Cultural Sociology and Other Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity in the Cultural Sciences

The subject of this article is the relationship between cultural sociology and approaches to culture in other social science disciplines. What are the characteristics of the theoretical environment, in which cultural sociology is operating? The article begins by reviewing the literature on interdisciplinarity. Many authors argue that interdisciplinarity is increasing or should be increasing, but the general consensus is that disciplinary isolation is the norm. From this perspective, the relationships between disciplines can be understood in terms of trading zones, in which fields in different disciplines have little in common, theoretically, or empirically. Interdisciplinary communication in ‘trading zones’ requires that participants laboriously construct a set of terms that permits them to exchange ideas. Alternatively, I propose that clusters of fields in different disciplines are linked by free-floating paradigms. Participants in disciplines that share ‘free-floating paradigms’ are able to communicate with one another more readily. The article presents evidence for the second interpretation, drawn from survey articles in disciplinary handbooks. Disciplines and fields in which the study of culture draws from the same pool of paradigms and models and shares a set of lines of inquiry with cultural sociology include traditional disciplines, such as anthropology, communication, geography, history and psychology, and interdisciplinary fields, such as cultural studies, communication, feminist theory, material culture, science studies, and visual culture. Interdisciplinary fields – particularly cultural studies – perform an important role in diffusing paradigms across disciplinary boundaries. Free-floating paradigms are associated with the work of major theorists, such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Clifford Geertz, Bruno Latour, Adorno, Gramsci, and Habermas.     

Arrangements for market intermediation and policies. Modernizing the fruit and vegetable market in France, 1950–1980

This article studies experiments in organizing the fruit and vegetable market from the 1950s till the late 1970s. It shows that there were alternatives to the principle of distribution, e.g. modernizing traditional wholesale markets (carreau) or setting up producer controlled veilings (marchés au cadran, or “clock auctions”). After exposing the rationale underlying each of these models, the empirical conditions are examined for actually implementing change. Attention is drawn to the factors that weigh on social actors in the market, in particular the tension between homogenization and concentration on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the uniqueness of products and transactions.     

Becoming aware of the grand social challenges: how an international and interdisciplinary educational context may broaden students’ perspectives on human rights and public health

ABSTRACT

The understanding of contemporary social problems and challenges in an international and national perspective is a significant issue for social work because of globalisation and social problems are too complex to handle by single actors themselves. The need for interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration is important. This paper focuses on experiences from an Erasmus Intensive Programme with the title Human Rights, Public Health and Social Service Challenges on Local Government in the Nordic-Baltic Sea Area. Social work students from different countries interacted with students from other disciplines such as political science, psychology and economy to discuss common challenges and solutions in this field. The analysis of the findings shows students reflect upon human rights issues as universal rights and how challenges presented by contextual differences in preconditions for everyday life between the countries, are reflected from different disciplines/professional perspectives. The paper argues that international and interdisciplinary programmes, where students get the opportunity to meet and to work with overarching and transnational issues, have a great potential for engaging students in global development in a rapidly changing world.     

Logit Models for Affiliation Networks

Once confined to networks in which dyads could be reasonably assumed to be independent, the statistical analysis of network data has blossomed in recent years. New modeling and estimation strategies have made it possible to propose and evaluate very complex structures of dependency between and among ties in social networks. These advances have focused exclusively on one-mode networks—that is, networks of direct ties between actors. We generalize these models to affiliation networks, networks in which actors are tied to each other only indirectly through belonging to some group or event. We formulate models that allow us to study the (log) odds of an actor's belonging to an event (or an event including an actor) as a function of properties of the two-mode network of actors' memberships in events. We also provide illustrative analysis of some classic data sets on affiliation networks.     

Social Isolation Among Racial/Ethnic Minority Immigrant Youth

Despite the long sociological tradition that focuses on the social adaptation of racial/ethnic minority immigrant youth, little work investigates whether these groups are socially isolated. However, existing research provides a strong foundation from which researchers can further explore this important topic. This article begins by discussing relevant theories and ongoing debates regarding minority immigrant youth's social relationships. Next, the article surveys literature across social science disciplines that describes relationships minority immigrant youth have (or in some cases, do not have) with three important social actors: their peers, teachers, and parents. The article concludes by providing recommendations for future research.     

Partitioning signed social networks

Structural balance theory has proven useful for delineating the blockmodel structure of signed social networks. Even so, most of the observed signed networks are not perfectly balanced. One possibility for this is that in examining the dynamics underlying the generation of signed social networks, insufficient attention has been given to other processes and features of signed networks. These include: actors who have positive ties to pairs of actors linked by a negative relation or who belong to two mutually hostile subgroups; some actors that are viewed positively across the network despite the presence of negative ties and subsets of actors with negative ties towards each other. We suggest that instead viewing these situations as violations of structural balance, they can be seen as belonging to other relevant processes we call mediation, differential popularity and internal subgroup hostility. Formalizing these ideas leads to the relaxed structural balance blockmodel as a proper generalization of structural balance blockmodels. Some formal properties concerning the relation between these two models are presented along with the properties of the fitting method proposed for the new blockmodel type. The new method is applied to four empirical data sets where improved fits with more nuanced interpretations are obtained.     

Interdisciplinary agendas in visual research: re-situating visual anthropology

In this article I review recent literature on visual research methods in the social sciences to explore two questions. First, I examine how recent interdisciplinary exchanges have portrayed the founding disciplines in visual research and representation through a focus on visual anthropology (and to a lesser degree visual sociology). Second, I critically survey the common aims and interests of academics promoting visual methods from/for their disciplines. As we delve into the “new” visual research literature, it becomes clear that contemporary visual researchers from different disciplines have common interests: reflexivity; collaboration; ethics; and the relationship between the content, social context and materiality of images. I shall argue for a more collaborative interdisciplinary approach to visual research whereby disciplines might learn from each other without seeking narrative foils to assert the supremacy of their own discipline at the expense of others.     

Advocacy Networks Through a Multidisciplinary Lens: Implications for Research Agendas

Advocacy networks are coalitions of movements and organizations that in recent years have gained unprecedented levels of influence through their soft power strategies. They have become key political actors in local, national and international arenas. Research on their performance and role within today’s information society has been developed by academics from different disciplines. Some of these analyses, however, seem to portray them as a new actor within an already-existing structure. This article argues that the network structure of these associations requires for a multifaceted and multidisciplinary approach in order to better understand how they are changing the political and social landscape. In order to achieve this purpose, this article is divided in two parts: the first one offers an overview of existing literature on the subject from different disciplines and at different scales, while the second part puts forward a framework to consider all relevant spheres of these networks for better analyses. As will be noted in the literature review, most of the case studies have been carried out from a clear disciplinary focus with its own set of categories and focus on preferred dynamics. This approach reduces the density of the networks by portraying them as other already-known institutions. One example of this is that of scales of action, usually defined as local, national, international or transnational. By focusing solely on the arena of direct influence, other interactions that may be central to the network are thus ignored or minimized. In order to disentangle such misrepresentations, it is suggested here to consider five dimensions of analysis in the study of advocacy networks: (1) scales of action and interaction, (2) cultural contexts and legacies, (3) network logic, (4) discourse production and contestation and (5) institutional ecosystem. By considering the implications of all five of them, it is proposed here, accounts may yield more comprehensive analyses of how these webs of civil society groups are transforming the political landscape.     

The attitudes of American sociologists toward causal theories of male homosexuality

The origin of homosexuality has been the subject of systematic study in many disciplines during the previous century. In the social science literature, two general models concerning the etiology of homosexuality have emerged, the essentialist model and the constructionist model. This article reviews these two models and provides empirical data on their relative support. Support for each model has been gauged by assessing the opinions of sociologists. Data was obtained from a random sample of sociologists teaching in colleges and universities throughout the United States. The major finding is that the majority of sociologists now endorse the essentialist position.     

Network centrality and social movement media coverage: A two-mode network analytic approach

This article examines the relationship between structural location (namely, degree centrality) and news media coverage. Our central hypothesis is that the network centrality of social movement actors is positively associated with the prevalence of actors being cited in the print news media. This paper uses two-mode data from a communication network of environmentalists in British Columbia, and examines the relationship between their structural location and the frequency by which they are cited in newsprint media with regard to particular frames (about forest conservation, environmental protest, and related issues). We asked a sample of social movement participants about their ties to a target list of relatively high profile actors (environmental activists). We turned the resulting network matrix into a bipartite graph that examined the relationships amongst the target actors vis a vis the respondents. Next we calculated point in-degree for the target actors. For the target actors we also have data from a representative sample of 957 print news articles about forestry and conservation of old growth forests in British Columbia. We compare the effects of network centrality of the target actor versus several attributes of the target actors (gender, level of radicalism, leadership status) on the amount of media coverage that each of the target actors receives. We find that network centrality is associated with media coverage controlling for actor attributes. We discuss theoretical implications of this research. Finally, we also discuss the methodological pros and cons of using a “target name roster” to construct two-mode data on social movement activists.     

The Social Psychology of Corruption: Why It Does Not Exist and Why It Should

In recent decades, corruption has emerged as a major cause of global inequality and an important subject of social scientific research. This article argues that social psychologists have not taken full advantage of analytical tools at their disposal to generate explanatory accounts of corruption in non‐Western contexts. In the first part of the article, the author maintains that the lack of social psychological research on why people engage in corruption is due to the dearth of empirical data on corruption, the theoretical complexity of this phenomenon, and current popularity of neoliberalism in politics and academic research. In the second part of the article, the author argues that the symbolic interactionism school of social psychology has a number of tools that could be more helpful in exploring the causes of corruption in non‐Western settings than rational‐choice approaches that are currently en vogue. The article concludes with an argument that such analyses could generate culturally sensitive as well as policy‐relevant theories of corruption.     

Variétés de capitalisme ou entrepreneurs institutionnels? Une application aux cas de la sous‐traitance et de la formation de la main‐d'œuvre au Québec

Based on the theory of institutional entrepreneurs, this article examines the coexistence of different forms of governance within a given economic space. Since the approach based on models of capitalism does not make it possible to account for this institutional diversity on the same territory, a theoretical perspective centred on the innovative action of social actors has been used to explain such a phenomenon. Our demonstration is based on a comparative analysis of two recent cases of transformation of public labour policies in Quebec: outsourcing and labour force training. These two major contemporary employment relations issues which are part of the same environment, have brought into play the same social actors in very similar institutional frameworks and have nevertheless led to contrasting dynamics and results. The actor's autonomy, more than a model, allows us to understand the different institutional trajectories that have thus been adopted.     

A Prophet in his Hometown? the Academic Reception of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” Across Disciplines in France and in the United States

This article analyzes the reception of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the twenty-first century” from September 2013 to June 2015 in France, where it was first released, and in the United States, by academics who come from a variety of disciplines. We discuss the “spontaneous sociology” offered by some of the actors of this reception and analyze, using their remarks as a starting point, the major predictors of the content of an academic review of Piketty. Our results highlight the strong effect of passing time on the content of the reviews – three clear phases can be identified in the reception of the book showing a “proteus effect” pattern. They also emphasize the importance of understanding how academic disciplines structure the debate – much more so than the country of residence. In fact, most of the opinions academics express on Piketty’s book are tied to their departmental affiliations. We look at how this link articulates the intellectual structures of the disciplines with field theory. Our results suggest a strong autonomy of the social scientific field from more general public concerns.     

Tracks and Traces: Thailand and the Work of Andrew Turton

To understand caste in India we must explain the particularity of this mode of stratification, while avoiding an essentialism that isolates caste from other social forms. Stratification appeared in India long before an emic model of caste. Yet in contemporary India, I found actors concerned to place themselves in a rank order, even in ephemeral situations. I outline an Indian concept of the individual, characterised by relative immunity of the self to the social sphere, and argue that this immunity acts as a shield to keep ranking apart from the self. Indian actors show their social capability by adapting to situations rather than imposing a consistent personality across them. Local stratification is explained by actors in a historical mode, as if history was an interactional sequence played out between communities rather than individuals. Indigenous models of society provide an alternative explanatory mode, as when Brahmins claim the superior position. Their holistic model, however, is matched by king-centred and merchant-centred models. Subalterns have yet other views of Indian society. I argue that holistic models in India are constructions of the dominant, and should not be taken to represent ‘Indian culture’. Indian society should rather be seen as plural, with several emic models used to describe and explain it. Still, the tendency to create rank in so many situations points to particular rules of interaction and discourse, which implies talking ‘as if’ hierarchy, in the Dumontian sense, was an objective reality.     

A latent space model for cognitive social structures data

This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling a set of directed, binary networks in the context of cognitive social structures (CSSs) data. We adopt a relativist approach in which no assumption is made about the existence of an underlying true network. More specifically, we rely on a generalized linear model that incorporates a bilinear structure to model transitivity effects within networks, and a hierarchical specification on the bilinear effects to borrow information across networks. This is a spatial model, in which the perception of each individual about the strength of the relationships can be explained by the perceived position of the actors (themselves and others) on a latent social space. A key goal of the model is to provide a mechanism to formally assess the agreement between each actors’ perception of their own social roles with that of the rest of the group. Our experiments with both real and simulated data show that the capabilities of our model are comparable with or, even superior to, other models for CSS data reported in the literature.     

Prestige in social dilemmas: A network analytic approach to cooperation among Bogotá’s art organizations

What brings about cooperation in social dilemmas? The literature has proposed motivational and strategic solutions to social dilemmas. In motivational solutions, actors cooperate because they care about fairness. In strategic solutions actors cooperate because their chances to exploit others are reduced. This paper argues that actors also cooperate in order to gain prestige. The effect of prestige on cooperation is examined relying on a unique set of network and covariate data on art organizations (museums, independent art spaces, galleries and art foundations) in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. Bogotá is a not a very likely environment for cooperation, since distrust is still widespread after a long civil war. The temporal exponential random graph models predict dyadic cooperation (i.e., between two actors) based on past and present cooperation in the network as well as of the organizations’ characteristics. The analysis thus controls for the effect of actors’ past and present interaction on the present cooperation dilemma. The paper shows that prestige affects cooperation in social dilemmas independent of past and present interactions.     

Sozialer Status und prosoziales Handeln: Ein Quasi-Experiment im Krankenhaus

Sociological, social psychological and economic research on the nexus between socioeconomic status and prosociality has so far provided contradictory findings. Some studies suggest that actors with a high socioeconomic status act more egoistically than actors with a lower socioeconomic status. Other studies find the opposite to be true. In contrast to previous research, which has worked with one-dimensional measures for socioeconomic status, this study examines prosocial behavior among occupational groups that have regular real-life contact in their workspace. About 150 hospital employees (physicians, nursing staff and nursing students) participated in experiments on altruistic giving in dictator games. The findings are surprisingly strong and clear-cut: Actors with higher social status act more prosocial than low-status actors. Furthermore, we find hardly any in-group effects, which have been repeatedly postulated. Our findings support the claim that high status promotes prosocial behavior. Also, they indicate that the inconclusive and in part contradictory findings provided by previous research stem to a considerable degree from deficient measures of social status and problematic experimental designs.     

Social problems clusters as contexts for claimsmaking: implications for the study of off-campus housing

ABSTRACT

Many social problems claims occur in a context that involves (1) actors’ recognition of other stakeholders, (2) relationships among those actors, and (3) varying temporal frameworks that influence how each claimsmaker views the current collection of issues. We call actors’ involvement in overlapping issues a social problems cluster, a set of claimsmaking efforts that involve many of the same people and groups as advocates, or opponents. Using a case study of local student housing issues as an example, we suggest the following regarding the social problems cluster. First, we consider how the interactions among social problems cluster members shape what happens with a particular issue. Second, we consider the way participants within one social problems cluster recognize links may reflect participants’ biographies, interests, ideologies, and so forth. Attending to how the social problems cluster’s members interact and link issues helps to locate a particular claim within its broader context.     

Scandal as norm entrepreneurship strategy: Corruption and the French investigating magistrates

The sociological and legal scholarship on norm entrepreneurship focuses almost exclusively on the creation and promotion of new norms. Much of norm entrepreneurship is, however, oriented towards the solidification of existing yet under-enforced norms. Such entrepreneurship, which legal officials as well as social and political actors can undertake, often involves creating scandals: publicizing the real or alleged transgressions of high status actors. Scandals entail the exercise of popular justice and their logic is collectivistic. These two characteristics underlie the strategic recourse to scandal that often combines norm entrepreneurship and status-enhancement. This article discusses the use of scandal by the French investigating magistrates in the 1990s. Exploiting the declining prestige of the political elite, the low status French investigating magistrates targeted high status political actors and publicized their corruption investigations. The use of scandal circumvented the political pressures in the judicial process and the niceties of criminal procedure, discredited the political elite as a whole, and forced the latter to adopt various anti-corruption measures. Traditionally subordinate to the executive, the French judiciary mobilized around the corruption scandals against the political elite and, for the first time since the Revolution, acquired relative independence and enhanced status.     

More Powerful Forces? Women,Nonviolence, and Mobilization

In this survey of studies of women's nonviolent mobilization, I scrutinize “more powerful forces,” the mobilizing forces of marginalized social actors that add to and make possible the development of broad‐based people power. The study of people power has yet to extensively consider the contribution of marginalized social actors. Specifically, I ask: (i) What do women contribute to the development of nonviolent protest power and (ii) What can we learn about mobilizing power, the power of people to protest nonviolently and gain the franchise they seek, when we expand our analytical lens to incorporate women's roles? How do we account for the gendered but often unseen actions taken by marginalized social actors? My focus on women in nonviolent mobilization stems directly from my research on gendered invisibility with an empirical focus on women's gendered socialization. Here, I review how gendered social structures shape women's power of participation and success in nonviolent mobilization.