PDF Seth Abrutyn Editor Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory

Sociology can explain much more of the social universe than it could then, and now it is poised to explain even more. Sociology would be able to develop testable theories, formally expressed, that could explain the operative dynamics of the social universe.

Part II Rethinking the Macro-Micro Link

Part III A Coherent Social Universe

Part IV Constraints on Experience

Part V Modes of Change

Orienting Ourselves
Three Challenges

The Time Crunch
The Slavish Adherence Principle
The Conceptual Crunch

An Overview

Classic Questions
Levels of Social Reality
Theorizing the Social World The ﬁ nal section of the book takes a third

Conclusion

There is not enough time to take the student through Durkheim's suicide and the development of the sociology of suicide throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. First, because of the size of the theory and the way it is taught, many scholars invent neologisms for pre-existing concepts or processes.

Integrating and Disintegrating Dynamics in Human Societies

Approaching the Analysis of Integration in Societies

Macrostructures and cultures are made up of meso-level structures, while the corporate and categorical units of the meso level constrain what happens in microencounters. Conversely, the dynamics of encounters influence the dynamics of integration at the meso level and sometimes even at the macro level of social organization.

The Macrodynamics of Integration

Structural Mechanisms of Integration

Segmentation
Differentiation
Interdependencies
Segregation
Domination and Stratiﬁ cation Max Weber’s ([1922] 1968 : 212–299) analysis of
Intersections
Cultural Integration

In contrast, members of categorical units are placed in positions within the work divisions of corporate units. In this condition of lower dominance, the intersection of memberships of categorical units in divisions of labor of corporate units will be higher.

The Microdynamics of Integration

Basic Conditions of Emotion Arousal
The Distribution
Meeting Expectations and Receiving Positive
Transactional Needs and Their Effects on Meeting

And as these positive emotions build up, their arousal dampens the effects of the distal bias inherent in negative emotional arousal. Group Inclusion: Must feel part of the continuous flow of interaction in an encounter; and the more focused the encounter, the more powerful is this need.

Mesodynamics of Integration

Fields and Niches Among Corporate Units

The Ecology of Corporate Units When attention shifts to the ecology of corporate
Structural and Cultural Fields The new institutionalism tended to see the ﬁ elds

Intersection and Consolidation

And as differentiation between business units increases, so will the level of intersection between members of various categorical units within business unit divisions of labor in a wider range of institutional domains. Structural Fields A structural field is created through the macro-level integration on business units as institutional domains evolve.

Conclusion

Power in Organizational Society

Introduction
The Macro Approach to Power
The Micro Approach to Power
Introducing the Meso-Level

A Brief History of the Emergence
Empowering Organizations
The Nature of Power in Organizations

Connecting the Micro
Connecting the Macro
Conclusions

A relational understanding of power has inspired and underpinned many classical definitions of power. The second goal of the paper is to connect the meso-approach to power with power research at the macro-level of social formations and the micro-level of exchange.

Action in Society: Reﬂ exively Conceptualizing Activities

Sovereignty, Rational Action, and the Puzzles of Modernity

At the same time, and once prompted by the division of the church (and thus authority), the notion of rationality favored by the philosophers began to move in the direction of formalization. Holism received unexpected but also confused nourishment in the French Revolution's descent into terror, dictatorship, and restoration.

Thinking About Appropriate Activity Concepts

And finally, since there are institutions in coordinating the activities of often many politically fertile people. Prediction tells at best what state to expect, not how to successfully intervene in the world to reach a certain state.

Action in Modern Social Thought

Individualism
Communalism 14

Emergent Social Facts
Social Activity Concepts
Weaknesses and Strengths of Established Social Action

In other words, in the social sciences, the use of the term emergence in the Comte-Durkheim sense of a "strong" emergence is ontically quite problematic. A very important dimension of Simmel's theory of interaction is provided by his transcendental reflections on the conditions for the possibility of interaction to take place in the first place.

Action-Reaction Effect Sequences

35 Seen from the consequently processualist model presented here, it is therefore highly misleading to speak of micro and macro as "levels". 38 It is therefore no coincidence that the art of rhetoric as a self-conscious practice first flourished in the participatory politics of the ancient Greek poleis and in Republican Rome.

Conclusion

The idea of the self: thinking and experiencing in Western Europe since the seventeenth century. Marsh (Trans.) New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations.

Interactionism: Meaning and Self as Process

Introduction

In this, Mead's philosophy gave theoretical flesh to an influential idea that an early Chicago sociologist, Charles Horton Cooley (1902), has called "the mirror image"—that the way we understand ourselves is always determined by the way we understand ourselves . way we think others understand us. That is, the unity of analysis in interactionism is what Blumer (following another of his teachers, Robert Park) called "the collective act."

Research Projects

Patterns of Self
Situational Patterns
Patterns of Collectivity

For customers, it was the fast nature of the interaction that was of utmost importance. This decision was then codified into a seemingly minor detail of the situation – a box to be checked.

Interactionism: Challenges and Developments

The Tricky Problem of Culture But not all questions are so easily answerable

But it does so without losing sight of the situation's creative potential as a place of meaning-making. So, from an actor's point of view, just focusing on the here and now of the situation misses a lot of what makes it what it is.

So Where Does This All Leave Us?

This included the obvious - the repetitive moments of synagogue life and religious celebrations, the structured demands of their children's schools -. It is in the aggregation of situations and as people try to make sense of them together and negotiate the meaning of their world and their own identities that the social world is made.

Introduction

In the fourth part, I will examine some of the fundamental issues in contemporary cultural analysis. I close by highlighting the implications of this situation for the future of the "concept of culture" as a central analytical resource in sociology.

The Sociological Classics as Pre-cultural Theorists

The Germanic Tradition
Marx and Engels’s “Big” Idea The problematic that was most poignant in the
Max Weber’s Little Ideas
Emile Durkheim’s Représentations

The theorist who would move the German debate on ideas to the level of the individual was Max Weber. At the level of the individual, Durkheim does not face the action-theoretical problem of whether he is "ideal".

Enter “Culture”: Talcott Parsons

Parsons Invents “Culture”
Culturalizing the Classics
Classical Socialization Theory Textbook introductions to normativist functional-

The story of how this happened is an ugly one, as everyone focuses on the "rewriting" of the classics established by Parsons in The Structure of Social Action (1937), when Parsons did not yet have access to the concept of modern culture. From these conceptual fragments, Parsons constructed his version of the concept of culture in the 1940s and 1950s.

Contemporary Cultural Theory: Fighting

The Problem of “cultural depth”
Reactions to the (Over) reaction
Whatever Happened to the Cultural System?

In the same way, revivals of the "strong external sampling" of the "super-organic" element of culture, such as Alexander (2003) or Reed (2011), try to conceptualize this sampling without relying on the problematic (quasi-organicist) conception of culture as a. system.". It is Parsons who is clear and offers the notion of a "cultural system" as a scientific object of study.

Conclusion

The first assumption ("essentializing premise") is an ontological representation of the cultural system as an addition to the social and material world, which manifests itself as a set of signs and signifying objects and actions. The second assumption ("formalizing premise") is the endowment of this hypostatized cultural system with the endogenous ability to create "meaning" and significance through the internal interplay of signs only in isolation from action, cognition, and social structure.

The Macro and Meso Basis of the Micro Social Order

Introduction

Levels of Social Reality
Embedding
Structure and Culture
Evolution of the Social Universe

A top-down theory must therefore explain how the dynamics of the macro-realm affect the meso-realm, which in turn affects the micro-realm of the meeting. There are, of course, reciprocal affects from micro to meso to macro, but these will be underemphasized because of the strain I got writing this chapter.

The Macro Level of Social Reality

Selection Pressures
Properties of the Macro Realm of Reality

Cultural Properties of the Macro Realm
The Ordering of Cultural Elements
Structural Properties and Dynamics of the Macro

Ideologies and meta-ideologies are formed from the circulation of generalized symbolic media across domains and legitimize, with varying degrees of success, the inequalities of the stratification system. Conflict often begins at the micro level, as emotions are stirred between individuals in corporate meetings and units due to discrimination against their membership in categorical units; and when there is mobilization around grievances, there are changes in the structure and culture of institutional domains and the profile and culture of the class system, thus changing the micro-level dynamics of social organization.

The Meso Realm of Social Reality

The Cultural Beliefs

Beliefs in Corporate Units
Beliefs About Categoric Units As the literature in social psychology on status

The Structure of Corporate and Categoric Units

Successive Embedding
Consolidation and Intersection An important property of corporate and categoric

And it is all the more likely that the evaluative content of status beliefs about membership in categorical units will influence beliefs about status locations in divisions of labor. When distributions consolidate categorical unit memberships into particular types and levels of locations in corporate units, categorical unit memberships and status beliefs about locations in divisions of labor are consolidated and strengthened (Turner 2002); and as a result, a society becomes more stratified.

The Micro Level of Social Reality

The Culture of Situational Expectations in Micro-level
The Structural Properties of Micro Reality

The Nature of Status
The Nature of the Corporate Units
Boundary Markers and Rituals The more bounded is a corporate unit in physical

In communities, if the encounter is part of one of the organizations that make up a community (eg, police, medical offices, schools, churches, etc.), then the expectations inherited in the division of labor of the organization in which an encounter is embedded will be operative. But, in most cases, individuals and groups of individuals tend to adhere to the expectations of places where meetings should not be focused.

Motivational and Emotional Dynamics in Encounters

Meeting the Expectations States Generated
Receiving Positive or Negative Sanctions

What forces break the centripetal control of approximate bias and thereby allow positive emotions to flow from external and legitimate macrostructures, generating commitments to these structures and their culture. In contrast, positive emotions when experienced in many encounters embedded in corporate units in a wide range of institutional fields will have the same effects as the fulfillment of expected states in breaking proximal biases and leading to legitimization and commitment to , their macrostructures and cultures.

Comparing Top-Down with Bottom-Up

So they are right that the nature of the embedding is crucial in determining whether or not encounters can break through the proximal bias and allow positive emotions to migrate first to meso and then to macrostructures and their cultures. Perhaps the positive emotions coercively generated will not break through the proximal bias, but they will make the world of micro-level encounters more satisfying and prevent their rejection of the meso and macro worlds that limit their options.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the forces of the micro-realm of the social universe constantly feed back into the meso- and macro-realms, making them more or less viable. As long as these feedbacks reinforce connections to the structures and cultures of the meso- and macro-realm, a top-down analysis provides a great deal of explanatory power of what is likely to occur in the micro-universe.

The Problem of Social Order in Nested Group Structures

Introduction
Theoretical Orientation

Concept of Social Order
Emotions and Social Order The overall implication is clear: Groups that gen-
Research Evidence

Theoretical Mechanisms

Autonomy and Control
Interaction Frequency
Tasks and Shared Responsibility
Interconnections of Proximal and Distal Groups
Comparing Our Approach to Jon Turner’s

Developing a New Theoretical Formulation

The Argument

Conclusion

These emotions originate in social 'encounters' on a micro level. The strength and resilience of a macro-order depends on micro-level encounters that generate positive emotions, as well as the propagation of those feelings to larger groups, organizations or communities. This amounts to a matter of 'social emergence'. The theory of relational cohesion (Lawler and Yoon take up this question for social exchange contexts.

Social Networks and Relational Sociology

Introduction
Holism and Individualism
Networks, Interactions and Ties

Interdependence and Power In many cases actors’ ties also involve interde-
From Dyads to Triads and Networks

Social Worlds and the Social World
Analyzing Networks

The Whole Network
Subgroups
Node Level Properties

Structure and Agency
Micro and Macro
Conclusion

Althusserian Marxism, like Parsonian functionalism, removed human actors from the picture, identifying institutions as relevant parts of the capitalist system for analysis and critique (although Althusser (1971) later reintroduced the 'subject' into his theory of ideology). At birth they possess very few of the qualities of a 'social actor' and acquire these qualities only as a result of interaction with others.

Varieties of Sociological Field Theory

Introduction
Common Themes in Field Theories
Classical Roots of Contemporary
Contemporary Elaborations of Sociological Field Theory

The promise of field theory is its potential to explain interactions in a wide variety of social settings. We refer the reader to May (1972) and Martin (2003) for more detailed accounts of the classical foundations of field theory, drawing on many others.