ABSTRACT This article brings Norm Circle Theory (NCT) into dialogue with Critical Heritage Theory (CHT) to examine normative authority in the heritage field. Although strands of CHT that draw on discourse analysis and assemblage approaches illuminate the ideological formations shaping heritage and the relationships between humans, cultural objects and nature, they often operate with a relatively “flat” ontology that tends to leave the causal powers and ontological depth of these components undertheorized. Drawing on depth ontology and a realist theory of emergence, NCT grounds normativity in real social entities whose enduring properties and relations generate emergent causal powers. In light of CHT's ongoing concern with power and hegemony in heritage governance, NCT offers a stronger explanatory account of how norms are produced, contested and stabilised over time. Drawing on qualitative secondary analysis of two cases—debates over the conservation of medieval painted churches in Cyprus and over the demolition of the governmental Y‐block in Oslo, the paper shows that heritage controversies are structured interactions among overlapping norm circles, each mobilising distinct discourses and institutional resources. The paper concludes by reflecting on how NCT can complement existing approaches in heritage studies, including Critical Discourse Analysis and people‐centred approaches and ultimately offers a framework that more effectively explains authority and power in heritage governance.
ABSTRACT Social norms are negotiated in discourses. Discourse participants join together as collective actors in order to pursue their shared interests with the help of norms. However, successfully negotiated norms neither represent the interests of all members of society, nor are all representatives of these norms completely convinced of them. Because of the ontological principle of lack, all concepts of collective identity, including norms, are based on the frustration of members of the collective. Complete satisfaction is not possible even for the most discursively powerful actors, as they experience conflicting needs such as pleasure, social belonging and differentiation, not all of which can be fulfiled by a norm enforced by them. This promotes dissatisfaction, which can be suppressed by the unconscious psychological defence mechanisms of dissociation and disavowal. With these mechanisms, subject emotionally distance themselves from stressful situations such as the existence of inadequate norms. The subject can lethargically settle into difficult situations or use the disconnection from stressful feelings as a basis for discursively advocating for the change of norms. Power relations, cultural practices and structures promote the popularity of certain needs and defence mechanisms. Disavowed and dissociated discursive positions and feelings accumulate as the real and return unexpectedly in a destructive form. The question arises as to what extent discourses can be conducted without psychological defence processes and the real can be constructively integrated. The article combines psychoanalytic political social theory with micro‐practices of psychological and discursive processes, thus exploring the conditions of norm genesis.
Modern institutions can be seen as 'regimes of autonomy', social contexts in which different criteria for autonomy are maintained. Some of these institutions provide individuals the opportunity to nurture their moral selfhood as they allow persons to learn the capacity for giving legitimate justifications for their decisions. Among these institutions are the court of law, the educational system, the public debate and the academic system. Contemporary technical and institutional developments, such as the implementation of digital systems and the privatisation of public services, challenge the capacity of institutions to nurture their moral selfhood. These developments introduce regimes of autonomy in which the autonomous self appears to often be understood as an empirical given, in the sense that there is no necessity to support decisions by giving reasons.
This article examines the transmission of historical narratives from a psychosocial perspective, highlighting the central role of collective memory in the construction of social reality. Here, memory is conceptualised as a dynamic process, simultaneously structured by stable elements that ensure identity cohesion as well as reshaped by current social and political contexts. Within this dialectic between continuity and transformation, collective memory-in its completeness and its gaps-emerges as a key object of study for understanding the relationship between history, social representations and memory itself. The rise of nationalism and populism in the 21st century relies on the politicisation of memory, which is increasingly used as a tool of legitimation and narrative reconfiguration. The current 'post-truth' era amplifies this phenomenon by replacing historical facts with subjective and often emotional interpretations that reshape national narratives. The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games serves as an illustrative case: while reaffirming a consensual national narrative, it also included new, less consensual figures, such as the French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura, exposing tensions between national identity and diversity. Collective memory thus appears as a crucial field of enquiry for understanding contemporary social transformations, with the contributions of Halbwachs, Bartlett and Moscovici providing a fertile theoretical framework for analysing these dynamics.
ABSTRACT Progress and dialogue in cultural analysis are often hindered by analysts' reliance on implicit ontic claims, namely, foundational, unstated assumptions about the expected properties and typical characteristics of cultural kinds, thus precluding proper debate and theoretical progress. This paper develops a systematic four‐part taxonomy of these claims, distinguishing among compositional claims (what culture is made of), locational claims (where cultural kinds exist in the world), property claims (necessary traits such as systematicity) and aetiological claims (their origin or provenance). I argue that explicitly articulating these claims is essential to moving beyond mere methodological disagreements and to building a robust cultural science. I use this framework to critically consider two persistent and problematic tendencies in cultural theory. First, I argue against compositional claims that posit culture as nonmaterial or ‘deal’ stuff, as this commits analysts to a philosophical substance dualism that struggles to explain cultural causation in the physical world. Second, I challenge the use of sharedness as a definitional property of culture, arguing that this focus commits a ‘groupist’ fallacy. Dropping sharedness as a criterion allows analysts to focus instead on the explicit social processes (such as instruction and imitation) that make culture widespread while recognising that cultural novelty fundamentally arises from individual ingenuity and learning.
ABSTRACT Margaret Archer's widely cited work on the structure/agency problem draws upon the concept of ‘morphogenesis’, which she borrows (with full acknowledgement) from Walter Buckley's theory of complex adaptive sociocultural systems. In this paper, I revisit Buckley's original formulation and argue that it is both different from and better than Archer's later version (though she makes an interesting methodological contribution to it). Archer's version is shaped by her desire to avoid ‘conflating’ structures and agents, as she believes Anthony Giddens' structuration theory does. It is sometimes appropriate to draw an analytic distinction between structures and actors, as she suggests and as Giddens himself occasionally does, but she goes beyond this in practice, arguing for a more substantial distinction different to cannot be defended. Buckley rightly rejects any such substantial distinction. His position is closer to Giddens' in this respect. However, his approach differs significantly from that of Giddens too, avoiding the problems that Archer identifies with structuration theory. Buckley thus affords a preferable alternative to both Archer and Giddens, a middle path that combines the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of their respective approaches.
ABSTRACT An increasing number of scholars have employed the critical realist concept of norm circles in empirical research. Norm circles are social structures, composed of human agents, that tend to encourage people to conform with norms. As such, they provide a (partly) structural explanation for social normativity, which in turn plays an important role in many other social structures. Researchers who come across the concept, however, often ask how it relates to other elements of critical realist theory. This paper addresses the relationships between norm circle theory and the work of three influential critical realist theorists: Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and Tony Lawson. With reference to Bhaskar's work, it presents norm circles as entities with emergent causal powers and as social structures that are concept and activity dependent. With reference to Archer's work, it shows how the morphogenetic approach applies to the development of norm circles but also considers the tensions between norm circle theory and Archer's understandings of reflexivity and culture. Regarding Lawson's work, it argues that norm circles add an explanation of why people go along with positional rights and obligations that are the centrepiece of Social Positioning Theory and how positions exist. Overall, the paper argues that norm circle theory complements all these contributions. It illustrates how abstract ontological work can be applied to more concrete empirical social cases and thus extends critical realist social ontology. Given the centrality of normativity to many social structures, it also provides a resource for theorising other forms of social structure.
ABSTRACT Global climate governance has produced ambitious agreements and extensive policy frameworks, yet decisive action remains out of reach. Emissions continue to overshoot Paris targets, and warnings of accelerating risks persist. This paradox—ongoing activity alongside a sense of insufficiency—raises a deeper question: Why do governance failures endure despite recognition of the threat? This article applies morphogenetic regulation (MR), a critical realist framework, to examine how systemic dispositions shape climate governance. Focusing on UN and EU climate policy documents, it shows how the public problem of climate change is objectified as a governable problem through externalist reasoning that treats nature as separate from yet interdependent with society. The article traces how this orthodox framing reflects deeper systemic properties that condition what appears governable, feasible or meaningful. Heterodox critique of this framing, analysed in a separate paper, can be brought into systematic comparison through calibration to identify the systemic conditions of climate governance's persistence. This article clarifies why efforts so often fall short and develops the problématique of perseverance: How systemic identity can be traced through diverse interactions—including critique itself—and how that identity persists even as it is contested.
ABSTRACT This paper argues that if the wildly popular expression ‘post‐truth politics’ means anything, it describes a political situation in which political speech elicits support from its audience without the public believing it to be true or not (Section 2). As a result, the phenomenon of post‐truth (PT), if there is such a thing at all, forces us to move our account of political action away from the standard belief‐desire model (BDM) (Section 3). I offer an alternative where attention replaces belief in Section 4.
ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to provide a novel as well as radical perspective that helps to elucidate the fundamental function civic values fulfil within society through an embodied model that provides a framework, both theoretical and practical, for the shaping of the subject's political culture and habits. We examine the cognitive basis of the notion of civic values and rational choice theory, arguing that, when confronted with the “terrorist dilemma”, the latter appears as an ill‐formed scientific framework. We propose an embodied approach to the concept of political culture through ecological psychology, arguing that it not only offers a better scientific framework for the study of political culture and habits but also that this framework shows the profound limitations of the notion of civic values in the first place. We consider the implications for public policy in regards to the prevention of radicalisation, contrasting the public policy outcomes that derive from orthodox and our proposed model, examining specific cases such as the 2018 Toronto van attack.
ABSTRACT Political assassinations are commonly interpreted as extreme responses to threat or injustice, driven primarily by fear, anxiety or anger. In this theoretical article, I challenge that view and advance a more differentiated proposition: Political and politically motivated assassinations are often less directly driven by fear, anxiety or anger than by disgust once a target is construed as unchangeable moral taint. Drawing on the Interaction Discrepancy Model (IDM), I conceptualise such assassinations as the behavioural endpoint of appraising another person as a source of enduring moral contamination whose transgressions are attributed to them and judged unlikely to change. Within this framework, fear and anxiety correspond to appraisals of uncertain changeability and primarily motivate preparative responses such as vigilance, concealment and avoidance, whereas anger corresponds to appraisals of likely changeability and primarily motivates retributive responses such as punishment, protest and sanction. Disgust, by contrast, is linked to appraisals of unlikely changeability and is especially compatible with exclusionary and expulsion‐oriented tendencies; under specific political conditions, that removal logic may escalate into assassination as an extreme attempt to eliminate perceived contamination from the political sphere. I clarify how disgust is conceptualised relative to debates on core disgust, moral disgust and moral outrage, outline how the account can be falsified using historical analyses of assassins' writings and ethically acceptable analogue studies, and discuss practical implications for prevention by shifting changeability appraisals and avoiding narratives of absolute irredeemability. I also identify future research directions, including testing possible moderators such as power and political leverage.
In recent years, a critical position has been developed regarding the role of work and organisational psychology (WOP) as a scientific tool for corporate interests and as an ideological instrument that contributes to producing the forms of subjectivity necessary to reproduce the capitalist system. In response to this, Critical WOP questions the hegemonic economic and labour model and the subjectivities it produces, while making proposals aimed at emancipation and social transformation. This article presents the main criticisms of hegemonic WOP and the constituent elements of Critical WOP, and based on these, it outlines a proposal for critical psychosocial intervention in the field of trade union renewal, as trade unions have historically been marginalised in studies on WOP. This work aims to offer a small contribution to the development of a fertile and little-explored academic field, namely the convergence between psychology and trade union renewal. The proposal integrates various frameworks of knowledge, such as critical approaches to WOP, psychopolitical validity, participatory action research, political subjectivation and the psychosocial aspects of collective action and peer political support. The text concludes with a series of reflections to advance the construction of a psychology of work oriented towards trade union renewal.
ABSTRACT By integrating concepts from the work of Margaret Archer and self‐determination theory, this article extends both of those bodies of work and offers a new sociopsychological explanation of how conscious decision‐making processes can influence the quality of human experiences and human wellbeing. The article argues that Archer's work provides an adequate sociopsychological account of (a) how people make conscious decisions (via reflexivity) and (b) why people choose one option rather than another when making conscious decisions (i.e., because of their personal concerns and ultimate concerns). However, it is necessary to build on Archer's work to explain how conscious decision‐making processes can influence the quality of human experiences and human wellbeing. To that end, self‐determination theory (SDT) enables us to theorise and analyse whether some modes of reflexivity and some kinds of concerns are more conducive to optimal human experiences than others. Importantly, this article argues that the modes of reflexivity that a person uses when making conscious decisions will influence the quality of their subjective experiences and, ultimately, their wellbeing. That is because of the extent to which the person's basic psychological needs are supported or constrained when they (a) use reflexivity to make conscious decisions and (b) pursue associated actions.
ABSTRACT The institutional logics and norm circle perspectives have emerged as two approaches to the analysis of institutions in organisations and society. This paper compares the two perspectives and asks whether they should be seen as alternative or complementary approaches. Although the two approaches rest on a shared ontological conception of institutions as objectified, or taken‐for‐granted, phenomena that are imbued with a strong sense of normativity, their diverging epistemological commitments and analytical emphases speak in favour of treating them as relatively distinct alternatives. This is especially the case insofar as the ‘mainstream’ approach, that has dominated research on institutional logics, is concerned. However, I also draw attention to how insights from the institutional logics and norm circle perspectives can be selectively combined and complement each other within a research approach that builds on a shared, critical realist understanding of institutions.
This paper attempts to revisit the critical realist theory of reflexivity, derived from the pragmatist tradition of symbolic interactionism (SI). It discusses how interactionist sociology, with its emphasis on investigating microstructures through meaning-making, has formed a critical realist theory of reflexivity that serves as a theoretical bridge between the micro and macro levels-specifically, between 'subjective concerns' and cultural and structural stability and change. The paper focuses on Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity and internal conversation as a critical realist response to social constructionism, connecting it to SI, particularly through Herbert Blumer's framework. It proposes a holistic approach to studying reflexivity through human concerns. By underscoring the interconnection between SI methodology and the critical realist theory of reflexivity, the paper offers a triangulation of several qualitative methodological strategies to study reflexivity in a more rigorous manner while also providing a connection between the purely interpretive and the positivistic traditions.
Prejudice is a major worldwide problem fuelling discrimination and conflict in everyday life. In mainstream psychological and social science research, many prejudice researchers test theoretical propositions using standard (survey) questions. This article argues that this important type of work will benefit from reflecting on some of the feedback that people give when participating in research that uses self-report for measuring prejudice. Four issues relating to different aspects of this research are identified and discussed: misinterpretation, invalidation, dehumanisation and double standards. It is argued that seriously considering these four issues can have various implications for prejudice research quality and design and is important for theoretical and applied reasons.
Sometimes, we do not act in accordance with what we know. For example, we may purchase products that we know are the result of production chains with questionable ethics. This contribution investigates the paradox between social action and rational knowledge, starting from the ambivalence between emotion and reason. The analysis integrates Schmitz's Neue Ph & auml;nomenologie and Neophenomenological Sociology (NPS) and is divided into three parts: (1) clarifying affective involvement as a social a priori and the patheur's felt-bodily communication, (2) focusing on the concepts of the semi-thing, the situation, and the atmosphere as pre-reflective motivators of action and multisituationality, and (3) interpreting Hochschild's concept of feeling rules as programme components of the situation, thereby highlighting the emotional friction that can arise when one is emotionally involved in two or more conflicting situations. Building on this, the concept of social sensibility is introduced as a trans-subjective dynamic, shaped atmospherically in a sensitisation process, which guides social action. This concept offers a tool for understanding action and inaction in contemporary crises.
In everyday life, individuals regularly confront novel situations which demand their attention and response. In such situations, they routinely deploy portable norms to select between appropriate and inappropriate next actions. Yet, these norms do not seem to determine the conditions of their own application. How then are we able to act in an orderly and mutually intelligible manner? This paper examines two attempts to answer this question, neither of which is entirely satisfactory. Talcott Parsons solves this 'problem of meaning' by postulating the existence of a cultural system that governs the applicability of shared norms. By contrast, Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology prioritises actors' own methods of in situ sense-making, drawing attention to contextually specific practices for securing intersubjectivity. Although Garfinkel's approach resolves some problems with the Parsonian account, I argue that his break with Parsons introduces a conceptual slippage between regulative and constitutive normativity. In view of this, the final section argues that contemporary social theory would benefit from renewed attention to the mutual autonomy of these two phenomena.
This article develops composition theory as a pragmatist specification of the mesosocial. Existing theories describe situated social life without adequately explaining the mechanisms that produce it. Recent pragmatist scholarship has established important foundations: Gross on mechanisms, Lizardo on habit, and Hallett on inhabited institutionalism. Yet the mechanisms themselves remain underspecified. Composition theory fills this gap through four sets of mechanisms: composition, engagement, sedimentation, and circulation. Together, these explain how problem responsive actors assemble formations, how formations become consequential as affordances meet capacities, how residues accumulate over time and how patterns extend across settings through movement and echoing. The article reinterprets Dewey's concept of situation as the flow of actors' transactions with and within their present place (relational, symbolic and material environment) while remaining cognizant of their direct and indirect experiences with other places. Place is the somewhere somewhen locatable environment that necessarily grounds each situation and social reality as such. The framework reconceptualizes microsocial, mesosocial, and macrosocial as a continuum of compositional complexity anchored in the mesosocial. It expands the range of theory-driven research questions by directing attention to processes within and across places of action rather than to the forces of abstract structural properties.
This paper outlines a distributional approach to institutional analysis, reconceptualizing institutions as distributions of knowledge and activity across people. We argue that institutionalization and institutional change are best understood by focusing on actors with the requisite knowledge and motivation to keep institutional patterns going, fix them when they go awry, or transform them when required, here called functionaries. The distributional approach allows us to distinguish between two main types of institutional change often conflated in the literature: Content-based and formal change. Content-based change, the one most often discussed, involves the importation, recombination, or expansion of specific patterns of activity. In contrast, formal change, often neglected in the literature, refers to shifts in the distribution of knowledge and activity within an institution, leading to dynamics of centralization and decentralization of institutional patterns. In this way, the distributional approach highlights the role of functionaries in both institutional stability and change, providing a micro-level perspective on institutional dynamics.
