Back to Hegel? On Gillian Rose's critique of sociological reason

Thirty‐five years ago, Gillian Rose articulated a significant critique of classical sociological reason, emphasizing its relationship to its philosophical forebears. In a series of works, but most significantly in her Hegel contra Sociology, Rose worked to specify the implications of sociology's failure, both in its critical Marxist and its ‘scientific’ forms, to move beyond Kant and to fully come to terms with the thought of Hegel. In this article, I unpack and explain the substance of her criticisms, developing the necessary Hegelian philosophical background on which she founded them. I argue that Rose's attempted recuperation of ‘speculative reason’ for social theory remains little understood, despite its continued relevance to contemporary debates concerning the nature and scope of sociological reason. As an illustration, I employ Rose to critique Chernilo's recent call for a more philosophically sophisticated sociology. From the vantage point of Rose, this particular account of a ‘philosophical sociology’ remains abstract and rooted in the neo‐Kantian contradictions that continue to characterize sociology.     

Emotions,affects and the production of social life

While many aspects of social life possess an emotional component, sociology needs to explore explicitly the part emotions play in producing the social world and human history. This paper turns away from individualistic and anthropocentric emphases upon the experience of feelings and emotions, attending instead to an exploration of flows of ‘affect’ (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions. It establishes a materialist sociology of affects that acknowledges emotions as a part, but only a part, of a more generalized affective flow that produces bodies and the social world. From this perspective, emotions are not a peculiarly remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment. This enhances sociological understanding of the part emotions play in shaping actions and capacities in many settings of sociological concern.     

Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn

In this paper we outline a critique of ‘decorative sociology’ as a trend in contemporary sociology where ‘culture’ has eclipsed the ‘social’ and where literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. By the term ‘decorative sociology’ we mean a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a politicized, textual reading of society and culture. Although we acknowledge slippage between the textual and material levels of cultural analysis, notably in the output of the Birmingham School, we propose that the intellectual roots of cultural studies inevitably mean that the textual level is pre‐eminent. In emphasizing the aesthetic dimension we seek to challenge the political self‐image of decorative sociology as a contribution to political intervention. We argue that while the cultural turn has contributed to revising approaches to the relationships between identity and power, race and class, ideology and representation, it has done so chiefly at an aesthetic level. Following Davies (1993), we submit that the greatest achievement of the cultural turn has been to teach students to ‘read politically’. The effect of this upon concrete political action is an empirical question. Without wishing to minimize the political importance of cultural studies, our hypothesis is that, what might be called the ‘aestheticization of life’ has not translated fully into the politicization of culture. We argue that an adequate cultural sociology would have to be driven by an empirical research agenda, embrace an historical and comparative framework, and have a genuinely sociological focus, that is, a focus on the changing balance of power in Western capitalism. We reject the attempt to submerge the social in the cultural and outline the development of an alternative, integrated perspective on body, self and society. We conclude by briefly commenting on three sociological contributions to the comparative and historical study of cultural institutions which approximate this research agenda: Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Sennett.     

Real social analytics: A contribution towards a phenomenology of a digital world

This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of ‘algorithmic power’ (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that, far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are emerging, as social actors continue to pursue their social ends but mediated through digital interfaces: this is the consequence of many social actors now needing their digital presence, regardless of whether they want this, to be measured and counted. The article proposes ‘social analytics’ as a new topic for sociology: the sociological study of social actors’ uses of analytics not for the sake of measurement itself (or to make profit from measurement) but in order to fulfil better their social ends through an enhancement of their digital presence. The article places social analytics in the context of earlier debates about categorization, algorithmic power, and self‐presentation online, and describes in detail a case study with a UK community organization which generated the social analytics approach. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this approach for further sociological fieldwork in a digital world.     

Young subjectivities and affective labour in the service economy

Post-Fordist employment is characterised by the demand for new forms of labour in which workers are expected to make personal investments in their work and to mobilise their embodied subjectivities in the practice of labour. Whilst employment insecurity is well documented in the sociology of youth, theoretical development in this area has yet to contend with the role of changes in the nature of labour itself in the production of youth. This paper draws on theories of labour under post-Fordism to explore the practice of ‘affective labour’ amongst young people performing ‘front of house’ bar work in a large metropolitan service economy. The paper theorises the role of youth subjectivities – including capacities for relationality and leisure, gendered embodiment, and tastes – in the practice of contemporary labour. The paper describes how young people doing bar work contribute to the production of affective atmospheres, or sensations of ease, pleasure and enjoyment that are offered to clientele of boutique bars. In this, we suggest that affective labour mobilises young subjectivities at work in ways that are currently unrecognised within youth studies. The paper concludes by suggesting a new research agenda that goes beyond the existing focus on youth transitions through employment to explore how youth is produced as part of the social dynamics of post-Fordist labour.     

The 'negotiated night': an embodied conceptual framework for the sociological study of sleep

Sleep is essential for our health and well‐being but it has, historically, been the subject of little sociological study. Yet sleep is not, as common sense would have us believe, ‘asocial inaction’. Like our waking lives, it is a time of interaction. The sociology of sleep presently exists in a state similar to the early stages of development of the sociology of the body, waiting for something like Frank's (1991 ) typology of body action, which served as a heuristic guide through which action and its multifaceted components could be understood. This paper argues that one productive analytical framework is to adapt Watson's (2000 ) ‘male body schema’ for the sociological investigation of sleep. This revolves around four interrelated forms of embodiment: normative (opinions and perceptions about healthy sleep behaviour); pragmatic (‘normal’ as related to social role); experiential (feelings related to sleep); and visceral (the biological body and sleep). The possibilities this model provides for the sociology of sleep is illustrated in the paper through the analysis of a case study of sleep negotiation between a couple.     

Sociological social work: a cartoon

I trace an account of social work—and sociology—that I believe holds a promise for re-forming the relationship between the two. I develop the argument in two ways. First, taking 1920s Chicago as a case study, I will attempt ‘a history of the present’ to suggest how the relationship between sociology and social work came to be as it is. I will suggest that the practice of some (both familiar and forgotten) people in 1920s and 1930s sociology and social work is best explained as a form of ‘sociological social work’. Second, after tracking this genealogy, I suggest an agenda for sociological social work that consists of straining to enact certain kinds of inter-disciplinary relationships, developing methodological social work practice, hearing occasional sociological frontier conversations and shared theorising. I illustrate how these arguments challenge both sociology and social work and both theory and practice.     

Revitalizing sociology: urban life and mental illness between history and the present

This paper proposes a re‐thinking of the relationship between sociology and the biological sciences. Tracing lines of connection between the history of sociology and the contemporary landscape of biology, the paper argues for a reconfiguration of this relationship beyond popular rhetorics of ‘biologization' or ‘medicalization'. At the heart of the paper is a claim that, today, there are some potent new frames for re‐imagining the traffic between sociological and biological research – even for ‘revitalizing’ the sociological enterprise as such. The paper threads this argument through one empirical case: the relationship between urban life and mental illness. In its first section, it shows how this relationship enlivened both early psychiatric epidemiology, and some forms of the new discipline of sociology; it then traces the historical division of these sciences, as the sociological investment in psychiatric questions waned, and ‘the social' become marginalized within an increasingly ‘biological' psychiatry. In its third section, however, the paper shows how this relationship has lately been revivified, but now by a nuanced epigenetic and neurobiological attention to the links between mental health and urban life. What role can sociology play here? In its final section, the paper shows how this older sociology, with its lively interest in the psychiatric and neurobiological vicissitudes of urban social life, can be our guide in helping to identify intersections between sociological and biological attention. With a new century now underway, the paper concludes by suggesting that the relationship between urban life and mental illness may prove a core testing‐ground for a ‘revitalized' sociology.     

Wounded/monstrous/abject: a critique of the disabled body in the sociological imaginary

Contemporary sociology has made sense of bodily difference by mobilising a number of tropes. ‘Wounded’ (or vulnerable), ‘monstrous’ and ‘abject’ stand out by virtue of their ubiquity though they do not exhaust the repertoire. These categories highlight the conceptual tensions between the sociology of the body and Disability Studies. In this paper, I will examine the value of these tropes to Disability Studies and suggest that while they can help to clarify the processes that bring about the misrecognition of disabled people, understanding the nature and scope of the lives of disabled people in modernity requires a more embodied language rather than one that has been generated from a sociological imaginary that is strongly influenced by a non‐disabled subject position in which repulsion for the other – which one must become – is never fully resolved. Disability has had little impact on sociological theories of the body and when sociology ventures into disability it has tended to conflate it with an ontology of human frailty or gloss it with tropes that may be instructive about the generic or gendered modernist structure of exclusion but it tells us little about the specific forms of invalidation experienced by disabled people.     

Six Rules of Qualitative Research: A Post-Romantic Argument

Qualitative sociology too easily succumbs to a ‘Romantic’ impulse. In a sociological context, the Romantic seeks to understand raw ‘experience’, usually by the use of unstructured interviews. Such work can lack analytic rigour, failing to distinguish the sociologist from the journalist. Following Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, the approach adopted here emphasizes the forms of representation and contexts which inform practical reasoning. It recommends a non-Romantic sociology–an aspiration curiously shared by Durkheim–and suggests some ways to pursue it.     

Young bodies,power and resistance: a new materialist perspective

Portrayals of young people as either victims or perpetrators of errant, aberrant or even dangerous attitudes, desires or behaviours may be criticised for obscuring the relations of power within which young bodies are socially and physically located. However, notions of ‘resistance’ to power within these critiques remain under-theorised. In this theoretical paper we take a new materialist approach to explore the affectivity of young bodies, and the flows and intensities that produce and reproduce power and resistance, and what young bodies can do, feel and desire. To illustrate young bodies’ resistances, we offer the example of the transgressive pro-ana movement that resists both biomedical and social definitions of anorexia. We conclude there is a need to focus upon ‘resisting’ as an affective movement of becoming, rather than upon ‘resistance’ as an agentic act, with consequences both for young bodies, theory, research and activism.     

Towards an immature sociology

Sociological theory displays a tendency to depict the social world in terms of completed ‘beings’. The social, thus depicted, is a world of powers to ‘finish’(such as the power granted to convention to provide for social order), and finished products (such as agents and ethical points-of-view). As sociologists of childhood have attempted to bring children into sociological focus in their own right, the disciplinary concern with the ‘complete’ has required that children be attributed the properties assumed more normally to belong to adults. The sociology of childhood has thus preserved the privilege of the complete and the mature over the incomplete and the immature. In this paper the key sociological issues of convention, agency and ethics are given a theoretical interpretation that makes them fit for understanding childhood. The ability of convention to complete social order is questioned. Agency is portrayed as the emergent property of networks of dependency rather than the possession of individuals. An alternative to the ethics of ‘positions’ is offered in the form of an ethics of ‘motion’. Where extant sociologies of childhood have brought children into the ‘finished’ world of sociological theory, this paper uses childhood's ontological ambiguity to open the door onto an unfinished social world.     

Family is NOT an institution: distinguishing institutions from organisations in social science and social theory

This paper addresses the use, and potential misuse, of the ‘institution’ as a key concept in sociology. The concept of the ‘institution’ is interrogated using ‘family’ as an example and new institutional economics (NIE) as a crucible. The sociological understanding of family as an ‘institution’ is challenged by the distinction between ‘institutions’ and ‘organisations’ in NIE. The blurring of generic non-sociological terms with critical sociological concepts causes confusion between institutions and organisations. This is highly problematic for understanding social change in increasingly complex systems. I conclude that the contextual embedding of sociological concepts remains important to the appropriate use of the term ‘institution’ in the social sciences.     

The ‘animal‐advocacy agenda’: exploring sociology for non‐human animals

This paper focuses on sociology and the study of human non‐human animal relations. Using as a catalyst referees' comments on a previous paper about experiments using non‐human animal subjects, in this present paper three problematics are identified and discussed. These problematics centre on the ‘acceptable’ content of sociological inquiry, the ‘permissibility’ of advocacy‐oriented sociology, and the ‘admissibility’ of non‐human animal‐advocacy to advocacy‐oriented sociology. The three problematics are explored through the lens of reflexive and critical sociology. Two central questions are raised: first, should sociology include the study of non‐human animals and secondly, can sociology advocate for non‐human animals? The paper concludes with an affirmative response to both of these questions. The paper ends by stressing that sociology has so much to offer the study of human non‐human animal relations. Professional sociologists have a key role to play in enabling this work to move from margins to centre in published sociology.     

The Anglican clergy and the early development of British sociology

The theoretical bias evident in histories of sociological thought and practice has tended to minimise some other important influences on its development. One such is the relationship between ‘Christian Sociology’ as articulated by the writers of such Church of England organisations as the Christian Social Union and the Christendom Group. A reading of the early journal publications of early twentieth century British sociology suggests an inter-relationship between the input of the Anglican clergy and the emergence of a scientific, university-based discipline. With particular reference to the sociological intentions of the 1924 Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC) and to the writings of the Christian Sociologist, Maurice B. Reckitt, this article suggests that the view that the relationship between Christian and academic sociology can be interpreted simply as a ‘phase’ in sociological history does less than justice to the complexities of a neglected aspect of the professionalisation of the discipline.     

The main themes of Sociology in Europe

Social conditions influence sociological research muck more than they do other sciences. Consequently, beyond the common interests of the whole sociological community one can observe interests that are specific to social and cultural areas. It is to the interaction of general and specific sociological interests, and their relation to the possibility of constituting a ‘European’ sociology, that this paper is addressed. Its starting point is an analysis of the contributions at the XIIth World Congress of Sociology (Madrid, 1990). The relation of the proposed theme to the geographical area and gender of the conference participant was studied via the application of content analysis and the use of residual analysis. A profile of thematic preference was established for each variable category. The analysis shows that in Europe there is an evident preference for some questions, but despite this common trait, significant differences can be observed in terms of both the geographical area and gender variables.     

Relational sociology: a well-defined sociological paradigm or a challenging ‘relational turn’ in sociology?

In this paper I present and summarize the theoretical proposals of four leading scholars of the so-called ‘relational sociology’. First of all I try to contextualize its emergence and developments in the increasingly globalized scientific system. From this particular (and international) point of view, relational sociology seems to develop through a peculiar scientific path opened and charted by well-identified actors and competitors, their invisible colleges, their global connections, cleavages, and coalitions. Whatever the structuring of this field, it accomplishes the criticism of classical individualistic and collectivistic sociological theories, a task strongly facilitated by the development of new methods and techniques of empirical research, and by the increasingly powerful computing capabilities. After this brief historical reconstruction, and following very strictly the contributions of the four scholars, I try to synthetize their theoretical designs, focusing the analysis on two scientific issues of great significance for the future of relational sociology: the specific ontology of ‘social relations’ and the methodologies used to observe it adequately. Finally, I wonder if we are facing a new sociological paradigm, already well structured and internationally established, or rather a ‘relational turn’ that probably will develop into a new ‘sociological field’ internally very differentiated and articulated.     

Homework: Routine,social aesthetics and the ambiguity of everyday life

Routine is a central feature of everyday life, yet its peculiar rhythms, and the range of experiences associated with it, are often neglected within cultural studies and sociology. Simmel’s attempt to provide a sociological aesthetics is seen as a project that needs reanimating for the study of everyday life routines. This does not mean, however, that Simmel is the only, or the best, guide to the aesthetic dimensions of everyday routine life. In an attempt to provide some co-ordinates for instigating a socio-aesthetic approach to routine, this paper discusses a number of writers who couple aesthetics and the everyday, and who might provide frameworks for the study of experiential aspects of routine life. It also suggests that an inverted reading of John Dewey could provide socio-aesthetic study with the ‘formless’ forms required to bring everyday background routines into the foreground. The socio-aesthetic study of cooking undertaken by Luce Giard provides an example of the complexity of such an approach. Lastly the article looks briefly at new directions for ‘everyday life aesthetics’, more specifically at Henri Lefebvre’s unfinished project of rhythmanalysis.     

Bourdieu's distinction between philosophical and sociological approaches to Science Studies*

Sociological inquiry into the natural sciences has shown that they are contingent, social constructions. However, Science Studies research has been obstructed by epistemological conflicts about the nature of science and theoretical perspectives upon studying it. Bourdieu's sociology of science is under‐utilized in this field, as he addresses these obstructions and offers a way forward. Bourdieu argues that researchers have failed to distinguish between sociological and philosophical approaches in social science, thus committing the ‘scholastic fallacy’. In conjunction with this fallacy, the logic of the Science Studies field produces a tendency towards disciplinary confusion, philosophical radicalization, and crisis. These patterns were expressed in the ‘science wars’. The field has followed a philosophical path rather than a sociological one, and its progress has been obstructed. While some of Bourdieu's philosophical arguments remain problematic, his reflexive sociology allows us to differentiate philosophical from sociological approaches, providing an alternative direction for Science Studies.