Contemporary articles citing White H (1992) Identity Control Str

cultural, concept, empirical, economic, here, action, market, point, institutional, expectations

Fuhse, Jan. 2009. "The Meaning Structure of Social Networks." Sociological Theory. 27:1 51-73. Link

This essay proposes to view networks as sociocultural structures. Following authors from Leopold von Wiese and Norbert Elias to Gary Alan Fine and Harrison White, networks are configurations of social relationships interwoven with meaning. Social relationships as the basic building blocks of networks are conceived of as dynamic structures of reciprocal (but not necessarily symmetric) expectations between alter and ego. Through their transactions, alter and ego construct an idiosyncratic ``relationship culture'' comprising symbols, narratives, and relational identities. The coupling of social relationships to networks, too, is heavily laden with meaning. The symbolic construction of persons is one instance of this coupling. Another instance is the application of social categories (like race or gender), which both map and structure social networks. The conclusion offers an agenda for research on this ``meaning structure of social networks.''.

Wherry, Frederick. 2008. "The Social Characterizations of Price: the Fool, the Faithful, the Frivolous, and the Frugal." Sociological Theory. 26:4 363-379.

This article extends both Viviana Zelizer's discussion of the social meaning of money and Charles Smith's proposal that pricing is a definitional practice to the under-theorized realm of the social meanings generated in the pricing system. Individuals are attributed with calculating or not calculating whether an object or service is ``worth'' its price, but these attributions differ according to the individual's social location as being near to or far from a societal reference point rather than by the inherent qualities of the object or service purchased. Prices offer seemingly objective (quantitative) proof of the individual's ``logic of appropriateness''-in other words, people like that pay prices such as those. This article sketches a preliminary but nonexhaustive typology of the social characterizations of individuals within the pricing system; these ideal types-the fool, the faithful, the frugal, and the frivolous-and their components offer a systematic approach to understanding prices as embedded in and constituents of social meaning systems.

Fuchs, S. 2001. "Beyond Agency." Sociological Theory. 19:1 24-40. Link

The reason why agency/structure and micro/macro debates remain unresolved is the bad essentialist habit of treating such pairs as opposite natural kinds. Once variation is allowed, agency and structure. or micro and macro, are temporal? poles bracketing a continuum. with serial entities moving along this continuum over time. Explaining these transformations from agency into structure, or micro into macro. and vice versa is the challenge for explanatory theory. This challenge is met by switching to a constructivist level of second-order observing. Then, agency and structure become variable devices or frames different observers might use to perform different sorts of cultural work.

Zafirovski, M. 2000. "The Rational Choice Generalization of Neoclassical Economics Reconsidered: Any Theoretical Legitimation for Economic Imperialism?." Sociological Theory. 18:3 448-471. Link

The article reconsiders the generalization of neoclassical economics by modern rational choice theory. Hence, it reexamines the possible theoretical grounds or lack thereof within neoclassical economics for economic imperialism implied in much of rational choice theory. Some indicative instances of rational choice theory's generalization of neoclassical economics are reviewed. The main portion of the article addresses the question as to whether neoclassical economics allows its generalization in rational choice theory and thus legitimizes economic imperialism. Presented are a number of pertinent theoretical reasons why neoclassical economics does not fully justify ifs generalization into rational choice as a general social theory particularly into an over-arching economic approach to social action and society Also discussed are some theoretical implications of the rational choice generalization of neoclassical economics. The main contribution of the article is to defect lack of a strong theoretical rationale in much of neoclassical economics for rational choice theory's manifest or latent economic imperialism.

Collins, R. 2000. "Situational Stratification: a Micro-macro Theory of Inequality." Sociological Theory. 18:1 17-43. Link

Somers, MR. 1995. "Narrating and Naturalizing Civil Society and Citizenship Theory: the Place of Political Culture and the Public Sphere." Sociological Theory. 13:3 229-274. Link

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the `'political culture concept'' in the social sciences. Surprisingly Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nov cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, volume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Angle-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Angle-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology.

SOMERS, MR. 1994. "The Narrative Constitution of Identity - a Relational and Network Approach." Theory and Society. 23:5 605-649. Link

This article argues for reconfiguring the study of identity formation through the concept of narrative. It is motivated by two recent but seemingly unrelated developments in social theory and society. One is the emergence of a wide-spread `'identity politics'' and a concomitant scholarly focus on the `'social construction of identity.'' The other is the reconfigured approach to the concept of narrative that researchers from many disciplines have been formulating in recent years. Both are important developments not to be overlooked by social scientists and social theorists; both, however, have problems and limitations as they now stand. I argue in this article that the limitations of each potentially can be overcome by bringing the two thematics together. The key concept I propose to achieve this reconfiguration is that of narrative identity.

Hanagan, M. 1997. "Citizenship, Claim-making, and the Right to Work: Britain, 1884-1911." Theory and Society. 26:4 449-474. Link

Brubaker, R & F Cooper. 2000. "Beyond ``identity''." Theory and Society. 29:1 1-47. Link

Swedberg, R. 2001. "Sociology and Game Theory: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives." Theory and Society. 30:3 301-335. Link

Krippner, GR. 2001. "The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the Paradigm of Economic Sociology." Theory and Society. 30:6 775-810. Link

Mohr, John & Harrison White. 2008. "How to Model an Institution." Theory and Society. 37:5 485-512. Link

Institutions are linkage mechanisms that bridge across three kinds of social divides-they link micro systems of social interaction to meso (and macro) levels of organization, they connect the symbolic with the material, and the agentic with the structural. Two key analytic principles are identified for empirical research, relationality and duality. These are linked to new research strategies for the study of institutions that draw on network analytic techniques. Two hypotheses are suggested. (1) Institutional resilience is directly correlated to the overall degree of structural linkages that bridge across domains of level, meaning, and agency. (2) Institutional change is related to over-bridging, defined as the sustained juxtaposition of multiple styles within the same institutional site. Case examples are used to test these contentions. Institutional stability is examined in the case of Indian caste systems and American academic science. Institutional change is explored in the case of the rise of the early Christian church and in the origins of rock and roll music.

Aspers, Patrik. 2009. "Knowledge and Valuation in Markets." Theory and Society. 38:2 111-131. Link

The purpose of this theoretical article is to contribute to the analysis of knowledge and valuation in markets. In every market actors must know how to value its products. The analytical point of departure is the distinction between two ideal types of markets that are mutually exclusive, status and standard. In a status market, valuation is a function of the status rank orders or identities of the actors on both sides of the market, which is more entrenched than the value of what is traded in the market. In a market characterized by a standard, the situation is reversed; the scale of value is more entrenched than the rankings of actors in the market. In a status market actors need to know about the other actors involved as there is no scale of value for evaluating the items traded in the market independently of its buyers and sellers. In a standard market it is more important to know how to meet the standard in relation to which all items traded are valued. The article includes empirical examples and four testable hypotheses.

Beckert, Jens. 2009. "The Social Order of Markets." Theory and Society. 38:3 245-269. Link

In this article I develop a proposal for the theoretical vantage point of the sociology of markets, focusing on the problem of the social order of markets. The initial premise is that markets are highly demanding arenas of social interaction, which can only operate if three inevitable coordination problems are resolved. I define these coordination problems as the value problem, the problem of competition and the cooperation problem. I argue that these problems can only be resolved based on stable reciprocal expectations on the part of market actors, which have their basis in the socio-structural, institutional and cultural embedding of markets. The sociology of markets aims to investigate how market action is structured by these macrostructures and to examine their dynamic processes of change. While the focus of economic sociology has been primarily on the stability of markets and the reproduction of firms, the conceptualization developed here brings change and profit motives more forcefully into the analysis. It also differs from the focus of the new economic sociology on the supply side of markets, by emphasizing the role of demand for the order of markets, especially in the discussion of the problems of valuation and cooperation.

Ghaziani, Amin. 2009. "An ``amorphous Mist''? the Problem of Measurement in the Study of Culture." Theory and Society. 38:6 581-612. Link

Sociological studies of culture have made significant progress on conceptual clarification of the concept, while remaining comparatively quiescent on questions of measurement. This study empirically examines internal conflicts (or ``infighting''), a ubiquitous phenomenon in political organizing, to propose a ``resinous culture framework'' that holds promise for redirection. The data comprise 674 newspaper articles and more than 100 archival documents that compare internal dissent across two previously unstudied lesbian and gay Marches on Washington. Analyses reveal that activists use infighting as a vehicle to engage in otherwise abstract definitional debates that provide concrete answers to questions such as who are we and what do we want. The mechanism that enables infighting to concretize these cultural concerns is its coupling with fairly mundane and routine organizational tasks. This mechanism affords one way to release the culture concept, understood here as collective self-definitions, from being ``an amorphous, indescribable mist which swirls around society members,'' as it was once provocatively described.

Beckert, Jens. 2013. "Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations in the Economy." Theory and Society. 42:3 219-240. Link

Starting from the assumption that decision situations in economic contexts are characterized by fundamental uncertainty, this article argues that the decision-making of intentionally rational actors is anchored in fictions. ``Fictionality'' in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world and the beliefs in causal mechanisms leading to this future state. Actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future and organize their activities based on these mental representations. Since these representations are not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are also a source of creativity in the economy. Fictionality opens up a way to an understanding of the microfoundations of the dynamics of the economy. The article develops the notion of fictional expectations. It discusses the role of fictional expectations for the dynamics of the economy and addresses the question of how fictional expectations motivate action. The last part relates the notion of fiction to calculation and social macrostructures, especially institutions and cultural frames. The conclusion hints at the research program developing from the concept of fictional expectations.