth-century crises in Ottoman Turkey and Ming China than followed the English Revolution. The entire question of the divergence of Eastern and Western economic and political development, of Western dynamism and Eastern stagnation in the early modern period, therefore needs reexamination. In particular, the manner in which Western Europe forged ahead of the advanced Eastern civilizations of Islam and China needs to be explained in a way that accommodates the similarities of the seventeenth-century crises in each.Focusing on cultural frameworks and how they governed reactions to state crises and shaped state reconstruction provides an entry point for such an explanation. Different ideological legacies, embedded in state reconstruction after the seventeenth-century crises, profoundly influenced the later divergence of East and West.Discussions of culture and revolutions have been obfuscated by arguments over whether material or cultural and ideological factors are the primary agents of change. Clearly this false dilemma — asking whether history is governed by Marxist materialism or Hegelian idealism — fails to capture historical reality. A number of scholars have tried to overcome this dichotomy. Clifford Geertz, Natalie Davis, and Robert Darnton have turned to deep analysis of texts or events, analysis designed to illustrate the creativity of individuals and groups in producing symbols and actions that both express and shape their material conditions. Other authors — Giddens and Bourdieu — have put forth general theories of culture that stress the ability of individuals to appropriate cultural elements and use them to reconstruct or reinforce material and institutional structures. All of these approaches attempt to free individuals from the determinism of materialist constraints, and also from the mechanical reproduction of a dominant culture. These approaches therefore have the virtue of avoiding either a simple socioeconomic or cultural determination of individual action. Yet they also are almost useless for long-term, causal historical explanation, for they tend to reduce to a halfway house between materialism and idealism, blandly asserting that, in general, individuals respond to both their material and their cultural environments with (more or less) creative responses that both reproduce and alter those environments.But as we have just observed, the creative response to a changing environment is not constant. These theories of culture fail to appreciate temporal variation, that the role of culture may be quite different in particular concrete historical settings. At some times, as in politically stable periods, the level of cultural innovation may be low; at other times, as in prerevolutionary periods, ideological innovation may increase, but chiefly in response to material forces that create a social crisis. At still other times, as during state breakdown and the ensuing struggle for power, ideological creativity may rise to great heights and develop its own dynamics. And in the restabilization of authority after a breakdown, as the ideological creations of the power struggle become embedded in the postrevolutionary cultural framework, cultural patterns and ideologies may dominate the future possibilities for material as well as cultural change.Interestingly, it was precisely those revolutions that failed to overcome traditional rule fully but did experience a phase of creative, tradition-repudating ideology, namely England and France, that left a legacy of fruitful and dynamic tension in postbreakdown society. Although the Puritans and Jacobins faded after the revolutions, a part of their views remained in a rich stock of antitraditional symbols, institutions, and ideals. State reconstructions in those countries thus were continually challenged by claims to principles that hedged absolute authority. In contrast, the ideological response that occurred in tradition-reinforcing cases of state breakdown — as in the Ottoman Empire, China, and Hapsburg Spain — sought to purify and reaffirm traditional institutions. In these cases, the crisis was blamed on deviation from orthodoxy, and the new regimes sought to strip away variety in the extant cultural framework, purging elements perceived as heterodox. The reconstruction of state and social institutions allowed a recovery of traditional prosperity; but the impoverishing of the cultural framework of post-breakdown society reduced the basis for future dynamism and fundamental change. Meiji Japan was a hybrid case, as marginal elites did sweep away certain aspects of the traditional government and its status system, releasing resources for development and imperial expansion. But the Meiji Restoration still was framed in traditional and conservative ideology, which left a legacy of conservative and traditonal emphasis that continued to dominate much of political and social life.In short, theories of culture that simply describe the interaction of individuals with cultural elements in general terms are gravely incomplete. Cultural frameworks act with particular power at the times when states are rebuilt or revised in times of state breakdown or crisis. A more complete theory of culture — whose development has begun in the works of Wuthnow and Swidler — thus must recognize that cultural dynamics vary over time, becoming more fluid and more creative at some times, more rigid and more limiting at others.But in addition, these diverse outcomes suggest that macrosociology has unduly neglected the role of culture in constraining state structure and dynamics, particularly during periods of state crisis and reconstruction. Theories of social change must recognize that at some concrete historical junctures it is material forces, while at other such junctures it is cultural frameworks and ideologies, that play the dominant role in causing and directing change.This essay is an elaboration of chapter 5 of J. Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

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Aging as intracohort differentiation: Accentuation,the Matthew effect,and the life course

Recent contributions of sociologists and others have brought a new awareness and new theoretical understanding of the extent to which human aging and life-course patterns are shaped by social conditions and influenced by social change. Yet the potential of many social processes to account for individual aging patterns remains untapped, because research and theory have focused heavily upon comparisons between cohorts rather than the internal differentiation of cohorts. This paper shows that focusing upon intracohort differentiation over the life course leads to a mobilization of sociological findings whose age-related implications have not been exploited. Using the phenomenon of aged heterogeneity as an illustrative case, it is suggested that intracohort differentiation—operating through macro-level, organizational, and micro-level processes—can explain significant phenomena of aging previously neglected by theory, or else assumed to be psychological in origin. These processes specify Merton's Matthew effect. Implications for biological aging and for research are briefly discussed.     

A Sociology of the Periphery Versus a Peripheral Sociology: Rural Sociology and the Dimension of Space1

Abstract Rural sociology is intrinsically concerned with the spatial dimensions of social life. However, this underlying research tradition, particularly the use of space as a research strategy, has been insufficiently addressed and its contributions to general sociology are little recognized. I outline how concern with space, uneven development, and the social relationships of peripheral settings have provided substantive boundary and conceptual meaning to rural sociology, propelled its evolution, and left it with a legacy of strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. A willingness to tackle the dimension of space and the thorny problems it raises often sets rural sociologists apart from other sociologists. This research tradition contrasted with general sociology's concern with developing generalization, aspatial covering laws, and proto-typical relationships of modern or Fordist development settings. Conceptual openings have left sociologists questioning their past agenda. Coupled with the “creative marginality” inherent in the questions and contexts addressed by rural sociologists, this makes the subfield central to contemporary sociology.     

Social class and social liberalism

The relationship between social class and politics has been a central concern of political sociologists over the years. Recently various scholars have contended that the last twenty years have witnessed the emergence of noneconomic or social issues (e.g., equal rights, personal freedom) and of a middle class liberalism, especially on these social issues. In fact, it was claimed that this privileged radicalism has led to an inversion of the traditional relationship between class and political ideology, as now it is the middle class which is more supportive than the working class of liberal positions on the important social issues of the day. In this paper we subject these claims to a rigorous empirical test using 1973–1982 NORC data. Our findings indicate that there is little support forclass differences in social liberalism, and that most of the apparent differences are due to education. Furthermore, affluence does not have a consistent effect on social liberalism. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analyses for the nature of class differences in American society.     

The theoretical costs of ignoring childhood: rethinking independence, insecurity, and inequality

Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in “the social studies of childhood,” sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology’s relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars—who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field—and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline—about independence, insecurity, and inequality—I argue that children’s perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children’s perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory.     

Children's understanding of the interpersonal consequences of dissemblance of nonverbal emotional-expressive behavior

Eighty-five children in three age groups (6–7, 10–11, and 13–14 years) participated in an interview study in which their beliefs were elicited about how others are likely to react when one presents an emotional front. They also responded to questions about (a) their preference for adults versus peers as targets of genuine emotional expressiveness, (b) expected outcomes for children who either almost never reveal their feelings or who almost always do, and (c) how they construct a balance for themselves between when to reveal their real feelings and when not to. Age and sex differences were found for some social contexts and not for others. The oldest girls stood out on a number of comparisons as a unique group: They were more likely to believe that dissembled expressions would be taken at face value in a couple of social contexts, they were more likely to prefer peers as the recipients of genuine emotional-expressive displays, and they gave more complex reasoning about how to achieve a balance between dissemblance and expression of genuine feelings. The data are discussed from the standpoint of how naive theories of emotion are used by children to make sense of their social relations.I would like to express my appreciation to the children and staff of Rohnert Park School District for participating in this investigation. I also want to thank Jane Weiskopf for her help in interviewing the children and Michael Crowley for his undertaking of the statistical analyses.     

Maintenance work: Interrogating the sociology of art

The following article explores the different ways art sociologists investigate art that is based in the participatory arts. The aim is to shift the empirical focus to the art practice, which speaks for itself, and to place the work of the artist and all who cooperate or collaborate in the making of the artwork at the center of sociological analysis. By allowing the artist to speak fully about their work, art sociologists can uncover new social and cultural phenomena and better understand the different motivations underlying art-making. The following literature highlights the recent tendencies in the sociology of art, explores the “social turn” in art and presents different sociologists who focus on the art practice and the art’s voice. For further development of the field, I suggest the sociology of art needs to catch-up with the recent tendencies in art by placing the empirical focus on participatory art practices that will not only give us a better understanding about the intricate actions taking place in the art making, but it will also illuminate new layers of social life that are hidden. To conclude, I suggest that sociologists engage with participatory-based artists to enhance sociology through a public sociology of art.