Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour最新文献

In this paper, we attempt to rehabilitate the notion of role by linking sociological role theory to recent work on motivational, affective, and cognitive neuroscience specifying the internal mechanisms behind motivated action. We argue that there is nothing inherently problematic or retrogressive in the idea of “role,” once its link to a purely normative account of motivated action is severed. Instead, by conceptualizing roles as emerging and persisting around structured reward systems, we are able to incorporate contemporary motivational science such that rewards become the proximate causal mechanisms currently missing in role theory. Consequently, a key implication of our argument is that the best way to link role, action, and structures is by reviving the idea of institutions as literal reward systems, which allows us to envision roles as the mechanisms via which the pursuit and delivery of rewards and goal-objects are routinized. Implications for a motivational theory of roles, rewards, and institutions is discussed.

Philosophy of social science (PoS) typologies can help practitioners in the social sciences to reflect upon the often-tacit assumptions embedded in research. Existing PoS typologies however suffer from various shortcomings, one of them being a tendency to present extreme versions of the assumptions underpinning research. Having considered this and other shortcomings, the present paper advances a flexible PoS typology. Operating with strong and moderated versions of three PoS perspectives – positivism, constructionism and (critical) realism – the typology captures key assumptions underpinning a broad range of contemporary social research. Moreover, it opens up the possibility of contemplating the assumptions embedded in research in a more fruitful way. To render tangible how the typology constitutes an improvement over existing typologies, it is used in reflections on sustainability research on climate negotiations, green growth and housing development.

Judith Butler and Kate Manne shed, in different ways, doubt on the capacity of the recognition-paradigm to comprehend phenomena of crucial ethical and political importance: whereas Butler argues that deeper than recognition are “frames” in light of which individuals and groups appear as recognizable human beings at all, Manne argues that too much has been made of the capacity of the idea of being recognized as human or person to explain interhuman cruelty and violence. In short, for Butler there is something even more important than recognition that precedes it, whereas for Manne matters of vital (or lethal) importance happen after, or on top of, recognition. In my view both are pointing at crucially important issues, but I am more optimistic of the capacity of the notion of recognition to deal with them. I present an account of recognition as personification, which can both meet the challenges and unite the seemingly disparate views of the two authors as complementary perspectives to, and focussed on dialectically related aspects of, a whole. This whole is recognition, or lack thereof, of particular individuals and groups as full-fledged persons.

Some philosophical and psychological approaches to social interaction posit a powerful explanatory tool for explaining how we navigate social situations: scripts. Scripts tell people how to interact in different situational and cultural contexts depending on social roles such as gender. A script theory of social interaction puts emphasis on understanding the world as normatively structured. Social structures place demands, roles, and ways to behave in the social world upon us, which, in turn, guide the ways we interact with one another and the ways we coordinate our behaviors. In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of coordinated behaviors in social interactions in humans. I argue that looking closely at everyday interactions, for which social coordination is central, strongly points to a fundamental role of scripts for social cognition and interaction. In order to explain some social interactions, like those based on social coordination, we do not need to recourse to mental state attribution. Rather, I argue, scripts are a powerful resource for explaining social interaction and especially coordinated behaviors. Scripts have been neglected in standard approaches to social cognition but are (re-)gaining attention via the normative turn in social cognition.

Recent writings on recognition and ambivalence highlight the limits of narrowly dyadic and teleological accounts of recognition. In this article, I extend the work on ambivalent recognition by proffering a conception of recognition as vulnerable. I emphasise the need to come to know the self as part of the journey toward recognition and to interrogate the role of the privileged in the dance of recognition. I illustrate vulnerable recognition with reference to literature that highlights this more complicated reading of recognition in practice, including calls for white settlers to come to understand the way settler culture shapes relations with others and Indigenous refusal of recognition. I maintain that a vulnerable and processual conception of recognition takes seriously the demand to re-cognise or to ‘know again’, which is at the heart of Hegel's agonistic account of recognition. A vulnerable conception of recognition enables us to better understand our interconnectedness and the place we occupy in particular histories and structures, with their ongoing legacies of privilege and oppression.

Heritage sites and places are often mobilized to represent a group's identity and sense of place and belonging. This paper will illustrate how heritage and museum visiting, as a leisure activity, facilitates or impedes recognition and redistribution in direct and indirect ways. Drawing on extensive qualitative interviews with visitors to 45 heritage sites and museums in the USA, Australia, and England, the paper demonstrates the importance of emotions in mundane struggles over recognition and misrecognition. How emotions uphold or challenge investments in heritage narratives are examined. The paper argues that heritage and heritage-making is a valuable focus of analysis that reveals the nuances of how people sustain or impede claims for recognition and redistribution.

I present a theoretical social psychological framework for social knowledge based mainly on the triadic concept of sign relations and the process of semiosis. The framework is based on concepts from authors aligned with interpretative semiotic approaches, such as Peirce, Deely and Eco. After defining signs and sign relations, I propose to conceive social knowledge as sign relations happening in communication processes, and employ the notion of code to account for socially shared group conventions. I suggest that the analysis of code properties such as content, social acknowledgment and history can identify differences in social knowledge forms and the concrete contexts that sustain them. The framework is discussed in comparison with other social and cultural psychological approaches based on semiosis. Finally, methodological implications are commented.

The metaphysics of sex and gender is of significant philosophical, social, and cultural interest at present. Terms like transgender and cisgender have come into wider circulation in the fight for gender justice. While many are familiar with ‘transgender’, fewer know ‘cisgender’, the term that captures AFAB-women (assigned ‘female’ at birth-women) and AMAB-men. But ‘cisgender’ is controversial to some, which I find surprising. In this article, I reflect on my process of recognising my self as cisgender. During, I highlight the ethico-political consequences of refusing the onto-epistemic category ‘cisgender’. I shall argue that uptake of ‘cisgender’ and apprenticeship to trans texts uncovers how we maintain, and might purposefully disturb, queer/cis-hetero, man/woman/other hierarchies of social identity power. I argue this self-recognition is a crucial tool for challenging ‘cisgender commonsense’ and may be a means toward dislodging ciscentrism in my (western, Anglophone) milieu.

In this article, I discuss the importance of ontology and its implications, demonstrated in the examples of different approaches to neoliberalism. The lack of careful ontological considerations leads to confusing and often contradictory usages of the term ‘neoliberalism’, obfuscating its usefulness. Instead, I suggest a cartography which consists of integrating two ontological debates - structure-agency and material-ideational - through the interplay between the problematiques of structuration and semiosis, and the operational debate on ideas/interests. In so doing, this cartography can provide readers with various heuristic devices to understand the making of theories, why and how conceptualizations of neoliberalism differ between and within theories and pinpoint the thematic implications of these differences. The translation of this cartography helps to achieve two things, (1) to move beyond the static analyses of neoliberalism and endorse the dynamic understand of neoliberalization processes, (2) to understand why systemic process-based understandings of neoliberalization can create distinctions between analytical understandings of neoliberalism in terms of either the commodification of marketization processes or the marketization of commodification processes.